As for sight, people do share in beholding the higher lights—the sun, the moon, and the planets—but the materials out of which a demonstrative proof is fashioned are not restricted to that alone. If it is said, “What is grasped by the senses is shared only at the level of its genus, just as all people are acquainted with colors, tastes, odors, heat, and cold—even though the very object these people perceive is not the identical object those people perceive—yet they agree in the genus,” we reply: mass-transmitted reports and experimental findings can likewise be shared in their genus, as has already been explained. Indeed, the sense of satiety and the slaking of thirst that follow eating and drinking belong to the class of experimental knowledge, and people participate in this generically. The same is true of the pleasure accompanying those acts, of sexual intercourse, and of other actions: whenever a person performs the act and subsequently feels a given effect, and this is repeated until it becomes clear that the act causes that effect, this is precisely what is meant by empirical observation. Conjectural propositions (ẓanniyyāt) are rooted in such observations. What is intended is that, when one takes a certain medicine and finds that the illness disappears—or, conversely, that the medicine produces pain—the appearance of the disease through that agent and its disappearance through that agent are both determined empirically. The same applies to the pains and pleasures that arise from smells, sounds, sights, and tactile sensations: the senses apprehend this scent, see that form, hear that sound, taste that flavor, and touch that texture; then the pleasure felt within the soul is something one directly finds by the inner sense, and it belongs to the same class as outward sensory data. The general conviction that takes shape in the mind—namely, that this genus brings pleasure and that genus brings pain—is likewise derived from experience, for neither outward nor inward sensations contain anything universal in themselves. The universal judgment that settles in the heart is therefore a compound of sense perception and intellect; it is experiential knowledge, just like the belief that satiety and quenched thirst result from known foods and drinks, that death and disease stem from lethal poisons and pathogenic causes, and that these conditions are removed by recognized remedies. All of these are empirical propositions: through the senses one learns the particular instances, and when these recur time after time, the intellect grasps that the effect is due to a shared universal factor. It then issues a universal ruling that such-and-such produces this particular pleasure, while such-and-such produces that particular pain.