In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate.

Praise belongs to God perpetually, and blessing and peace upon Muḥammad and his Household.

This is the summary of what we have set down of discourse concerning man's — indeed every animal's — interposing of his estimative opinions (ārāʾ wahmiyya) and posited matters (al-umūr al-iʿtibāriyya) between himself and his second perfections.

We by no means forget the endeavors of our predecessors — the great ones among our teachers and our most ancient forerunners — and their striving in the cause of the realities: they attained what they attained, were guided and guided others upon the way, may God reward their beautiful endeavors. But we have inherited from them no discourse devoted specifically to this subject. We therefore resolved to set down what it is important to set down of discourse proper to it; and in what we have set down by way of exposition we have leaned upon nothing but explicit demonstration (burhān) where demonstration is possible, and upon bare estimation (al-tawahhum al-mujarrad) elsewhere. Withal, the matter is grave and the provisions are scant — and God is the One whose help is sought.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: the investigation of iʿtibārī matters is among ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī's own innovations, as the martyr Muṭahharī makes clear in his annotations to the sixth essay of Uṣūl al-falsafa; Muḥammad Taqī Miṣbāḥ Yazdī likewise calls that essay "a new and original investigation in Islamic philosophy" (Risālat al-tashayyuʿ fī l-ʿālam al-muʿāṣir, p. 400). The editor also notes that in Uṣūl al-falsafa (1:570) the author himself remarks: "We cannot have recourse to demonstration in the subject of iʿtibārāt," because "demonstration runs only in the domain of realities" — which is why the exordium reserves burhān for "where demonstration is possible."]

The species realized in actual fact (fī nafs al-amr) — whether immaterial, demonstration having established their existence, or material and natural, those animals lacking perception aside — are things whose essences are fully determinate, and they possess second perfections which their natures demand with a real exigency: perfections either present with them from the first moment of their existence, as in the case of immaterial things, or arriving through the preparation of external preparatory causes, as with the simple natures of the elements. The percipient animals, by contrast, are not complete in their very essence, nor do their acts follow upon their natures by an outward necessity in every respect, in such a way that they would stand entirely on a par with the rest of existents. They too have intermediaries (awsāṭ) on the path to their perfections — and among these are certain non-necessary, non-real things which follow upon real things, and upon which real things in turn follow: things not real, standing midway between two realities.

The sum of our purpose in the discourse set down in this domain, then, is to know: what are these things? How do they follow upon the real things? And how do the real things follow upon them?

These inquiries, be it noted, are best regarded as an offshoot of the science of the soul (ʿilm al-nafs). The book comprises two essays (maqāla) — and God is the One whose help is sought.

In sixteen chapters:

Chapter 1 — the purpose of this Essay. Chapter 2 — the reality of iʿtibār, and why man needs it. Chapter 3 — how it arises, and the first iʿtibār. Chapter 4 — the principal iʿtibārāt pertaining to society. Chapter 5 — the concomitants of the iʿtibārāt. Chapter 6 — the settled practice (bināʾ) of the rational agents and those who live in society, and that it does not change of itself. Chapter 7 — good and bad. Chapter 8 — whether what they have settled upon changes, and how it changes when it does. Chapter 9 — speech and linguistic positing (waḍʿ). Chapter 10 — possession (milk) and its concomitants. Chapter 11 — leadership and subordination and their concomitants. Chapter 12 — impelling (baʿth), deterring (zajr), obedience, and the like. Chapter 13 — obedience, further. Chapter 14 — discourse on the iʿtibāriyyāt in the case of parity between the two sides. Chapter 15 — that in their deeds they act by knowledge. Chapter 16 — their knowledge as it stands with another.

And with that we shall conclude the Essay, God Most High willing.

Since between the perfection of man — indeed of every animal — and his deficiency there stand posited matters and opinions upon which his second perfections branch out, the purpose of this Essay is to explain: why does man need these estimative meanings at all?

What is the first thing he needs?

And in what manner does he need whatever he needs?

Does any iʿtibār there undergo change?

And how does it change, when it changes?

What are good (ḥusn) and bad (qubḥ), and how do they stand?

Further: what are the general iʿtibārāt without which animal or human society cannot be achieved?

What do they bring in their train — and how do they bring it, when they do? And how does all of that vary from case to case?

Further: from what conviction (iʿtiqād) ought action to proceed, and how must it be?

And when the requisite conviction is unattainable, how, and in what, is relief to be found?

— together with the giving of the reason for all of this.

