As for “a fortiori reasoning,” which the early generations employed in following the Quran, it indicates that the attributes of perfection, free of all deficiency, belong to Him in a more perfect manner than anything they know to belong to others. The difference is beyond the intellect’s capacity to measure, just as it cannot measure the difference between the Creator and the created. Indeed, if the intellect recognizes differences in excellence between one creature and another whose extent cannot be encompassed, and knows that Allah’s superiority over every creature is greater than any creature’s superiority over another, this makes clear to it that what belongs to the Lord surpasses everything belonging to all others by an immeasurable degree.

Thus, it is as though “a fortiori reasoning” imparts knowledge of something distinctive to the Lord, while the general nature of that thing is known. For this reason, discerning scholars preferred the view that terms predicated of Him and of others are predicated in a graded manner: neither as mere homonyms nor as terms sharing a meaning whose instances are equal, but as terms sharing a meaning whose instances differ in degree. Thus, the terms whiteness and blackness apply both to an intense degree—such as the whiteness of snow—and to a lesser degree—such as the whiteness of ivory. Likewise, the term existence applies to both the Necessary Existent and contingent beings, but its greater perfection and excellence in the Necessary Existent exceed the difference between these two degrees of whiteness.

Yet this difference of degree in graded terms does not prevent their underlying meaning from being common and universal. Graded terms must therefore have a shared universal meaning, even though that universal exists only in the mind. This is the subject of “division”: the division of a universal into its particulars, as when one says that what exists is divided into the necessary and the contingent. For the subject being divided is common to all the resulting categories. Further, the fact that