the two terms correctly. Most people may not grasp what specialists mean by these ambiguous expressions. Once they grasp the intended meaning, and the meanings of “that which possesses attributes” and “that which subsists in itself,” their knowledge of the one is like their knowledge of the other: all of this is innate. For this reason, the rigorous thinkers among both those who affirm and those who negate have agreed on this.

As for the rational thinkers among the negators—the philosophers, the Qarmatians, the monists, and others like them—they have recognized that they are compelled to say, “He is absolute existence; He is neither determinate nor particularized, nor this nor that.” For they know that whenever He has a determinate reality in the external world and a distinctive property setting Him apart, it necessarily follows that He is a body occupying space, either within the world or outside it. They may concede the denial of this, and so they were left between the meaning they called corporealism and this negation and nullification. They chose the latter, but supposed that what they affirmed could exist in the external world, whereas all rational people