Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/228

 with it. Therefore the world consists of entia or substances on which the mind reflects the qualities which are not in the thing itself but only in the mind. Against the Aristotelian theory that matter suffers the impress of form, he argues that all impress is subjective in the mind: if all qualities fall out substance itself ceases to exist, and so substance is not permanent but transitory, which opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter.

The substances perceived by us are atoms which come into existence from vacuity and drop out of existence again. Thus, when a body moves from one position to another the atoms in the first position cease to be, and a group of new similar atoms come into existence in the second position, so that movement involves a series of annihilations and creations.

The cause of these changes is God, the only permanent and absolute reality. There is no secondary cause, as there are no laws of nature; in every case God acts directly upon each atom. Thus, fire does not cause burning, but God creates a being burned when fire touches a body, and the burning is directly His work. So in the freedom of the will, as, for example, when a man writes, God gives the will to write and causes the apparent motion of the pen and of the hand, and also directly creates the writing which seems to proceed from the pen.

Existence is the very self of the thing. This is peculiar to al-Ash'ari and his followers: all others hold existence to be the state (hāl) necessary to the