those matters—whether their disagreement was merely verbal, unintelligible, or substantive. An example is the claim that the servant acquires his acts but does not truly perform them. Those who make this claim hold that acquisition is within the servant’s power, yet affirm for him a power that has no effect on the act within its scope. Hence, most rational thinkers have said: “This is contradictory and unintelligible speech. If power has no effect whatsoever on the act, its existence is no different from its absence, and it is not power at all. Rather, it merely accompanies the act, just as the agent’s other attributes—his height, breadth, and color—do.”

When these people were asked, “What is acquisition?” they replied: “It is what occurs in the agent and over which he has a created power, or what occurs in the locus of created power.” When asked, “What is power?” they replied: “That by which the movement of someone trembling is distinguished from the movement of someone acting by choice.”

Most rational thinkers therefore said to them: “The movement of someone acting by choice occurs through his will, unlike the movement of someone trembling; it also occurs through his power. If you make will alone the distinction, a person may will someone else’s act without performing it himself. If you mean that he has the power to perform it, then the question returns to the meaning of power. Power, as intelligibly understood, is an attribute by which an agent acts. No power can be affirmed for one who does not act, nor can there be a power whose existence or absence makes no difference to the agent.”

These followers of Jahm say that the servant does not truly perform his acts; rather, he truly acquires them. Alongside acquisition, they affirm a power that has no effect on it: its existence or absence makes no difference to acquisition, but it has been conjoined with it without having any effect on it. They further claimed that all the forces, natural properties, and higher and lower causes that exist