that which occupies space, or it may refer to an indivisible atom. Some philosophers claim to establish the existence of self-subsisting substances that do not occupy space.

Later speculative theologians, such as al-Shahrastānī, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and others, say that nothing in reason renders this impossible. Hence, someone who follows their approach—and establishes the temporal origination of the world solely through the temporal origination of bodies—says that, assuming intellectual substances exist, this proof contains nothing that establishes their temporal origination. Consequently, some who combined speculative theology with philosophy adopted the view that intellectual substances are eternal, whereas bodies come into being, and that the cause necessitating the latter’s coming into being is the arising of one of the soul’s conceptions. Some prominent authors held this view.

So too did al-Urmawī, the author of al-Lubāb, who answered the philosophers’ specious argument for perpetual agency, which entails that anything coming into being must have a cause. He answered it with the dazzling reply he took from al-Rāzī’s discussion in al-Matālib al-ʿĀliya. Al-Rāzī had given this answer, although in al-Matālib al-ʿĀliya he mixes the philosophers’ discourse with that of the speculative theologians and is bewildered over the question of temporal origination and eternity.

This answer is among the most unsound answers. For one may ask: What necessitates the continual arising of those conceptions? Moreover, according to them, the soul must be connected to a body, making the existence of a soul without a body impossible.