Shaykh al-Islām Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him—said:

Section

A Principle

I have written about matters relating to this principle in the preceding notebook.

The foundation of affirmation and negation, love and hatred, is the soul’s awareness of existence and nonexistence, and of what is congenial or uncongenial to it.

When it perceives the existence of a thing itself or its attributes, it believes in that existence and acknowledges it. Then, if these are attributes of perfection, it believes that the thing deserves reverence and honor, affirms it, and praises and extols it.

When it perceives the thing’s nonexistence, or the absence of attributes of perfection from it, it believes in that absence.

If it perceives neither existence nor absence, it believes in neither, and neither affirms nor denies. Yet it may believe something to be absent when it does not perceive its existence, even though it does not perceive its nonexistence either. There is a clear difference between awareness of nonexistence and lack of awareness of existence. This is the state of ignorance through which most people fall into error: they deny what they have not fully comprehended, and whoever is ignorant of something becomes hostile toward it.