the philosophers.”

They may also say:

“The measure of its motion is time. Thus, we affirm the implications of motion and time having existed from eternity as a kind, while maintaining that bodies came into being.”

This, then, is the position of those who follow both groups.

We have already said that they followed each group precisely where it erred. Their contradiction arises because the speculative theologians based their argument that bodies came into being solely on the impossibility of events having no beginning. This is their mainstay. Otherwise, once the existence of beginningless events is admitted, every event could have been preceded by another event. It would then no longer follow that the subject in which successive events occur must itself have come into being.

If this principle upon which the speculative theologians built their argument is sound and established, then an infinite succession of motions is impossible, whether in the soul or anything else. Anyone who accepts the implications of this principle while also affirming beginningless events in the soul or elsewhere therefore contradicts himself.

“The real implication of his position” is that beginningless events are impossible, yet beginningless events must exist. If, however, this principle is false, their arguments that bodies came into being are invalid, and the possibility of beginningless events necessarily follows. In that case, their kind may have existed from eternity. To maintain that they must all have come into being—and that the cause of their coming into being is a state of the soul—is therefore contradictory.

“Furthermore,” according to the philosophers, the soul cannot exist without a body, nor can motion occur in it except in conjunction with a body. It is a soul only when conjoined with a body, as the human soul is with its body. Thus, if the soul of the celestial sphere separates from “matter”—that is, hyle