receive a universal judgment that pours itself into the mind in an all-embracing form. Yet it is obvious that this is nothing more than analogical inference, and its universality cannot be trusted unless one first knows that the general ruling necessarily attaches to the shared element. Once that is established, it will be known with respect to every single instance, so knowledge of the particulars is not in fact dependent on that universal.
Moreover, among the propositions based on ordinary experience there is no universal statement that cannot be overturned, as all rational people agree. Even the philosophers allow for breaches of customary order, though they attribute them to one of three causes: celestial influences, psychic forces, or natural causes. These three, in their view, account for every rupture of habit, and to them they ascribe the miracles of the prophets, the karāmāt of the saints, magic, and the like. We have treated this issue at length when examining whether prophetic miracles are merely psychic powers, and we have shown the falsity of that claim—indeed, even the leading philosophers reject it—through sound proofs that need not be repeated here; the discussion is known as the “Ṣafadiyyah Question.”
Second: the inner self-evident perceptions, such as each person’s awareness of his own hunger and thirst, love and hate, pain and pleasure. All of these are particulars. One learns the state of another person—or derives the universal judgment concerning such states—only by way of analogy. People do not all perceive every one of these particulars as they collectively perceive certain external sensibles like the sun and the moon. In these inner perceptions there is a specificity, both in the perceiver and in the thing perceived, that is absent from external sensibles, even though both belong to the same general category; in this respect they resemble customary matters.
Their claim that souls are equal: a source of their error concerning prophethood.
They have produced no proof that souls must be equal in these states, nor even that the rational soul is uniform in all its individuals. This is one of the causes of their misguidance in recognizing prophethood, for they have grasped only those rulings that souls ordinarily share, even though that regularity can indeed be broken.