The attributes which the Divine Book has assigned to the Creator and Maker of the universe, are only the perfect forms of those which are found in man, and these are seven in number: Knowledge, life, power, volition, hearing, seeing and talking. Now as to knowledge, God in his Divine Book has said the following “Shall he not know all things who has created them?”[54] The argument contained in this verse is that a created thing always shows, by the arrangement which it possesses,--its different parts being made for the sake of one another for the benefit intended to be derived from that thing,--that its maker is not nature only, but it must have been made by one who has arranged all for the end in view. So he must have a knowledge of it. For instance, when a man looks at a house he knows that the foundation was laid for the sake of the walls, and the walls have been raised for the roof. So it becomes clear to him that the house must have been built by a man knowing the art of building. This quality is eternal, for it is not fitting that God should possess it for a time only. But we should not go down deep into this matter, and should not say, like the Mutakallimun, that He knows the created things at the time of their creation, by His eternal knowledge, for then it becomes necessary that the knowledge of the created thing at the time of its non-existence be the same which is absurd, when knowledge is said to be dependent upon the existent things. As an existent thing is sometimes an action, and sometimes only a potentiality, it is necessary that the knowledge of the two existence be different, as its time of being in potentiality is quite different from the time of its being in action. But this the Law does not explain. On the other hand it maintains quite an opposite position: that God knows the created thing at the time of its creation, as He has said, “There falleth no leaf, but He knoweth it; neither is there a single grain in the dark parts of the earth; neither a green thing, nor a dry thing, but it is written in the perspicuous book.”[55] So it is necessary that we should lay down in Law that He knows a thing before it comes into being; knows a thing when it is, and not when it should have been; and knows when a thing has been destroyed at the time of its destruction. This is what the injunctions of the Law establish. It has been so because the masses cannot understand the universe through visible things, except in this way. The Mutakallimun have no argument to advance against it, except that they say that the knowledge which changes with a change in the existent thing is itself created, while with God nothing created can be attached. They say so because they think that that which cannot be separated from the created thing is itself created. But we have already exposed the fallacy of this argument. So it is established by the rules described, and it should not be said that he knows the creation of the created, and the