We say: the human species — indeed everything possessed of perception — is perfected only through acts that depend upon will; and will is consummated only from knowledge. This holds of necessity: by the very principle of its species-nature it demands assents (idhʿānāt) out of which the will takes form. But assent to a real, necessary nexus — a nexus obtaining in the external world between two terms each of which is apt to exist there in its own concrete identity, whether the nexus be true, as when we say "man wonders," or false, as when we say "the horse speaks" —

— assent to a nexus of this kind, in short, occasions no will. Will proceeds, rather, from knowledge of a nexus that is not real and not necessary; and this is achieved only where the nexus is one whose two terms and whose quality are not real, or where some part of all that is not real.

It is thus clear that man by his very nature needs a non-real knowledge and opinion, through which his will is consummated — and through his will, his real perfection.

Let us now explain what this non-real assent and knowledge is in itself.

We say: these non-real meanings and matters must, in their abstraction, terminate at real matters — whether they be conceptual or assertoric — for the soul does not originate them within itself without any assistance from the external world; otherwise their holding-true of the external would not be invariant, whereas "speech," for instance, is always predicated of sounds under a specific condition. Between them and the real matters, then, there is some nexus. This nexus is not in the external world, so it is in the mind; and it is not a case of the soul's originating them from no principle at all, as you have learned. It proceeds, then, from a principle, and by partnership with the real meanings — for without these there is no linkage among meanings whatsoever. By "partnership" we mean a kind of union: they are the real meanings themselves, together with a certain manipulation by the estimative faculty (wahm) — otherwise the two would not unite, or would not differ; and this is evident.

From all of this it has become clear that iʿtibār is: the giving of the definition (ḥadd) of one thing, or of its ruling (ḥukm), to another thing, through the manipulation and act of the estimative faculty. And our discourse in this book is confined to those iʿtibārāt that stand midway between the two realities — I mean perfection and deficiency.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: to grasp the reality of iʿtibār one must set the iʿtibārī over against the real, "for things are known through their others." He then quotes the five contrasts drawn in Essay 6 of Uṣūl al-falsafa: (1) real perceptions mirror what is in actual fact; iʿtibārī perceptions are postulates the human mind fashions to meet life's needs — suppositional, made, posited, with no purchase on actual fact; (2) real perceptions can be employed in philosophical and scientific demonstration, iʿtibārī ones cannot — the former have logical value, the latter none; (3) real perceptions do not hinge upon the needs of the living being, iʿtibārī ones are hostage to them; (4) real perceptions do not alter with particular circumstances, iʿtibārī ones take their color from changing needs and conditions; (5) real perceptions are not susceptible of development and ascent, iʿtibārī ones graduate through an ever-growing perfective movement. A second note observes that iʿtibār embraces the animals as well, since their actions issue from will, will from the estimative faculties — and it is these that generate iʿtibār.]

If we go deep, and imagine our souls stripped bare — taking them as at their first arrival in this world — or picture a child born this instant, having taken in no knowledge beyond certain primary convictions: he knows that he is he; he senses some of his limbs, and that they belong to his body. Given that he possesses faculties — among them the nutritive and the digestive — and that something has landed in his stomach, then the state he finds in himself, relative to himself, is one he does not distinguish from the nexus between his body and his head: a nexus of necessity. Then, when his stomach is emptied by digestion and he grows hungry, he senses once more that very same nexus, and moves toward food with that very same conviction concerning the nexus.

This, then, is posited obligation (al-wujūb al-iʿtibārī), and its source is real necessity.

And this was the first ruse by which the human fiṭra beguiled him, that by it he might be conveyed to the good-in-itself, the real absolute perfection. Such is the purpose of this illustration — though before it, perhaps, lie yet earlier steps.

This was the first "matter" (mādda) to which the soul awoke; as for the likes of prohibition (ḥurma) and preferability (awlawiyya) and so forth, they come long after it.

[Author's own note: by fiṭra is meant nature insofar as, through the estimative faculty, it carries the nexuses over by way of necessity.]

Thereafter, if we suppose for man a first association with another — nature impelling him to obtain the requisite thing that would remain incomplete but for association — there then supervenes whatever the two of them, in association, need by way of iʿtibār; and this, or the main part of it, came to two things.

The first: making-understood (ifhām) — bringing to presence before the other what one of them has noticed, by indication (ishāra), so that the other's sense may return to the very thing to which the first one's sense returned, in whatever way it may chance. But fiṭra inclines to the easier and ever easier, and what is absent from sight is reached through hearing — the like of which we observe abundantly among the other animals. Thereupon the details of intonations, and of combinations of the letters of the alphabet, spread and ramify. In the earliest generations a single word denoting a single meaning was composed of some twenty letters, until at the last things were drawn to the point where one letter or two convey what twenty used to convey.

