Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Volume 1

take this or that form, are shaped and figured, and, in a word, are specified and become capable of producing individuals. And this is the anticipation of individuals, which modifies and varies within the modified and diversified energies, as well as the anticipation of the energies that take on, so to speak, the most diverse rhythms. Thus, these are the determinations that must be posited in this regard, unless some reasoning forces us to admit that the immobile is the cause of mobile things; for example, that the demiurge the artisan creator is the reason for things that are born and perish, or, in general, the primary substance and the primary principle of universal things. For what would not proceed from this principle? And how could the cause of all things not be the pre-existing principles of all? What is there among secondary things that is not enveloped by the first?

If one admits this opinion, as I myself admit it, what shall we answer to the objection? We shall say that the immobile cause the unmoved mover gathers its effects within itself, in its immobility, and this in the general manner of the cause that incessantly engenders them, such as the cause that is universally fecund in the eternal nature, and which produces absolutely all things generated to infinity original: "ἐπ' ἄπειρον". It has therefore anticipated the one cause of all these sorts of things taken as a whole, and also, to speak more clearly, of all the individual things that succeed one another incessantly; a cause which is not the proper cause of either me or you, and yet is the cause of me and you and of all the antecedent things that have ever existed, and of those that will one day exist. Through this, individuals are gathered within it; through this, they distinguish themselves from it and separate from it, just as the light of the sun remains eternal in its own common nature, and at the same time distributes itself individually to each thing, because it possesses the one cause which

1. I read "to infinity" original: "ἐπ' ἄπειρον" instead of "infinite," which is perhaps simply a printing error.