Furthermore, it is necessarily known from the religion of the messengers that everything other than Allah is created and temporally originated, coming into existence after not having existed.

Moreover, the intellectual substances posited by the philosophers exist only in the mind, not in external reality. Most speculative theologians, however, say that their nonexistence is self-evident to reason. This has been discussed at length elsewhere, where it was explained that the intellectual substances whose existence the philosophers claim to establish—namely, the intellects, soul, matter, and form—have no reality outside the mind. Rather, they are intelligible objects within the mind, which the intellect abstracts from particular things, just as it abstracts the universals shared among different kinds, such as universal animality and universal humanity. Universals are universal only in the mind, not in concrete reality.

Some of these philosophers suppose that universals exist as universals in external reality, and that there are universal essences accompanying concrete particulars, distinct from the particular existing things themselves. Likewise, some posit universals separate from concrete particulars, which they call “Platonic Forms.”

Some also posit duration abstracted from moving things and motion, and an abstract void that neither occupies space nor inheres in anything that occupies space. They also posit matter abstracted from all forms. In their terminology, matter means a substrate. Thus, silver is said to be the matter of a ring or a dirham, and wood the matter of a chair—that is, the substrate in which this form is fashioned. This crafted form is an accident among accidents. They claim that a body has matter serving as the substrate for