The second: what perfection requires by way of an iʿtibār subsisting between two parties. The two parties stand to it either as equals, or in disparity — one of them, say, affecting and the other affected. Upon the first branches the iʿtibār of contract (ʿaqd) and covenant (ʿahd) and the rest, according to social good, that each may attain the perfection befitting his state — as with the kinds of sales, transactions, and treaties; upon the second, the iʿtibār of leadership, mastership (mawlawiyya), command and prohibition, and the rest.

And this complete leadership, by the mere positing of efficacy, is other than the leadership that gathers together several powers — as in the head of the household, then of the quarter, then the town, then the kingdom, then the region, then the world — this last being what the two practical wisdoms, domestic and civic (al-ḥikma al-manziliyya wa-l-madaniyya), investigate.

This is a summary whose detail will come to you hereafter, God Most High willing. The intent here is to make plain that the iʿtibārī matter is a matter which fiṭra conceives, and to which man assents, for the completion of his faculties, by a hidden ruse — the fiṭra of God upon which He originated mankind [cf. Qurʾān 30:30] — that thereby they might be conveyed to their goal.

[Editor's notes, abridged: (1) Chapter 3 treated the kind of iʿtibār whose arising does not depend on any human society — it is born of the individual's exploiting his own innate faculties, such as his digestive apparatus; this chapter treats the kind whose arising depends on society — e.g. matters of the family order such as marriage — which the ʿAllāmah terms "iʿtibārāt attaching to the community." (2) Domestic wisdom is the science of ordering the household — the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, servants; civic wisdom is the science whereby cities endure in the best state through sound governance that forestalls chaos; both are divisions of practical wisdom.]

The iʿtibārāt part company with the realities in this: the latter are fixed just as they are, while the former are shaky and unfixed — for one who is commanded may, in himself, perfectly well fail to comply, whereas an effect cannot fail to be acted upon by its cause. The need of fiṭra therefore pressed it to posit, for every iʿtibār — or for those among them most violently shaken — concomitants and a consequence, of good or of evil, suited to each, whereby the iʿtibār is confirmed; since the good or beneficial thing lying on its path is by nature sought and drawn toward, and the evil or harmful thing lying on its path is by nature dreaded and fled.

So in the domain of commands and prohibitions it posits punishment — an evil or a harm — as concomitant or consequence of failing to comply and to desist; and posits reward — the good or the beneficial — as concomitant or consequence of complying and desisting. And this, be it noted, is for want of leadership in the sense of the gathering of powers; where that is present, its positing in command may not be needed at all.

Hence it appears that this reward-and-punishment is owing to weakness of efficacy: the stronger the efficacy, the weaker the need for them — and conversely.

And in transactions and elsewhere, validity (ṣiḥḥa) and invalidity (fasād), completeness and deficiency, and the like are posited — all of them for confirmation and consolidation.

The rational agents (ʿuqalāʾ) — by whom we mean those who associate by fiṭra — move toward the good and the beneficial by nature, and flee the evil and the harmful by nature; but they do this with deliberation (rawiyya). The rational agents accordingly settle their practice (yabnūna) upon what living requires, carrying it into effect — that is, they act in accordance with it; and the probative authority (ḥujja) in the domain of action is that which action does not overstep. What they have settled upon is therefore an authority over them — an authority in its own right.

This is a proposition self-evident in its own domain, for its meaning is simply that what they have settled upon, they have settled upon — that, or something near it; and this is conceivable only where no settling upon its contrary, of a kind nature could make do with, is conceivable — otherwise there would have been no necessity for them to settle upon it.

As for what the rational agents have settled upon: if they have settled upon doing it, it is good (ḥasan); if upon leaving it, it is bad (qabīḥ). For good and bad are both iʿtibārī.

We say: this is because among the things qualified as good and bad are matters that are purely iʿtibārī — such as submission and respect — and whatever qualifies the iʿtibārī is itself iʿtibārī; for linkage in reality demands unity in reality.

We say: it has become plain in the early folds of this book that iʿtibār is the giving of one thing's definition or ruling to another thing by the act and manipulation of the estimative faculty. Now since this estimative bestowal follows upon the necessitation of some necessitating ground, and since that ground may admissibly be non-permanent in existence just as it may admissibly be permanent, it is admissible that the iʿtibār change through a change overtaking its ground — and this in one of several ways.

There is yet a third kind — though in truth it does not come down to a change in what they have settled upon — namely, change within the iʿtibār whereby it departs from conformity with its source while still serving as a locus of settled practice. For you have learned that iʿtibār, being of the estimative faculty's blending, never arises except from a source. When some meaning is posited, it can then happen that it is taken for a real meaning ranged alongside the other real meanings; whereupon the estimative faculty extends its ruling just as the ruling of the real thing used to be extended — as was mentioned in Chapter 2.

