…just as you asserted. On the contrary, the Essence entails them all: whenever the Essence is realized, all of them are realized, and none of them exists apart from the Essence. Some of them never exist save together with others; indeed, they may be mutually concomitant, such as the attributes of Allah, exalted is He. Not a single one of His attributes is found without the rest: His life is inseparable from His knowledge, power, and will, and His power is inseparable from His knowledge and life. They are all concomitant with one another, and all of them follow necessarily from the Essence, just as the Essence accompanies them. Hence no attribute serves as a middle term for another, contrary to your claim that some consequents follow directly from the Essence, others from a consequent, and still others from the consequent of a consequent. In truth, they all follow from the Essence and are concomitant.

Earlier we noted that a given attribute may be a condition for another attribute that belongs to the same category. As for those attributes that are inseparably bound to the subject—whether that subject is the Creator or a created being—they are all concomitant. Consider the essential attributes of a human being: his animality, rationality, and risibility are mutually concomitant; none of them exists without the others. If animality is found in some other creature, that animality is different from the animality particular to man. All specific differentiae and properties are concomitant, such as rationality and risibility.

Since these attributes are concomitant and yet some of them may be a condition for others, it is impossible that the condition should serve as the middle term by which the conditioned is established, as they maintain. To say so would entail that every essential attribute is a middle term for the others and that no necessary attribute would follow of itself, which combines two opposites. Hence the fact that one of two attributes is a condition for the other does not require its being a middle term in demonstrating the other, as they allege. Now, if the opponent denies that consequents can be divided into those that follow of themselves and those that follow through a middle term, while your proof rests on taking this division for granted, you are simply begging the question and proving the point by means of itself.

Should you object, “I advance this proof only against those logicians who concede that among consequents some follow through a middle term while others do not,” the answer is that this too is mistaken for several reasons. First, in that case the syllogism would be dialectical rather than demonstrative, whereas you have presented it as demonstrative. Second, the science of logic, which you regard as the balance of all sciences, must not be explained on the basis of dialectical premises, for then it would not…