They did not intend this contradiction; rather, they were led into it by their unsound rules of logic, in which they claimed that things possessing attributes are composed of their attributes, and that shared universals exist in their concrete instances. Those unsound rules of logic—which they made into laws whose observance supposedly prevents the mind from going astray in its thinking—led them into this very error and contradiction. Yet some of these laws are undoubtedly sound, which further demonstrates their inconsistency and ignorance. For they have established among their logical laws that a universal is that whose conception does not preclude its being shared, unlike a particular.
They have also established that universals are universal only in minds, not in concrete reality, and that the absolute, taken on condition of its absoluteness, exists only in the mind. These are sound laws. Yet they then claim, as the foremost of their later thinkers claimed, that the Necessary Existent is absolute existence, on condition that it be free of every positive determination.
Or, as one group among them says, He is absolute existence, on condition that it be free of every positive and negative determination. This is the position maintained by some of the heretical esotericists who affiliate themselves with Shiism or Sufism.
Or a third group says that He is absolute existence without any condition, as some among them put it. They agree that the absolute, on condition that it be free of all determinations involving existence and nonexistence