Here is the example supposed there. Fiṭra judges between a person and his food by a nexus like the nexus between a thing and its concomitant or its part — namely, necessity. Then afterward, this nexus having been imagined real, and two foods being present, it judges by the like of that nexus — yet of one of the two foods, not specifically either, since each of them is equally fit; although the original nexus, the one we supposed real, does not hold between a determinate and an indeterminate term — it being demonstrated in the Highest Science that existence is either identical with individuation or entails it.

In sum: this nexus becomes an obligation of the alternative sort (ka-l-takhyīrī); likewise the seeking of a thing from one of two persons, and the like; and likewise, in possession, what is held in common and undivided (al-mushāʿ).

So too in legal obligations and elsewhere: what is a condition is sometimes taken as prior, sometimes as posterior; and among parts there is that which is a part in one state and not in another. Examples of this sort abound throughout the folds of the iʿtibāriyyāt.

The like of this is found in the estimative faculty's conceptions just as in its assents; for among conceptions there are some whose relation to certain others is as the relation of estimative assents — such as our saying "every thing is in a place" — to intellectual assents. And it has been said, in the problem of mental existence in the Highest Science, that a thing may have a correct mental form conforming to what is in concrete reality, or may have none — as with what are not real quiddities; and whatever has no correct form, what is conceived as its form is of the estimative faculty's fabrication.

It is thus clear that the estimative faculty's carrying-over takes two directions: conceptual, as with "one of the two, not specifically either"; and assertoric, as with the obligatoriness of such a one. This too is a kind.

Man, at the first stage of his association, cannot dispense with speaking and articulation; for fiṭra's purpose in association is that its individuals each arrive at the perfection proper to him. In any two associates, then, there must be something that gathers up their personal purposes and then conveys each to what is proper to him. There is accordingly no escaping a meeting of their two senses upon one single thing — the one attending to the very thing the other attends to. Now in fiṭra's reckoning the sensibles are what is sensed, and they are what is out there in the world; and the strongest of them are those seen by sight. Though it assents to the existence of the other sensibles, it neglects them and counts them weak — thus we see a man, on hearing a sound from some direction, turn toward it to look, though sound is not sensed by sight.

It is thus clear that the most primordial means of making another attend is the external sensibles. And man — given the moving of his motive and sentient faculties — is aware from his own case that whenever an event occurs, a sound or any change at all, he turns toward it and seeks to perceive it and to perceive its cause, that his knowledge may be complete (for knowledge is completed by perceiving the cause). Knowing this nexus, when he wishes to make another understand what he intends — knowing the other to be his like — he produces an act by attending to which the hearer is carried over to what he intended. So you see him give out a cry and then flee, that the hearer may pass over to it: seeing his flight, the hearer knows there is something here that must be fled; he either searches it out, or does not search and flees as well himself.

The estimative faculty having the two said modes of manipulation: at times, by way of manipulating the meaning, it imagines the relation of the meaning's associate to the word to be like the relation of the meaning itself to it, so that the word is made to tell of the meaning's associate — and hence derive the chapters of those courtesies of metonymy and metaphor and the rest, whose exposition the two arts of bayān and badīʿ undertake. For all that — though society's purpose, namely the disclosing of the intent, be attained in whatever fashion — still the meaning with which the estimative faculty has grown familiar from the word, in the general run of usages, sees the word simply as a mold for it, and the speaker as intending it, once it is ascertained that he intends at all.

At other times, by way of manipulating the word itself, it sets to work and alters the word; and it never leaves off doing so, inclining toward the lighter and easier, changing words from form to form and from order to order, until word is derived from word and language passes into language — fiṭra in all of this reposing, as you have heard, only in what costs the least.

Of what has been described there are many witnesses in the expressions of the other animals, from their first growth to the settling of their state — save that man among them, through the existence of his deliberation, or its strength, is able to preserve the change once achieved and to stand firm upon it, as the other animals are not. Even so, its occurring among them is not far-fetched; and some of the variation found in the states of animals across times and regions — variation not traceable to nature — may well bear witness to it.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: the ʿAllāmah elsewhere reduces the multiplication of languages to definite factors — difference of milieu through migration and ethnic fission, the coining of new words under the new needs that social development secretes, and the rule of selecting the lighter and easier — all of which drive the splitting of tongues and the derivation of distinct language-families (Uṣūl al-falsafa 1:404, Essay 6).]

You have already learned, as to its root, that the positing of possession is the positing of something that approximates the part or the concomitant; and so it stands in whatever man has acquired from the outset with none to contest him.

But when in society the need to own a thing chances to arise while the thing is in another's hands, fiṭra deputes to exchange (muʿāwaḍa), or to other devices, by positing a standard through which the two parties come into ownership — falling to whichever of them its accord happens to fall — such as racing for stakes, gaming, and whatever runs their course.

