13. Thus The One is in truth beyond all statement: any affirmation is of a thing; but the all-transcending, resting above even the most august divine Mind, possesses alone of all true being, and is not a thing among things; we can give it no name because that would imply predication: we can but try to indicate, in our own feeble way, something concerning it: when in our perplexity we object, "Then it is without self-perception, without self-consciousness, ignorant of itself"; we must remember that we have been considering it only in its opposites.
If we make it knowable, an object of affirmation, we make it a manifold; and if we allow intellection in it we make it at that point indigent: supposing that in fact intellection accompanies it, intellection by it must be superfluous.
Self-intellection- which is the truest- implies the entire perception of a total self formed from a variety converging into an integral; but the Transcendent knows neither separation of part nor any such enquiry; if its intellectual act were directed upon something outside, then, the Transcendent would be deficient and the intellection faulty.
The wholly simplex and veritable self-sufficing can be lacking at no point: self-intellection begins in that principle which, secondarily self-sufficing, yet needs itself and therefore needs to know itself: this principle, by its self-presence, achieves its sufficiency in virtue of its entire content [it is the all]: it becomes thus competent from the total of its being, in the act of living towards itself and looking upon itself.
Consciousness, as the very word indicates, is a conperception, an act exercised upon a manifold: and even intellection, earlier [nearer to the divine] though it is, implies that the agent turns back upon itself, upon a manifold, then. If that agent says no more than "I am a being," it speaks [by the implied dualism] as a discoverer of the extern; and rightly so, for being is a manifold; when it faces towards the unmanifold and says, "I am that being," it misses both itself and the being [since the simplex cannot be thus divided into knower and known]: if it is [to utter] truth it cannot indicate by "being" something like a stone; in the one phrase multiplicity is asserted; for the being thus affirmed- [even] the veritable, as distinguished from such a mere container of some trace of being as ought not to be called a being since it stands merely as image to archetype- even this must possess multiplicity.
But will not each item in that multiplicity be an object of intellection to us?
Taken bare and single, no: but Being itself is manifold within itself, and whatever else you may name has Being.
This accepted, it follows that anything that is to be thought of as the most utterly simplex of all cannot have self-intellection; to have that would mean being multiple. The Transcendent, thus, neither knows itself nor is known in itself.
