Yet this attribution gravely misrepresents those to whom they ascribe it. These scholars agree that such terms are general and univocal—taking univocity in its broad sense, which includes graded predication—and admit of division and classification into types. This is possible only with univocal terms, as when we say: “Existents are divided into the eternal and the originated, and into the necessary and the contingent.”
Indeed, the very people who report this view, such as Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Rāzī and other later thinkers, combine in their writings the claim that these terms are purely equivocal with this division of them. Yet they themselves maintain that division applies only to univocal terms, which share both wording and meaning, not to terms that share wording alone. These include what they call graded terms. Division cannot apply to terms whose referents share no general meaning.
Such is the contradiction of these men, who rank among the later thinkers most renowned for rational inquiry and rigorous investigation in philosophy and speculative theology. In this attribution and their investigation of so fundamental a principle, they have fallen into an error into which even the least discerning ordinary person would not fall. This stems from the unsound principles they received from certain logicians—principles that stray from guidance and sound judgment. They supposed that unqualified universals exist in external reality as parts of particular things, and that this entails each particular being composed of that shared universal and whatever is exclusive to it. On this view, they were thus committed to holding that the Lord Most High, whose existence is necessary, is composed of shared existence and whatever is exclusive to Him, whether necessity, existence, or quiddity. Yet it is well known among logicians that universals are universal only in minds, not in external entities.