Problems Concerning First Principles

nor indeed before all things, nor beyond all things. It would be difficult to praise it as "all things" at all; indeed, it should not be praised at all, nor thought of, nor even surmised. For whatever we might think or conceive is either one of "all things"—and this is the truer view—or it is "all things" being purified. And even if we ascend to the simplest, analyzing and being analyzed, which is the most comprehensive of all, such as the final circumference, it is not of beings, but even of non-beings. For of beings, the unified and entirely indistinct is the limit. For every being is mixed from elements. But of the many, simply, it is the One. For we have nothing simpler to conceive than the One, the entirely One. And if we call this a principle and a cause and the first and the simplest, then these—and all other things—are there only according to the One. But we, unable to grasp it, divide ourselves around it, predicating our own divided things upon it. Except that we dishonor these things as many, because they do not fit the One. Therefore, it is not knowable, nor nameable; for in this way, it would also be many. Or are these things also in it according to the One? For the nature of the One is all-receiving, or rather, all-productive. And there is nothing that is not the One; for which reason all things seem to be drawn out from it. And that which is strictly the cause and the first is also the end itself and the limit itself, the coping stone original: "θριγγός" of all things simply, and the one nature of the many. Not the one that is in them from it, but the one before them that is generative of the one in them; the most partless summit of "all things" however they may be, and the greatest circumference of all "wholes," as they are called. But if the One is the cause of all things and the comprehensive of all things, what is our ascent beyond this? Might it be that—