24 GOD AS TRIUNE

the other hand, that same property, since it is constitutive of the distinction does not inhere in another Person, therefore does not inhere in that other Person's essence, therefore does not inhere in the essence of Allah. Therefore the same thing does, and does not, inhere in the essence of Allah; which is absurd . . . . Thus you can prove that, Incarnation being a property of the Son, Allah did, and did not, become incarnate: a contradiction that is self-evidently false.

To this it may be replied: Both in physics and metaphysics, when you get down to ultimate problems; you find yourself involved in logical contradictions. Time and eternity, creation and self-sufficingness, extension and infinity, all involve contradictions and intellectual insolubilities, for which indeed philosophers have a technical name, Antinomies of Reason, so inevitable have they found these contradictions. It need not, therefore, disturb us overmuch, even if we were to find one slight antinomy still adhering to our ultimate doctrine, that of the Sacred Trinity in Unity.

Now it is eminently to the point to notice that even our super-logical author himself is quite unable to escape such contradictions. In a former page, for example, we find him enlarging on another 'ultimate' question, namely, the ultimate constitution of matter. He has arrived at the atom, and is discussing whether it is divisible or not, and whether it has extension or not. After proving that you cannot conceive the dividing process going on ad infinitum1, he concludes that there must be a point


1 Arab philosophers never allow this possibility of an infinite series.
CREATOR, INCARNATE, ATONER 25

at which it ceases, and the atom becomes indivisible; and he proceeds:

This ultimate atom either has extension or it has not. If it has, then the mind can always conceive its divisibility, and so on ad infinitum, which, as we have shown, is impossible. The only possible conclusion, therefore, is that it has not extension, and we conclude that every body is composed of absolutely extensionless atoms, i.e., without length, breadth, or height, but having definite position; resembling the mathematical points, except that the former exist, while the latter are imaginary.

Such is the author's amazing conclusion; and we must remember it is the basis on which he erects his entire argument, for it comes at the very beginning of a book which is supposed to be a close logical argument for the refutation of materialism and the demonstration of Muhammadanism, with as great certainty as that of the mathematical sciences!

Surely the antinomy (if any) adhering in the doctrine of the Trinity is nothing compared with the hopeless contradictions in terms here involved! Matter, whose one distinguishing property is extension,1 is said to be composed of extensionless things, which, together, make up an extended thing. But an extensionless thing is equivalent to zero. However often you add zero to zero you only get zero; but according to our author, who is so severe


1 It is worth while noting that Muslim philosophic thought is against this Muslim neologist on this very point. In El-Fudali's Matn, the extension of matter is selected as the best example of the self-evident! To which his commentator expressly notes, '"Matter' —whether the atom or a compound.'