Thereupon branch out the kinds of transfer and conveyance, and the effects and rulings agreeable to it. As for possession posited as the category of having (jida) or of relation (iḍāfa) — to that we have paid no heed, and fiṭra will never awaken to it at all.

[Editor's note, abridged: jida and iḍāfa are two of the ten categories current in the philosophy books. Iḍāfa arises from a repeated relation between two existents — symmetrical, like the brotherhood of two brothers or the contemporaneity of two things in one time; or asymmetrical, like fatherhood-and-sonship, or priority-and-posteriority between two stretches of time. Jida (possession-as-category) arises from the relation of a thing to something enveloping it, as the body stands enveloped by the garment or the head by the cap (after Miṣbāḥ Yazdī's discussion of the ten categories).]

It has appeared from the preceding chapters that the positing of leadership is, in its root, the positing of the removal of the obstacle, or of strength of efficacy. But fiṭra, at every grade of its need, reposes in positing it in the manner befitting that grade: at the first dawning of its need it has recourse to its own opinion, for the purpose of arriving at what its opinion makes requisite — and hence it was [at first] the positing of strength-of-efficacy.

At the first household association, recourse is had to a head who gathers the powers of the people of the house and whom they obey, that he may preserve the equilibrium among their effective powers; for were there no head, each would do with what lies in his power whatever he could, and the purpose of the association would inevitably be disordered. So likewise the head of the quarter, then of the town, then the kingdom, then the region, then the world. When such a one is present, he preserves by his power the equilibrium among their powers and moves them toward what sets right the affair of the whole, according to what befits each single one.

Then, his power being above their powers, they cannot but assent to it — and next they must make it appear by its likenesses, whereby his power is preserved in an image, so as to be preserved outwardly; for the soul's assent is to the outward, according to what it possesses. Hence respect, magnification, and self-abasement: they rise when he sits, they bow and prostrate according to their assent and acknowledgment. Then this spread and circulated even toward those who are no heads at all, and became customary among them; and in the usages of mankind, across time and place, there is of this an abundance past all counting.

Thereupon fiṭra is inevitably constrained to posit impelling (baʿth) and setting-in-motion — this being, as it were, the most primordial of them in its contact with constraint, as you heard in Chapter 3; then to posit deterring (zajr) and prohibition; then to posit the preferable and the rest — such as recommendation, reprehension, and permission. The nexus between the subordinate and the act toward which he is impelled is the nexus of obligation; between him and the act prohibited, a nexus resembling impossibility, named impermissibility and ḥurma.

These two posits, as you heard in Chapter 5, draw after them the positing of requital (jazāʾ) for their confirmation and consolidation — if good, then good; if evil, then evil; at the least of it, praise and blame. Praise, however, is not obligatory — since what the strong one's strength demands is just that the weak be affected — whereas blame and censure are both obligatory. And it has passed in Chapter 5 that the stronger the one impelled and answerable, the weaker the positing of censure and blame; while the weaker the impeller and the positing of leadership, the stronger the positing of praise and commendation — and conversely. Of this there are many witnesses in the discussions of emphasis and performative utterance in the science of maʿānī, and in scattered loci of the science of bayān. And upon these two posits follows the positing of obedience — moving as the mover's moving requires.

The relation of obedience to the one commanded is likewise the relation of obligation — as with impelling; indeed it is a species of impelling, since the impelling posited here is precisely that the thing's relation to the person be the relation of obligation.

The respect in which it is an impelling is this: the generality of men, from long practice of the affairs of masters and their commands, hold that the nexus of obligation between one thing and another never exists without a particular instituting commander. Hence whatever it is in which fiṭra is bound to posit the nexus of obligation without positing any particular commander — that is an impelling and a moving from fiṭra, or from the intellect, as they sometimes hold and assent; and so it is an intellective command (amr ʿaqlī).

Impelling is thus of two divisions.

The first: what the universal fiṭra has posited — the obligation of preserving everything without which some requisite posit is not achieved: leadership, for instance, only by obedience, non-rebellion, respect, self-abasement, standing firm upon covenant and promise, and concurrence with the sincere counselor — and the like of these, past counting in their multitude.

The second: the impelling of heads and masters according to their own purposes, in what does not pass outside the circle of their headship and authority.

Should one rebel where in truth there was neither command nor impelling from the head, no requital follows upon it save what follows upon contravening the general command — censure and blame.

Then too, the likes of these matters obtain from the side of the subordinate as well, in his own measure — impelling, deterring, and requital: from him it is petition (duʿāʾ), from the master granting (istijāba), and the requital for it praise — and so forth.

