Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

distinguished by the fact that one of them is potentially something else,
whereas actually it is the thing received and whatever is potentially
another thing must necessarily receive this other thing and lose the thing it
actually is. ‘ Therefore, if there should exist a recipient in actuality and a
thing received in actuality, both would exist by themselves, but the
recipient is necessarily body, for only body, or what is in a body,
possesses receptivity primarily, and receptivity cannot be attributed to
accidents and forms, nor to the plane, the line, and the point, ‘ nor in
general to what cannot be divided. As regards an incorporeal agent, this
has been already proved, and as to an incorporeal recipient, or a recipient
not embedded in matter, such a recipient is impossible, although there is a
problem for the philosophers about the potential intellects And indeed, if
the compound has a subject and an attribute which is not additional to its
essence, b it is transitory and necessarily a body, and if it has a subject
and an attribute additional to its essence, without its having any potency in
its substance even in respect of this attribute, as is the case according to
the ancients with the body of the heavens, ? it possesses quantity of
necessity and is a body. For, if from such an essence, supporting the
attribute, bodiliness were taken away, it would no longer be a perceptible
recipient, and equally the sensory perception of its attribute would be
annulled and its attribute and subject would both become intellect, and
they would be reduced to one single simple entity, for from the nature of
the intellect and the intelligible it is evident that they are both one and the
same thing, since plurality exists in them accidentally, namely through the
substratum. ‘ And in short, when the philosophers assume an essence
and attributes additional to the essence, this amounts to their assuming an
eternal body with accidents inherent in it, and they do not doubt that if they
took away the quantity which is corporeity, the perceptible element in it
would be annulled, and neither substratum nor inherent would exist any
more; but if, on the other hand, they regarded the substratum and the
inherent as abstracted from matter and body, the substratum and inherent
would of necessity be both intellect and intelligible; but this is the Unique,
the Uncompounded, God, the Truth.
As to his statement that the whole mistake of the philosophers consists
in their calling the First the ‘necessary existent’, and that if instead they
called it ‘the causeless”, the conclusion which they draw about the First,
concerning the necessary attributes of the necessary existent, would not
303