Yet, by virtue of a certain cause or situation, one sign may at times offer a clearer indication than another; when that sign is employed, it simply alerts the mind to bring the intended meaning to consciousness—that meaning and no other—without, in truth, imparting any new knowledge of it.
If every conception had to be preceded by an earlier conception, the process would either proceed endlessly or fall into a vicious circle. Therefore, the notions most entitled to be conceived in and of themselves are the universal predicates that apply to everything, such as “existent,” “thing,” “one,” and the like. For this very reason, none of them can be explained without either circularity or recourse to something supposedly better known—yet nothing is, in fact, better known than they are.
Anyone who tries to define such notions soon falls into confusion. Take, for example, the claim that it belongs to the very essence of “existent” to be either an agent or a patient. Even if this were unavoidable, “agent” and “patient” are merely subdivisions of “existent,” and the idea of “existent” is far more familiar than that of acting or being acted upon. The majority of people readily grasp what “existent” means without having the faintest idea that it must necessarily be active or passive. Indeed, I myself have reached that conclusion only by means of syllogistic reasoning. How, then, should one fare who seeks to define an obvious term by an attribute whose very applicability to the term still awaits proof?
Similarly defective is the definition offered by those who say that a “thing” is that about which a statement (khabar) can be made: the notion of “can be predicated of” is more obscure than “thing,” and “statement” is more obscure than “thing.” How, then, can this serve as a definition? In reality, both “predicability” and “statement” become intelligible only after each is explained by saying that it is a “thing,” an “entity,” a “what,” or a “that which”—all near-synonyms of the very word “thing.” How, then, can “thing” receive a genuine definition through terms that are intelligible only by means of it? True, such formulations may offer a hint of guidance, yet in fact, when you say