When the two associates are of equal rank — no headship or subordination between them in themselves, as with two subordinates, or by the demand of the occasion — there arises of iʿtibār what befits the occasion; for whatever the social purpose of individuals-as-equals cannot be achieved without, fiṭra must posit. In that case every consequence or concomitant which the iʿtibārāt falling under this kind of association draw after them goes back to the object of the posit — the object of the impelling, for example: punishment, if there is any, goes back to the matter itself, not to the contravening of the impelling. For the impelling may accord with the interest under observance, while the consequence or concomitant is just what follows of itself upon the act.

True — were there a general command applying to the particular thing left undone, the returning consequence would go back to the thing commanded, not to the command; because each of the two associates stands in the head's stead in this kind of command. Or say rather: this kind of impelling needs, in society's eye, no impelling head at all — as we see that anyone who notices such a contravention may punish and censure it, no determinate censurer being required; just as it assuredly requires no [formal] reward and punishment.

Then again, each of the foregoing iʿtibārāt may be carried by society's view and purpose to a locus not its own, so that the chapters intermix; and there arise thereby many iʿtibārāt whose enumeration does not enter into our purpose.

With this, the summary of the detailed account of the principal iʿtibārāt required in society is complete. Let us turn, then, to setting forth from what conviction action must proceed — and what the path is when such conviction is wanting and lost.

People aim at and move toward a thing, and beware of and flee from a thing; they must therefore act by what knowledge requires — for apart from knowledge, the thing is not present to them as the thing and nothing else. Acting upon knowledge is [in truth] acting upon the thing; as for [its being] the known-thing, knowledge itself being but an attribute — of that, fiṭra stands in heedlessness.

This said: the supposition (ẓann) whose contrary does not show itself to a surface glance, the estimative faculty does not pry apart from explicit, real knowledge, and so posits it as a standard for action. This is assurance (iṭmiʾnān) — as distinct from mere supposition and conjecture — a posit no maker-of-a-living can dispense with in his living. It belongs to what the rational agents have settled upon: with them it is knowledge, and they act upon it so long as they do not know the contrary. This said, the merely possible evil or possible harm, so long as its absence is not known, is fled from — and that only because deliverance, there, is known to lie in flight, which is therefore obligatory to do; and the discourse does not run likewise on the side of the good and the beneficial — for in the first case there are two roads, one safe and one unsafe, while the second case is not like it in this. Yet sometimes something of their contraries opposes the two, and blocks one of those paths.

When they have come to know a ruling, they act upon it — and they remain upon it until they know its contrary, even should the original knowledge itself have lapsed, because the estimative faculty makes no discrimination between the two states. This is something upon which every maker-of-a-living runs, even where there is no society at all; it is patent to whoever has studied the shifting states of the animals in their associating and their parting — and so of every human being. And when they have no decisive judgment of good or evil in a matter, or of benefit or harm, they build no effect upon it. And when they waver between two things as to a good or an evil, a benefit or a harm, they judge it obligatory there to secure both things together. And when they cannot tell a good from an evil, or a beneficial from a harmful — the good being sought and the evil dreaded — they halt; and if one of the two sides is omission, they side with it.

These are the principles of their iʿtibārāt and the mainstay of the gate of their action. They have many further particulars, which show themselves upon pursuit through the chapters of their movements and works. But that to which the universal purpose and the weighty intent attaches — in knowing the iʿtibārī matters, their genesis and their spread — is just the measure on which we have made our word brief and brought our discourse to completion; nor have we, in it, reposed — as we stipulated at the very outset — upon anything other than explicit demonstration and bare estimation.

[Translator's note: the four closing rules are recognizably the seeds of the four "practical principles" of Shīʿī legal theory — continuance (istiṣḥāb), exemption (barāʾa), precaution (iḥtiyāṭ), and option upon suspension (takhyīr/tawaqquf) — here derived from the fiṭrī conduct of any living being rather than from scripture. The chapter title follows the in-text heading; the table of contents reads "fī ʿilmihim ʿinda ghayrihi."]

In eight chapters:

Chapter 1 — the purpose of this Essay. Chapter 2 — the animal's distinction from the other species by voluntary movement. Chapter 3 — will and choice. Chapter 4 — that every act issuing from man is voluntary. Chapter 5 — that the act issues from man, knowledge being a preparer made ready. Chapter 6 — how the iʿtibār draws the reality after it. Chapter 7 — that the act is consolidated as assent intensifies, with other rules suited to that chapter. Chapter 8 — how assent is procured; and with that we conclude the Essay, God Most High willing.

