Likewise, if he says:

“If He were above the world, He would be a body, and He would have to be either larger than the world, smaller than it, or equal to it—all of which are impossible,”

he is told:

“Many people maintain that He is above the world without being a body.”

If the negator (1) says, “The falsity of their position is known by rational necessity,” he is told:

“Yet you say that He is an existent, self-subsisting being who is neither within the world nor outside it, neither separate from it nor occupying the same locus as it (2); that nothing is near Him or far from Him; [that nothing ascends to Him] (3) and nothing descends from Him; and other such negations. When these are presented to a sound innate disposition, it concludes with absolute certainty that this is false and that nothing of this kind could possibly exist. Indeed, its certainty that this conception is false is stronger than its certainty that it is impossible for Him to be above the world without being a body.

“If the judgment of sound innate disposition is accepted, your doctrine must be false, and it necessarily follows that He is above the world. But if its judgment is rejected, your rejection of the statement, ‘He is above the world without being a body,’ is invalid. For the innate disposition that judges one of these two conceptions impossible is the same one that judges the other impossible; its judgment cannot therefore be accepted in one case but not the other.”

The reason is that these negators claim that this judgment of impossibility belongs to the rejected estimative faculty, not to the valid judgment of reason. They say:

“Estimation consists in apprehending within sensible things (4) what is not itself sensible, just as a sheep apprehends the hostility of a wolf,”