Aligned sentence by sentence
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Part One · Chapter Seventy-Three — The Twelve Premises of the Kalām
The general premises that the mutakallimūn laid down — despite the differences of their views and the multiplicity of their methods — and which are necessary for establishing what they wish to establish in these four topics: twelve premises.
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Premise One: the establishment of the atom (the indivisible substance).
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Premise Two: the existence of the void.
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Premise Three: that time is composed of instants.
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Premise Four: that a substance is never devoid of several accidents.
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Premise Five: that the atom bears the accidents I shall describe, and is never free of them.
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Premise Six: that an accident does not persist for two moments.
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Premise Seven: that privations are ruled the same as their positive counterparts, and that they are all existing accidents requiring a maker.
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Premise Eight: that in the entirety of existence there is nothing besides substance and accident — they mean all created things — and that natural form is also an accident.
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Premise Nine: that accidents do not bear one another.
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Premise Ten: that what is possible is not judged by its correspondence with this actual existence to that conception.
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Premise Eleven: that there is no difference in the impossibility of the infinite whether it be in act or in potency or accidentally — I mean there is no difference whether those infinite things are actually existing and distinguishable from one another, or are not existing but merely possible.
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Premise Twelve: their statement that the senses err and that many of their objects of perception escape them; therefore their judgment is not claimed for them, nor are they taken absolutely as the starting-points of demonstration.
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After enumerating them, I proceed to clarify their meanings and to clarify what follows from each one individually.
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Premise One: its meaning is that they claim the entire world — I mean every body in it — is composed of extremely small parts that admit no further division because of their fineness, and the single part has no quantity whatsoever. Yet no atom exists in isolation — rather no body exists in existence except as composed of those atoms.
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Premise Two: the assertion of the void. The Orthodox also believe that the void exists — it is a dimension or dimensions in which there is absolutely nothing, empty of all body and devoid of all substance. This is impossible according to the philosophers; these thinkers needed it because in their view motion is the transfer of an atom through the void.
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Premise Three: their statement that time is composed of instants — I mean that it consists of many moments too brief in duration to admit division. This premise is also necessary for them because of Premise One: for whoever claims this yet says that body divides without limit contradicts himself.
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They have good reason for this, for if the foremost of the philosophers were puzzled by the matter of time — some of them not grasping its meaning, so much so that Galen said 'it is a divine matter whose reality cannot be apprehended' — how much more so for those who do not know what is well-known among them in natural science.
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Hear what they accepted as following from these three premises. They said: motion is the transfer of one atom from among those parts from one atom to the adjacent atom. It follows that there is no slow motion and no fast motion except in proportion to the number of atoms traversed.
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Do not suppose that what I described to you is the most outrageous thing that follows from these three premises — what follows from the belief in the void is more wondrous and more outrageous.
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Premise Four: their statement that accidents exist and are meanings additional to the meaning of the substance, and no body is devoid of at least one of them. Were this premise limited to this extent, there would be nothing controversial in it, for accidents exist — there is no dispute about this.
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Premise Five: their statement that the atom bears those accidents and is never free of them. The explanation and meaning of this premise: they say that these individual atoms of which every body is composed — each atom among them is never devoid of an accident that is one of the mentioned accidents.
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As for the soul, they differ about it. The prevailing view among them is that it is an accident existing in one individual atom from among the atoms that compose a human being for example, and the composite is called 'ensouled' because of that atom in which the soul resides.
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As for the intellect, I see them generally agreeing that it is an accident in an individual atom from the rational composite. As for knowledge, there is among them uncertainty as to whether it is an accident existing in each individual atom from the atoms of the knowing composite.
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When it was objected to them that we find most minerals and stones to have an intense color, and when ground, that color disappears — for when we grind intensely green emerald it becomes white dust — they answered with stratagems.
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Premise Six: their statement that an accident does not persist for two moments. The meaning of this premise is that they claimed God, mighty and glorious, creates the substance and creates in it whatever accident He wills, simultaneously in a single act; then that accident ceases to exist; and even if He were to create a second atom like it, He would create it without an accident in it, then create an accident in it.
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What led them to this view is that they do not want it said that there is any natural order whatsoever, or that this body's nature requires that such-and-such accidents attach to it; rather they want to say that the entire world is in constant flux — not as matters stand with the philosophers, who hold stability and continuity in everything according to nature.
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According to this premise they said: this garment that we claim to have dyed red — we are not the dyers at all; rather God created that color in the garment at the time of its contact with the red dye, which is another body.
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According to this arrangement they are obligated to say that these things we know now are not the same knowledge we knew yesterday — rather that knowledge ceased to exist and other knowledge like it was created.
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According to this premise they said: when a person moves a pen, the person has not really moved it — for the movement that occurred in the pen is an accident God created in the pen; and likewise the movement of the hand — which the multitude takes to have moved the pen — is an accident God created in the hand.
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As for human acts, they differ about them. The view of most, and of the majority of Ashʿarites, is that when this pen is moved, God creates four accidents, none of which is a cause for another, but they are concomitant. For this reason they said: human acts are 'acquired' metaphorically, not truly created; the servant 'acquires' but does not act.
