through intermediaries other than the first narrators—especially during the second and third centuries. Those later men were Qur’an-reciters and teachers, and these, too, were reciters and teachers; they were the links, the middle layer between the people and their knowledge of what the Messenger said and did. By their reports and instruction they directed the community to that knowledge.

The same holds for facts attained by reason or by the senses: when someone alerts a person to them and points the way, the modes of access differ and multiply, and the intellectual intermediaries themselves vary from case to case.

As for one who claims that the middle term found among necessary concomitants is also the middle term in the very subsistence of the attribute in the thing described, that is untenable on several grounds, as has been explained elsewhere. Even supposing it were sound, the mental middle term is broader than the external middle term, just as “proof” is broader than “cause.” Every cause can serve as evidence for its effect, but not every evidence is, in reality, a cause.

Likewise, whatever is a middle term in external reality may be adopted as a middle term in the mind and thereby become a proof, yet the converse does not hold. A proof is that which entails what it proves; therefore a cause that entails its effect can be argued from, and a middle term whose proximate consequence is entailed—and whose remote consequence entails it—does entail that consequence and can be used as evidence.

It follows, then, that one may sometimes establish the desired conclusion with a single premise, if nothing more is needed; at other times one cannot do so except through several premises, and one must know them. To stipulate a need for exactly two premises—neither more nor less—is sheer arbitrariness.

No one insists on reasoning with precisely two premises except the logicians. Hence, among all other thinking groups and authors of the sciences, you will not find anyone who confines his argument to exactly two premises—striving to reduce any excess to two and to supply any deficiency so as to make two—except the adherents of Greek logic and those who tread their path. Those who remain upon a sound natural disposition, or who follow a different way—such as the Emigrants, the Helpers, and those who follow them in excellence—do not bind themselves to that constraint.