But indeed it can be for no other reason indestructible or
self-sufficient than because its nature is good. Therefore to say that
the first principle is good is probably correct; but that this
principle should be the One or, if not that, at least an element,
and an element of numbers, is impossible. Powerful objections arise,
to avoid which some have given up the theory (viz. those who agree
that the One is a first principle and element, but only of
mathematical number). For on this view all the units become
identical with species of good, and there is a great profusion of
goods. Again, if the Forms are numbers, all the Forms are identical
with species of good. But let a man assume Ideas of anything he
pleases. If these are Ideas only of goods, the Ideas will not be
substances; but if the Ideas are also Ideas of substances, all animals
and plants and all individuals that share in Ideas will be good.
These absurdities follow, and it also follows that the contrary
element, whether it is plurality or the unequal, i.e. the great and
small, is the bad-itself. (Hence one thinker avoided attaching the
good to the One, because it would necessarily follow, since generation
is from contraries, that badness is the fundamental nature of
plurality; while others say inequality is the nature of the bad.) It
follows, then, that all things partake of the bad except one--the
One itself, and that numbers partake of it in a more undiluted form
than spatial magnitudes, and that the bad is the space in which the
good is realized, and that it partakes in and desires that which tends
to destroy it; for contrary tends to destroy contrary.
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