In the opinion of Nazzam God can do absolutely no evil thing; in fact he can only do that which he knows to be the best thing for his servants. His omnipotence reaches no farther than what he actually does. Who could hinder him from giving effect to the splendid exuberance of his Being? A Will, in the proper sense of the term,—which invariably implies a need,—is by no means to be attributed to God. The Will of God, on the contrary, is only a designation of the Divine agency itself, or of the commands which have been conveyed to men. Creation is an act performed once for all, in which all things were made at one and the same time, so that one thing is contained in another, and so that in process of time the various specimens of minerals, plants and animals, as well as the numerous children of Adam, gradually emerge from their latent condition and come to the light. Nazzam, like the philosophers, rejects the theory of atoms (v. II, 3 § 12), but then he can only account for the traversing of a definite distance, by reason of the infinite divisibility of space, by postulating leaps. He holds bodily substances to be composed of ‘accidents’ instead of atoms. And just as Abu-l-Hudhail could not conceive of the inherence of attributes in an essence, so Nazzam can only imagine the accident as the substance itself or as a part of the substance. Thus ‘Fire’ or ‘the Warm’, for instance, exists in a latent condition in wood, but it becomes free when, by means of friction, its antagonist ‘the Cold’ disappears. In the process there occurs a motion or transposition, but no qualitative change. Sensible qualities, such as colours, savours and odours, are, in Nazzam’s view, bodies. Even the soul or the intellect of Man he conceives to be a finer kind of body. The soul, of course, is the most excellent part of man: it completely pervades the body, which is its organ, and it must be termed the real and true Man. Thoughts and aspirations are defined as Movements of the Soul. In matters of Faith and in questions of Law Nazzam rejects both the consensus of the congregation and the analogical interpretation of the Law, and appeals in Shiʻite fashion to the infallible Imam. He thinks it possible for the whole body of Muslims to concur in admitting an erroneous doctrine, as, for instance, the doctrine that Mohammed has a mission for all mankind in contradistinction to other prophets. Whereas God sends every prophet to all mankind. Nazzam, besides, shares the view of Abu-l-Hudhail as to the knowledge of God and of moral duties by means of the reason. He is not particularly convinced of the inimitable excellence of the Koran. The abiding marvel of the Koran is made to consist only in the fact that Mohammed’s contemporaries were kept from producing something like to the Koran. He has certainly not retained much of the Muslim Eschatology. At least the torments of hell are in his view resolved into a process of consuming by fire.