syllogism and others like it can be useful in another context and when dealing with those who deny sensory perception, as we shall explain, Allah willing.

Likewise, someone may know that this dinar is like that one, this dirham is like that one, and these quantities of wheat and barley are like their counterparts. If he then knows some of the attributes of one member of a pair and what holds true of it—whether by nature, such as its nourishing and beneficial effects; by convention, such as its value and price; or under revealed law, such as its permissibility or prohibition—he knows that the same holds true of the other. Analogical inferences thus undoubtedly yield greater certainty than subsumptive syllogisms. Once the likeness is known, there is no need to construct a subsumptive syllogism for the two cases; doing so merely adds something superfluous. In this way, particular propositions are known through analogical inference.

Whoever says that this occurs through a subsumptive syllogism formed in the mind—namely, that if this were coincidental, it would not occur in most cases—has spoken falsely. This does not occur to people who know things through their own experience. Rather, merely knowing that the cases are alike, they immediately judge them alike, because knowledge of their likeness itself entails this as a self-evident truth of reason. Just as it is known through self-evident reason that one is half of two, so it is known through it that what holds true of a thing