Fifth:

These thinkers went wrong precisely because they based all their sciences on syllogistic reasoning. A syllogism necessarily requires a universal proposition and a middle term broader in scope than the entity described and judged—the subject, in grammatical and logical terms.

Every term and proposition has something broader in scope than itself. For example, one may speak of a human being; broader than this is animal; broader still is a growing body, then a body of the lower world, then body, then substance, and finally existent—whether existence is an essential genus, as some of them maintain, or an accidental attribute, as their more discerning thinkers maintain.

Thus, if it were said that the highest of the syllogistic sciences is the science of the existent and its concomitants, because its object is the most general of subjects, this would have some justification. Perhaps this is what they mean. Yet knowledge gained through such inference does not, by itself, yield knowledge of the reality of any existing thing unless that thing has a counterpart like it. One of the two like things is then known in itself, and the other by analogy with its counterpart. This condition cannot be met in knowledge of Allah, for He has no likeness or counterpart.

The speculative theologians, moreover, challenged them by proposing something higher than existence: the known and the mentioned. They said: “The highest category of objects of knowledge, and the most general names and terms, are ‘the known’ and ‘the mentioned,’ for these encompass both the existent and the nonexistent: the two kinds of existence—necessary and possible—and the two kinds of nonexistence—possible and impossible.”

One would therefore have to say that the highest science is that which examines the known and its concomitants. This is more general and comprehensive. A thing’s being known is something incidental to it, not an essential attribute. The same applies to its being existent, for this actually means that it is such that someone finds it. This is what the word implies: