His followers affirm the First—which they call the First Cause—only by reasoning from the motion of the celestial sphere (1). They said:
“It is volitional and appetitive, and so it must have a mover [separate] (2) from it.”
They claimed that anything moving by volition must have a mover separate from it, even though this claim has no evidence to support it; rather, it is false.
They said:
“Its mover causes it to move, just as the imam who is followed causes the congregant following him to move.”
They also sometimes liken it to the way a beloved sets a lover in motion: the lover who desires the beloved moves [toward it] (3), without any movement on (4) the beloved’s part. They said:
“That love is the love of becoming like the First.” (5)
[Al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā’s Agreement with Aristotle Regarding Appetitive Motion]
Likewise, his later adherents, such as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, and others like them, agreed with him. They all maintain that the motions of the celestial spheres are the sole cause of occurrences in the world (6), and that these motions arise from conceptions and volitions (7) that occur successively, one after another, although they follow a universal conception [and a universal volition] (8), like a man who wishes to