One does not even know that two qualities are contraries until he recognizes that they cannot coexist; and once he knows they cannot coexist, there is no further need to prove their opposition by labeling them “contraries.”

It follows, then, that one need not demonstrate which species or particular instances fall under a given universal, for our knowledge of the particulars is clearer than our grasp of the universal itself. Indeed, when they wish to show that contraries do not combine, they merely say: “By contraries we mean two positive attributes that cannot be found together in a single subject, such as blackness and whiteness.” The matter thus reduces to elucidating what they intend by that term; the intelligible meaning it conveys requires no appeal to some overarching universal. The same is true of contradictories, of condition and conditioned, of cause and effect, and of all such universal notions.

Refutation of the claim that cause and effect coincide in time

Whoever has not mastered this point will become confused in matters of reason and will be misled by their errors—whether those errors stem from faulty conception, as is usually the case with their leading figures, or from a deliberate intent to mislead, as some of them do.

For example, consider the issue of the world’s origination. They are asked: How can the world be a product fashioned by the Lord while nonetheless matching Him from eternity past to eternity future, existing alongside Him in time? The falsity of this is self-evident, for an effect cannot be simultaneous with its cause in time. They reply, “This is perfectly possible: the cause may precede the effect with a necessary intellectual precedence, like the hand’s movement before the motion of the ring it carries, the sun before its ray, or motion before the sound that arises from it.”

If the interlocutor is among those who speak of cause and effect with respect to divine attributes and the so-called “states,” saying, “Knowledge is the cause of the knower’s being a knower,” as do the affirmers of states among the dialecticians—such as al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr, Abū al-Maʿālī in his early position, al-Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā, and others—he is already accustomed to viewing cause and effect as mutually concomitant. Consequently, he will not find this notion objectionable here either.