  Whether in fact William admits genuine causal agency among creatures, he clearly thinks that God alone can create from nothing. Thus, he rejects Avicenna's so-called “emanationist” doctrine of creation, according to which, as he puts it, God creates from nothing only one thing, the first intelligence (or spiritual being), which in turn creates the next intelligence, and so on until the tenth or agent intelligence is reached, the creator of souls and the sensible world. William thinks one ground of this doctrine is Avicenna's principle that from what is one insofar as one can only come what is one (OO I, 618b; Teske 1998a, 82), and hence from God, who is absolutely one, can at most come one thing. In fact, William agrees with this principle, but thinks Avicenna has misapplied it. Instead, he follows the Jewish thinker, Avicebron (whom he thought was a Christian) and holds that creatures come from God not insofar as he is one, but “through his will and insofar as he wills, just as a potter does not shape clay vessels through his oneness, but through his will” (OO I, 624a; Teske 1998a, 96).