are indispensable to the thing described, for it has no reality without them and they are never found apart from it.

The difference they draw between what is “necessary,” what is an “essential constituent that enters into the quiddity,” what is “necessary to the quiddity,” and what is “necessary to its existence,” has already been discussed at length—and shown to be groundless, unless by “quiddity” one means what the mind conceives and by “existence” what obtains in the external world. In that sense, the distinction between mental concepts and concrete existents is indeed sound. But to claim that, outside the mind, there are two self-subsisting substances—one the sensible human being, the other an intelligible human that applies to every individual—and then to assert that the indispensable attributes without which the subject cannot be realized are partly inner constituents of its externally existing quiddity and partly external accidents of that same external quiddity: all of this is false, as has been demonstrated elsewhere.

Their syllogisms rest on universal premises they do not actually know:

The point is that everything they say about divinity, whether in the so-called divine sciences, the natural sciences, or their offshoots, yields no more certainty than analogical reasoning does. For their arguments are built upon a universal proposition, and they have no certainty that it is truly universal—no more certainty, in fact, than what accompanies an argument from mere analogy; nor do they have any means of attaining such certainty. Examples include their metaphysical dictum “From the One only one proceeds,” or “A single thing cannot be both agent and recipient,” and the like. These sweeping propositions they do not truly know, nor can they prove them except by a syllogism whose major premise is itself a universal claim they do not know—and which can indeed be refuted.

The purpose here, then, is to make clear that their syllogistic method yields no real knowledge of existent things; this is a broad issue that becomes evident upon careful consideration.

On the ‘simple One’ they regard as the source of composites:

Their statement, “From the One only one proceeds,” is itself a universal claim—yet never, in the whole realm of existence, have they encountered anything that is one in every respect from which something has proceeded, whether one thing or two.