When we recognize it, resident among the mass of things, our business is to see it for what it is- present to the items but essentially distinguished from them- and, while not denying it there, to seek this underly of all no longer as it appears in those other things but as it stands in its pure identity by itself.The identity resident in the rest of things is no doubt close to authentic identity but cannot be it; and, if the identity of unity is to be displayed beyond itself, it must also exist within itself alone.
It may be suggested that its existence takes substantial form only by its being resident among outside things: but, at this, it is itself no longer simplex nor could any coherence of manifolds occur.On the one hand things could take substantial existence only if they were in their own virtue simplex.On the other hand, failing a simplex, the aggregate of multiples is itself impossible: for the simplex individual thing could not exist if there were no simplex unity independent of the individual, [a principle of identity] and, not existing, much less could it enter into composition with any other such: it becomes impossible then for the compound universe, the aggregate of all, to exist; it would be the coming together of things that are not, things not merely lacking an identity of their own but utterly non-existent.
Once there is any manifold, there must be a precedent unity: since any intellection implies multiplicity in the intellective subject, the non-multiple must be without intellection; that non-multiple will be the First: intellection and the Intellectual-Principle must be characteristic of beings coming later.
4.Another consideration is that if The Good [and First] is simplex and without need, it can neither need the intellective act nor possess what it does not need: it will therefore not have intellection.(Interpolation or corruption: It is without intellection because, also, it contains no duality.)Again; an Intellectual-Principle is distinct from The Good and takes a certain goodness only by its intellection of The Good.
Yet again: In any dual object there is the unity [the principle of identity] side by side with the rest of the thing; an associated member cannot be the unity of the two and there must be a self-standing unity [within the duality] before this unity of members can exist: by the same reasoning there must be also the supreme unity entering into no association whatever, something which is unity-simplex by its very being, utterly devoid of all that belongs to the thing capable of association.
How could anything be present in anything else unless in virtue of a source existing independently of association? The simplex [or absolute] requires no derivation; but any manifold, or any dual, must be dependent.
We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light from the sun:
Soul carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the light which makes it essentially intellective;Intellectual-Principle carries the light as its own though it is not purely the light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character.
How can this highest have need of any other? It is not to be identified with any of the things that enter into association; the self-standing is of a very different order.
5.And again: the multiple must be always seeking its identity, desiring self-accord and self-awareness: but what scope is there within what is an absolute unity in which to move towards its identity or at what term may it hope for self-knowing? It holds its identity in its very essence and is above consciousness and all intellective act.Intellection is not a primal either in the fact of being or in the value of being; it is secondary and derived: for there exists The Good; and this moves towards itself while its sequent is moved and by that movement has its characteristic vision.The intellective act may be defined as a movement towards The Good in some being that aspires towards it; the effort produces the fact; the two are coincident; to see is to have desired to see: hence again the Authentic Good has no need of intellection since itself and nothing else is its good.
The intellective act is a movement towards the unmoved Good:
thus the self-intellection in all save the Absolute Good is the working of the imaged Good within them: the intellectual principle recognises the likeness, sees itself as a good to itself, an object of attraction: it grasps at that manifestation of The Good and, in holding that, holds self-vision: if the state of goodness is constant, it remains constantly self-attractive and self-intellective.The self-intellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act; and, in all that exists, the Act is towards The Good.
6.If this reasoning is valid, The Good has no scope whatever for intellection which demands something attractive from outside.
The Good, then, is without Act.What Act indeed, could be vested in Activity's self? No activity has yet again an activity; and whatever we may add to such Activities as depend from something else, at least we must leave the first Activity of them all, that from which all depend, as an uncontaminated identity, one to which no such addition can be made.
That primal Activity, then, is not an intellection, for there is nothing upon which it could Exercise intellection since it is The First; besides, intellection itself does not exercise the intellective act; this belongs to some principle in which intellection is vested.
There is, we repeat, duality in any thinking being; and the First is wholly above the dual.
