We have, of course, no slight aid to conviction, indeed the very strongest, in the exposition of the character of that principle.It is not like a stone, some vast block lying where it lies, covering the space of its own extension, held within its own limits, having a fixed quantity of mass and of assigned stone-power.It is a First Principle, measureless, not bounded within determined size- such measurement belongs to another order- and therefore it is all-power, nowhere under limit.Being so, it is outside of Time.
Time in its ceaseless onward sliding produces parted interval;Eternity stands in identity, pre-eminent, vaster by unending power than Time with all the vastness of its seeming progress; Time is like a radial line running out apparently to infinity but dependent upon that, its centre, which is the pivot of all its movement; as it goes it tells of that centre, but the centre itself is the unmoving principle of all the movement.
Time stands, thus, in analogy with the principle which holds fast in unchanging identity of essence: but that principle is infinite not only in duration but also in power: this infinity of power must also have its counterpart, a principle springing from that infinite power and dependent upon it; this counterpart will, after its own mode, run a course- corresponding to the course of Time- in keeping with that stationary power which is its greater as being its source:
and in this too the source is present throughout the full extension of its lower correspondent.
This secondary of Power, participating as far as it may in that higher, must be identified.
Now the higher power is present integrally but, in the weakness of the recipient material, is not discerned as every point; it is present as an identity everywhere not in the mode of the material triangle-identical though, in many representations, numerically multiple, but in the mode of the immaterial, ideal triangle which is the source of the material figures.If we are asked why the omnipresence of the immaterial triangle does not entail that of the material figure, we answer that not all Matter enters into the participation necessary;Matter accepts various forms and not all Matter is apt for all form;the First Matter, for example, does not lend itself to all but is for the First Kinds first and for the others in due order, though these, too, are omnipresent.
12.To return: How is that Power present to the universe?
As a One Life.
Consider the life in any living thing; it does not reach only to some fixed point, unable to permeate the entire being; it is omnipresent.If on this again we are asked How, we appeal to the character of this power, not subject to quantity but such that though you divide it mentally for ever you still have the same power, infinite to the core; in it there is no Matter to make it grow less and less according to the measured mass.
Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over with its own vitality.If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it.The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give;you will always be able to move with it- better, to be in its entirety- and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before you.
But supposing you do thus "seek no further," how do you experience it?
In that you have entered into the All, no longer content with the part; you cease to think of yourself as under limit but, laying all such determination aside, you become an All.No doubt you were always that, but there has been an addition and by that addition you are diminished; for the addition was not from the realm of Being-you can add nothing to Being- but from non-Being.It is not by some admixture of non-Being that one becomes an entire, but by putting non-Being away.By the lessening of the alien in you, you increase.
Cast it aside and there is the All within you; engaged in the alien, you will not find the All.Not that it has to come and so be present to you; it is you that have turned from it.And turn though you may, you have not severed yourself; it is there; you are not in some far region: still there before it, you have faced to its contrary.
It is so with the lesser gods; of many standing in their presence it is often one alone that sees them; that one alone was alone in the power to see.These are the gods who "in many guises seek our cities"; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and heaven, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to soul and life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which by its very lack of extension is infinite.
SIXTH TRACTATE.
ON NUMBERS.
1.It is suggested that multiplicity is a falling away from The Unity, infinity being the complete departure, an innumerable multiplicity, and that this is why unlimit is an evil and we evil at the stage of multiplicity.
A thing, in fact, becomes a manifold when, unable to remain self-centred, it flows outward and by that dissipation takes extension: utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold since there is nothing to bind part to part; when, with all this outflowing, it becomes something definite, there is a magnitude.
But what is there so grievous in magnitude?