You have learned in the foregoing discourse that these estimative opinions and iʿtibārī matters stand intermediate between two realities, and how they arise from the real things. The purpose now is to explain: how do they draw the real things after them, and what is the cause of that? Do the real things differ as these differ — and by what manner of difference ought they to differ? What is the first of them in the domain of acts, and what the strongest? And what is the cause in all of this?

It is well known that every species occurring in concrete reality is distinguished in its very reality from the other species — necessarily, by a constitutive differentia — and is further distinguished from them by being singled out for acts in which no other species shares; and that the animal, from among its co-divisions, is singled out by sensation and voluntary movement; that this voluntary movement is among the animal's properties, found in none other of the species; and that from the animal qua animal no act issues except by will. Though this is at first blush a theoretical claim standing in want of an explanation, we shall demonstrate it, God willing, in the chapters to follow.

Suppose a hungry, appetent man who finds something to eat — there being no obstacle — and eats it; and a man who slips from a roof and falls to the ground. We sense decisively the difference between these two acts: we find the eating, as it were, in possession of a meaning which the falling has lost. The first we name choice (ikhtiyār), and the second meaning constraint (iḍṭirār) — while the stone and the plant act neither by choice nor by constraint; so between the two meanings stands something like the opposition of privation and possession.

Then, when we analyze this chosen act in detail, we find that the agent first became alert to the act; second, conceived it and deliberated upon its fitness and unfitness; third, assented to its fitness; fourth, yearned toward it; then intended it — and did it. And when we press the inquiry to the level of the real, we find that the act which issued — being an existent, a possible — rests, in the issuance that belongs to it, upon the will; and the will upon the knowledge from which it proceeds; and so on. And the act, when it issued, issued necessary by the necessity of its cause, no possibility remaining to it. And since the efficacy of this knowledge and assent is incomplete without decisive judgment (jazm): were there no decisive judgment, arriving at one would require deliberation among the alternatives — as is man's way in the acquisition of knowledge; and every deliberating is likewise for the sake of arriving at the decisive judgment. Thought and deliberation, then, are a psychic movement not intended for its own sake; and alertness likewise belongs to what merely prepares for arrival at the decisive judgment, on account of inadvertence toward the thing known, or ignorance of it.

It has thus become clear that alertness and deliberation are not essentially intended in the act's coming about through will: supposing knowledge present, and the act good in itself with its goodness undoubted, the act would issue without any pause — and it would be choice.

If we go deep into every act that issues from man — even into those wherein a man knows nothing until he finds himself already fallen into their midst — we find that all of it issues from will and knowledge. For there is present some love for the act, some agreeableness with it; and this love comes only of some prior familiarity. There is, then, some assent — at most, in some of these cases, he has no knowledge of this knowledge; and wherever there is assent, there is will, assuredly.

It is an error for anyone to say that the bodily instruments, in the case of mere following-along and compelled action, simply trail in their motions whatever they follow and mimic, the act being non-voluntary. For the act, in these very cases, issues only from some love and some agreeableness to the soul — be it from habit or from accord with nature; for habit is sweet, and nature's accord is agreeable: so there is knowledge there, so there is will. Everything that issues from man — since it issues only from some agreeableness, and this is known by direct finding (wijdān) — there is love there, hence knowledge there, hence will there.

As for what a man may do and then abandon upon mere alertness: that is because the knowledge of its fitness, say, was conditioned, and the condition had been effaced from the soul; when he turns his attention, he becomes aware of the condition — and leaves off, the will having lapsed.

This knowledge which the will follows — which draws the will after it — is not, once regard is cut off from the assent, a cause of the will. For the very same thing may become the percept of two persons, one of whom acts while the other does not; indeed the state of one and the same person may differ in this across two times and two conditions.

Were that [efficacy] from it insofar as it is assent to the nexus, an act would have to issue at every knowledge — knowledge being one in kind — whereas in fact the act issues only upon assent to unconditional obligation. So likewise were it by virtue of the relation to the conceived meaning, or to the externally known thing. These two suppositions, moreover, are false on a further ground: such a relation is something non-real — either one of its terms is iʿtibārī, or it does not exist — so the relation is iʿtibārī; and for other unsoundnesses besides.

It is thus clear that the will does not issue from this knowledge that precedes it — assuredly not.

We say further: every species, by its very species-nature, is the principle of the issuance of its proper and common acts and of its second perfections, as is demonstrated in the Physics (al-samāʿ al-ṭabīʿī).

Again: what the animal does, it perceives — in the sense that the act, for its being willed, needs a perception. This yields the conclusion that the will issues from the animal nature itself, by the mediation of knowledge, without efficacy belonging to the knowledge — that is, knowledge is a preparer (muʿidd) for singling out the perfection, while the agent is the animal itself.

