any sharing with the servant in what is exclusive to the servant. If they agree in what is signified by the terms “existence,” “knowledge,” and “power,” this shared meaning is an unqualified universal that exists in minds, not in external reality; whereas what exists(1) in external reality is exclusive and not shared.

This is a point on which many thinkers have fallen into confusion, for they imagined that [agreement in](2) what these things signify necessarily means that the Lord’s existence is the very same existence as the servant’s.

Another group held that the term “existence” is used by mere homonymy, in defiance of their own reason. These terms are general and admit division. Thus, it is said that an existent is divided into the necessary and the possible, and into the pre-eternal and the originated. The subject of the division is [common](3) to its categories. By contrast, the meaning of a homonymous term—such as the Arabic word that denotes both a purchaser and the planet Jupiter—is not itself divided. Rather, one says that the term is applied to this and to that.

Another group thought that, by calling this and similar terms “terms of graduated predication”—because existence belongs more properly to the necessary existent than to the possible existent—it would escape this difficulty. But that is not so. For the fact that a shared universal meaning occurs in differing degrees does not preclude(4) the basic meaning from being shared by two things, just as the meaning of “blackness” is shared by this blackness and that blackness, even though one is more intense than the other.