among the claims that the mind may devise in this context—not only are these claims unsupported by any evidence, being merely arbitrary assertions and conjectures about the unseen, but there is also evidence demonstrating their falsity. They therefore offer no answer to the evidence that their fundamental principle is false. For those aspects must be either existent realities or mere negations. If they are existent realities, they have proceeded from the First; thus multiple things, more than one, have proceeded from it without an intermediary. If they are mere negations, the first emanation remains a simple unity, and consequently only one can proceed from it.

This is clarified by the following: if a multiplicity of negations entails multiplicity, then the First contains multiplicity, given the many things negated of it. If it does not entail multiplicity, then negations introduce no multiplicity into the first emanation, so only one proceeds from it, and so on.

Moreover, this unity that they posit exists only in minds, not in external reality, like the unity they make the principle of conceptual composites, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

This being so, their claim here—that the motion of the celestial sphere is single, eternal and everlasting, and that it is the act of the Lord, whose action is perpetual—is false for several reasons:

First: The motions are not one; rather, they are different motions, none of which proceeds from another. Thus, the assertion that they are one is false.

Second: Perpetual motion, whether it is one