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Fifth dialogue<br />
member, the whole, equal to, larger or smaller, like this or like that, relative<br />
to this or to that, identical to or different from, etc., respond to other concepts<br />
which do not express an absolute, and hence cannot designate the<br />
substance, the one or being, but, in terms of modes, determinations and<br />
forms, exist through the substance, in the one, and relative to being. Thus,<br />
just as it is commonly said that quantity, quality, relation, action, passion<br />
and other kinds of accidents are relative to one and the same substance, in<br />
the same way one could say that the one and supreme being, in which act<br />
does not differ from potency, can be all absolutely and is everything that it<br />
can be. It is in a complicative manner one, immense, infinite and comprehensive<br />
of all being, and in an explicative manner, it is present in sensible<br />
bodies and in the potency and the act that we see distinguished in them.<br />
That is why you hold that what is generated and generates (be it a question<br />
of an equivocal agent or of a univocal agent, as is commonly said in philosophy),<br />
as well as that of which the generation is made, are always of the<br />
same substance. Your ears will, therefore, not be jarred by the thesis of<br />
Heraclitus, which declares all things to be but one – the one which, thanks<br />
to its mutability, contains all things in itself. And since all forms are in it, it<br />
follows that all definitions accord with it, so that all contrary propositions<br />
are true. And what creates multiplicity in things is not being, is not the<br />
thing, but what appears, what is offered to the senses and lies on the surface<br />
of things.<br />
TEOFILO. Exactly. But I would like you to read further in this most<br />
important science and of this solid foundation of the truths and the secrets<br />
of nature. First, therefore, I would like you to note that nature descends to<br />
the production of things, and intellect ascends to the knowledge of them,<br />
by one and the same ladder. Both ways proceed from unity to unity, passing<br />
through a multitude of middle terms. Not to mention that the philosophical<br />
method of the Peripatetics and of many Platonists is to have the<br />
multitude of things as middle term, preceded by the pure act, at one<br />
extremity, and the pure potency, at the other; similar to other philosophers<br />
who affirm metaphorically that the darkness and the light come together<br />
in the constitution of innumerable degrees of forms, images, figures and<br />
colours. But beside all these philosophers, who take into consideration<br />
two principles and two princes, others rise up who, impatient with and hostile<br />
towards polyarchy, make the two principles coincide into one, which<br />
is at the same time abyss and darkness, clarity and light, profound and<br />
impenetrable obscurity, and supernal and inaccessible light.<br />
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