[Editor's note, abridged: "al-Samāʿ al-ṭabīʿī" is the Arabic name of Aristotle's Physics, which reached the Muslims through Syriac (shemʿā keyānā); it is the first part of natural philosophy customarily studied, treating the causes and principles of natural things, matter and form, motion and its concomitants, and body in its quantity and quality.]

The will is consummated only together with knowledge of the perfection — that is, that the thing known be a perfection; that is, that the knowledge attach to the act's being obligatory: so there is no act save from an intention of obligation, as passed in the first Essay.

The meaning of all this — and of what passed in Chapter 2 of the first Essay — is that from the external things, according as they agree with the temper or not, or fall in the path of what agrees or not, meanings are abstracted; and the concrete things are willed, or left, according to the application of these meanings to them — all of this by fiṭra and by the exigency of nature.

Hence most acts are compounds of numerous things imagined as one single thing — because nature, in willing them, intends from them one single meaning: the perfection, or something joined to the perfection, or lying on its path; rarely indeed does there occur an act that is not compound. Take eating: it is a collection of various local motions, of position and possession involving the hand and the morsel — the taking-up, the opening of the mouth, the gripping, the chewing, the taking-in, the swallowing; and if you analyze these compounds in their turn, you find them in themselves compounded of sundry things.

With this, the manner in which the iʿtibārī matters and the estimative meanings draw the real things after them stands clear and established: it is by their being united with the real external things and intended by the will, so that the real things come about, in actuality, in the external world. And this is the final purpose of the foregoing chapters.

Since there are in man — indeed in the animal — numerous faculties, animal and human, agreeing with the acts which are their exigencies, it is admissible that these very faculties should be what necessitates a will agreeing with them — that is, what necessitates and demands knowledges and assents agreeable to them, which in turn necessitate the will toward their exigencies.

And they, being strong in demanding their exigencies, it may happen that no colliding assent — supposing one — collides with them at all, because they are the more closely joined to nature; the assent arising from them is therefore the more primordial, in the sense that it is conditioned by no condition. And whatever is conditioned in its efficacy by some condition becomes unconditioned only by entering under one of these — unless the whole goes back to a single most-primordial one, as has been shown elsewhere than here.

Therefore: the stronger the assent, the stronger the efficacy. That is, when the assent is the more manifest, the soul's turning toward it is the more complete, while its rival — supposing one — lies hidden beneath the soul's aversions, so that its act mounts no rivalry; nay, the obstacle may perish outright through sheer aversion and non-attention — as may happen in the instantaneous massing of a mob (ijtimāʿ al-ghawghāʾ al-ānī). So likewise: the longer-lived the assent, the more firmly it stands with the soul, and the easier the issuing of the act in its presence; for the knowledge is settled in the soul, its fitness and unfitness long since disposed of, so that upon the mere alerting to its occasion the will takes form. Hence acts that occur upon mere alertness occur easily — as one who hears a sound turns toward it without deliberation; likewise all acts issuing from a natural mover, like scratching upon the bare feeling of it, or the hand's shielding at an oncoming blow; and the acts occurring by imitation, as is seen in children; and so also in those instantaneous gatherings. All of this is through the presence of an assent settled in the soul: upon the bare awareness of its application, the will is complete. The issuing of acts thus differs as the assents differ.

You have learned that the stronger the assent, the more complete the act; and that there are an assent — or assents — standing at the first occurrings of acts, which wait upon no respite, delay, or deliberation.

It is possible, then, to procure assent to a thing by dressing it in the dress of the primordial assent, or by dressing what accompanies it in that dress. And the more there is present an assent contrary to it, the greater grows the need for disguise, and the more pressing the need for sophistry, until what allegiance the opposing assent holds in the soul dwindles quite away. To this bear witness the greater part of the meanings of encouragements and incitements — nay, the poetics (shiʿriyyāt) in their entirety; and the practice of it is notorious.

This, when it is done by disguise. Sometimes it is done otherwise — namely, by establishing the conviction and making it firm-rooted through frequency of presentation. For in even a single occurrence there is an assent of the soul to existence; and the more the exposures multiply, the weaker grows the soul's attention to the alternatives, until the matter reaches a degree at which nothing of it is any longer disowned, by the sheer frequency of its incoming — hence the repetition of the ugly deed ends by lifting its ugliness. Thus the procuring of assent is possible.

In other words: the destroying of an established assent is by one of the two ways — either by abundant presentation of its like, or by disguising it with what is already established.

These two chapters do not enter into our purpose — the explanation of how the iʿtibārāt and the estimative opinions draw the real things after them; but we have set down the sum of these meanings within them because, from the side of assent, they touch upon our purpose. And here we conclude the Essay — praising God, majestic and mighty, invoking blessings upon His nearest friends, Muḥammad and his pure Household.