and that assent cannot be attained except through the procedure they have laid down. These two claims are among the most flagrantly false assertions. They also contend that the very procedure they describe yields conception of realities hitherto unconceived—this too is false. The evidence refuting these three claims has already been presented, and we shall later address their fourth claim, which is sounder than the others: namely, their assertion that their demonstrative proof produces certifying knowledge.
If, moreover, they insist that neither propositional nor conceptual knowledge can be gained without it, then they are in effect claiming that every road to knowledge open to the rational offspring of Adam is blocked, save the two routes they have marked out: definition and syllogism. They aver that these two alone conduct to the sciences the children of Adam attain by their intellects—meaning that whatever leads to knowledge must proceed along their route and no other. Thus, what they have articulated is a regulatory instrument by which intellectual methods are weighed and through which the sound path is distinguished from the unsound; heeding this statute, they say, protects the mind from slipping in the reflections through which it acquires either conception or assent.
Such is a summary of their claims, and every one of them is false, both in what they negate and in what they affirm. Not everything they deny in the methods of others is altogether baseless, nor is everything they affirm concerning their own methods wholly true in the manner they allege. Granted, their procedures contain some truth—just as the procedures of others contain some falsehood—for no author, whether they or anyone else, produces a discourse that does not encompass some truth.
What truth they possess is less than what is with the Jews, the Christians, and even the polytheists. Indeed, the Jews and Christians have, in proportion to the totality of what they hold, more truth than these people do; in fact, even the idol-worshipping pagans of the Arabs and their like possess, relative to what they hold, more truth than these people possess in the whole of their theoretical and practical philosophy—ethics, inner states, and civic polity.