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of bearing them while lacking them would entail His being contingent, which is impossible in His case. This is a method familiar to those speculative thinkers who have followed it.

(The second response is to say:
On this account, if we say, “Zayd is either rational or not rational; either knowledgeable or not knowledgeable; either living or not living; either speaking or not speaking,” or make similar statements that negate an attribute of a subject capable of bearing it, this would not fall under the opposition of negation and affirmation. Yet this plainly contradicts what is self-evidently known, the consensus of rational people, and what they themselves have stated in logic and elsewhere. It is well known that such propositions contradict one another through negation and affirmation: the truth of either entails the falsity of the other, so they cannot both be true or both be false. Thus, the conditions of contradiction are present in them.

The most they can say by way of distinction is that, when we say, “He is either sighted or not sighted,” this is affirmation and negation, whereas, when we say, “He is either sighted or blind,” this is possession and privation. This is merely a verbal dispute; otherwise, the meaning is the same in both cases.

It is therefore clear that this is a kind of opposition between negation and affirmation. This invalidates their assertion, in defining that opposition, that neither alternative can change into the other. For such a change is possible here, just as it is possible when the expression “blindness” is used.

(The third argument is to say: An exhaustive division is formulated as follows: two opposites either