Allah—exalted is He—has granted the Muslims such knowledge and clarity of expression, together with righteous deeds and faith, that by them they have surpassed every other group within the human race. Praise be to Allah, Lord of all worlds.
According to them, the “divine science” has no real object outside the mind:
That science, which in their view is entirely immaterial both in the intellect and in external reality, has, as you have seen, no extra-mental object at all. It deals only with absolute, universal notions, and universals exist solely in the mind. In this there is no perfection of the soul whatsoever.
Even supposing they should know the Necessary Being in particular, that knowledge concerns a determinate reality whose very conception excludes any partner. Yet the syllogism they call “demonstration” cannot establish anything determinate—neither the Necessary Being nor anything else. It yields only a universal concept, and a universal concept does not preclude the possibility of multiple instances. By contrast, knowledge of the Necessary Being excludes the possibility of any partner; whoever has not conceived of what admits no partner has not truly known God.
Whoever affirms of the Lord only a knowledge of universals—as Ibn Sīnā and his likes claim—and imagines that to be a perfection for the Lord, and a fortiori a perfection for the human soul—especially when he says that the soul perceives only universals while the body perceives particulars—has reached the utmost limit of ignorance.
These universals that do not lead one to the existent particulars entail no perfection whatsoever. The soul seeks knowledge of universals only to encompass them by knowing their particulars; if that is not attained, the soul finds no delight in the universals alone.
Fifth Point:
The soul attains perfection through knowing God in conjunction with righteous action—not through mere knowledge of God, let alone through philosophy alone.
Fifth Point (continued):
Let us concede, for argument’s sake, that the soul is perfected by abstract universals as they allege. Even so, what they put forward regarding the highest science in their system, the one that examines existence—whether in its entirety or in its truest sense—is not so, for