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In every instant from those instants — I mean the individual moments — God creates an accident in all the individuals of existing things, from angel to sphere and others, always and at every moment. And they said: this is the meaning of Lordship.
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Premise Seven: their belief concerning privations — that they are existing meanings in a body, additional to its substance; they are therefore also existing accidents; they are always being created — whenever something ceases a thing is created.
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It necessarily follows from this arrangement that the accident of death which God creates itself ceases to exist immediately, and God creates another death; otherwise death would not persist — just as life is created after death.
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Some of the Muʿtazilites say that some privations of positive qualities are not existing things — he says impotence is the absence of power and ignorance is the absence of knowledge — but this is not applied consistently to every privation.
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Premise Eight: their statement that there is nothing besides substance and accident, and that natural forms are also accidents. The explanation of this premise: all bodies are in their view composed of completely similar atoms in every respect, and the difference between them is a difference in their accidents, not in their substances.
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Premise Nine: their statement that accidents do not bear one another — it is not said among them that this accident is borne by another accident and that other by the substance; rather all accidents reside only in atoms of bodies, in nothing else.
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Premise Ten: this permissibility principle they mention — and this is the pillar of the science of kalam. Hear its meaning. They hold that everything imaginable is possible according to reason — such as a sphere becoming square, the intellect becoming ignorance, or the dead man coming alive.
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Yet they also agree that the combination of two opposites in one subject at one moment is impossible — reason does not accept and cannot permit that. They likewise say: a substance with no accident whatsoever, or the Deity being a body — these two are illusion and impossible.
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As for their claim that everything they enumerated as impossible cannot be conceived in any way, and that what they called possible can be conceived — this is a correct statement. But the philosophers say: what you called 'impossible' because it cannot be imagined — that is indeed so in your view, for everything that cannot be imagined is impossible.
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It has thus become clear that in their view what is imaginable is possible — whether or not it corresponds to actual existence; and everything that cannot be imagined is the impossible. This premise is valid only on the basis of the nine premises already mentioned.
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The mutakallim said to the philosopher: why do we find the body of iron to be extremely hard and rigid and black, while the body of foam is extremely soft and yielding and white?
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The philosopher answered: every natural body has two kinds of accidents — accidents that attach to it by reason of its matter, such as a human being's being healthy or sick; and accidents that attach to it by reason of its form, such as a human being's intellecting, feeling shame, or fear.
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The mutakallim refuted this entire answer with those premises he holds, as I shall describe: he says there is no form existing as you claim that would subsist in the substance and thereby make them different kinds of substances.
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Note. Know, O you who examine this treatise, that if you are among those who have studied psychology and its faculties and have ascertained everything according to the reality of its existence, you know that imagination exists in most animals — as Plato and Aristotle have explained.
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Hear what the mathematical sciences have benefited us, and how great what we have derived from them as premises.
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Know that there are things that when a person considers them by imagination he cannot conceive them in any way — rather he finds their conceiving impossible, like the impossibility of combining two opposites. Yet the existence of that thing whose conceiving is impossible has then been demonstrated by proof.
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It has thus become clear that there is something other than imagination by which the necessary, the possible, and the impossible are evaluated. How excellent this inquiry is, and how great its value for one who wants to wake from this stupor — I mean the belief that everything that cannot be imagined is impossible.
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Do not suppose that the mutakallimūn have no awareness of any of this — rather they have some awareness of it and they know it; they call what is imaginable yet impossible — such as God being a body — illusion and imagination.
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Consider, O examiner, and see how a crooked method of investigation has arisen: these are conceptions that one person claims are intellectual conceptions and another says are imaginative conceptions — and we want to find a matter and call it by both names.
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This topic of permissibility — I have words about it that you will hear in several places of this treatise, and it is a matter that one should not rush to dismiss entirely by trivializing.
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Premise Eleven: their statement that the existence of the infinite is impossible in any state whatsoever. The explanation of this: it has been demonstrated that the existence of an infinite magnitude, or of infinite magnitudes assembled together, is impossible — and we explained that this is indeed impossible.
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But the existence of the infinite in potency or accidentally — some of it has been demonstrated to exist, as it has been demonstrated that a magnitude is divisible in potency without end, and that time is divisible without end.
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For one who claims to have demonstrated the eternity of the world says that time has no end, and this does not entail for him any impossibility — since time is such that whenever a part of it has come to be, the part before it has ceased, replaced by another part.
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Premise Twelve: their statement that the senses do not always yield certainty. The mutakallimūn impugned the perception of the senses on two grounds: one is that they can miss — they said many objects of sense-perception are not perceived by the senses, not even approaching the first limit.
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Do not suppose that the mutakallimūn relied on this premise in vain — as most of these latter-day people suppose that their predecessors' aim in establishing the atom was unnecessary. Rather everything we presented from their statements is the product of astute and intelligent reasoning.
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You know that all these are ancient opinions that the sophists would claim, as Galen mentioned in his book on the natural faculties — about those who denied the senses — and he recounted everything we said about this.
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After setting out these premises, I proceed to clarify their methods in those four matters.