Cause Principle Unity

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