…between proximate and remote concomitants, claiming that the proximate is the one whose relation of entailment is immediate. You further alleged that whatever entails without an intermediary—its entailment being established outright—must be known as soon as the malzûm (the bearer of the entailment) is conceived, so that no middle term is required. In the end you explained this by saying that, when both the malzûm and the lâzim (the concomitant) are conceived together, the entailment must be known.
We reply: precisely the same applies when the first lâzim and its own second lâzim are conceived. At that point the malzûm and its proximate concomitant are both present to the mind, so the entailment of the second to the first must likewise be conceived. Yet the entailment of the first was already conceived; hence the very conclusion you were trying to escape follows—namely, that once the entailment of the first is known, the entailment of all subsequent concomitants is known as well. Therefore, if in order to know the entailment of the first you stipulate the simultaneous presence of both notions, you must make the same stipulation for the second; and if you drop the stipulation for the second, you must drop it for the first, so that your argument remains consistent.
On either assumption, the distinction between one lâzim and another—on the ground that this one involves a middle term and that one does not—collapses, provided the “middle” is understood as a middle in reality. Their claim that a lâzim without a middle must be known without proof, whereas a lâzim with a middle cannot be known except by cognizing that middle, is therefore invalid. Both assertions are false, and with them falls the evidence they adduced for differentiating first principles from commonly accepted propositions—exactly what we sought to show.
The Twelfth Path:
He says in answer to the second question:
“We do not concede that causality is other than the very essence of the cause; rather, we maintain that conceiving the reality of the cause together with conceiving the reality of the proximate effect necessarily yields knowledge that the cause is indeed a cause of that effect.”
We say: This statement contradicts what has gone before and is self-contradictory. For if causality is not distinct from the essence of the cause, then your earlier assertion—that the quiddity of the cause alone is insufficient for causality—falls apart, because causality is a relational notion, and a single thing by itself does not suffice for the realization of a relation. If it were not distinct, there would be nothing that could stand as an effect with respect to the cause, nor with respect to anything else; indeed, nothing would even be conceivable when both the cause and the effect are conceived. And if it is said that the distinction holds only in cognition and not in external reality, because causality is a privative matter, we reply: this, too, overturns your claim, for absolute non-being does not…