For if the principles must be universal, what is derived from
them must also be universal, as in demonstrations; and if this is
so, there will be nothing capable of separate existence-i.e. no
substance. But evidently in a sense knowledge is universal, and in a
sense it is not.
Book XIV
1
REGARDING this kind of substance, what we have said must be
taken as sufficient. All philosophers make the first principles
contraries: as in natural things, so also in the case of
unchangeable substances. But since there cannot be anything prior to
the first principle of all things, the principle cannot be the
principle and yet be an attribute of something else. To suggest this
is like saying that the white is a first principle, not qua anything
else but qua white, but yet that it is predicable of a subject, i.e.
that its being white presupposes its being something else; this is
absurd, for then that subject will be prior. But all things which
are generated from their contraries involve an underlying subject; a
subject, then, must be present in the case of contraries, if anywhere.
All contraries, then, are always predicable of a subject, and none can
exist apart, but just as appearances suggest that there is nothing
contrary to substance, argument confirms this. No contrary, then, is
the first principle of all things in the full sense; the first
principle is something different.
But these thinkers make one of the contraries matter, some
making the unequal which they take to be the essence of
plurality-matter for the One, and others making plurality matter for
the One.
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