anything except that what is contingent requires a cause.”

Then he said:

“Dependence is a negative attribute, so I am dying without having come to know anything.”

They also related a similar account to us about another of their distinguished scholars. Anyone familiar with them knows this, and knows that they are the most ignorant people on earth concerning the methods by which rational and transmitted knowledge are acquired—except those among them who have acquired knowledge through methods other than those of logic. Their knowledge comes from those other sources, not from their logical methods, despite all their toil over the demonstration by which they claim to assess knowledge. Whatever knowledge any of them has acquired did not come through what they have elaborated in logic.

Another point showing that certain knowledge, whether universal or particular, does not depend on their demonstration based on a universal proposition is that knowledge of that universal proposition must itself have a source. If they know it by inferring the unobserved from the observed, on the principle that the same judgment applies to a thing and to its like—as when we know that this fire burns, and therefore that an unobserved fire burns because it is like this one, and the same judgment applies to a thing and to its like—then the reply is: this is reasoning by analogy, which they claim yields not certainty but only conjecture. If, therefore, they have come to know the universal proposition only through analogy, they have based their certainty on what they themselves say yields only conjecture.

If they say:

“Rather, when particulars are perceived through the senses, universal knowledge arises in the soul from the Giver of Intellect—or, upon perceiving particulars through the senses, the soul becomes disposed to receive the universal emanating upon it from the Giver of Intellect.”

Or if they say that it comes from what they call the “Active Intellect,” or something similar, they are told: the question here is how it is known that the universal judgment in the soul constitutes knowledge, rather than conjecture or ignorance.