they departed from their predecessors and disputed with them in a merely verbal disagreement, without offering any valid, intelligible distinction. Restricting the term “substance” to what they have described is a matter of convention. Their predecessors say, rather, that it is anything that does not exist in a subject, just as the speculative theologians define it as anything that subsists independently, occupies space, possesses attributes, or bears accidents, and so forth.

As for a substantive distinction, their claim that the existence of contingent beings is additional to their essences in external reality is false. Their claim that the First is existence qualified by negations is likewise false, as explained at length elsewhere. Our purpose here, however, is to discuss demonstration.

The response is this: although various groups have been led astray by this discourse, it is merely embellished rhetoric, containing more falsehood than could be briefly described. Here, however, we shall draw attention to some of its flaws from several perspectives:

(First: If demonstration yields only knowledge of universals, and universals are realized only in minds, not in external particulars, while nothing exists externally except particular beings, then demonstration yields no knowledge of any particular. Thus, it yields no knowledge of any existent whatsoever, but only of things posited in the mind. It is well known that, even supposing the soul’s perfection lay in knowledge alone—although this proposition is false, as explained at length elsewhere—this is not knowledge through which the soul attains perfection, since it has learned nothing of