I say:

He has thus made clear that the Lord’s knowledge comes from Himself, not from anything else, and that His knowledge of intelligibles is not derived from them. Rather, His knowledge of them causes their existence. Consequently, His knowledge does not depend on its objects; rather, its objects depend on His knowledge, whether they are changing or unchanging.

Then he said:

“Note: The Necessary Existent must intellectually apprehend Himself through Himself, as has been established, and apprehend what comes after Him insofar as He is its cause and its existence proceeds from Him. He apprehends all other things insofar as they come into being within the ordered chain descending from Him, both in length and in breadth.”

Then he said:

“Note: The First’s apprehension of things from His own essence, within His own essence, is the most excellent mode in which something can be both apprehending and apprehended. Next comes the apprehension, by the intellectual substances necessarily proceeding from the First, of the First through His illumination, and of what comes after Him through Him, from His own essence. After these two come the soul’s apprehensions, which are impressions and traces produced by an intellectual source whose principles and relations are dispersed.”

Then he said:

“Misconception and clarification: Perhaps you will say: ‘If intelligibles are not united with the intellect apprehending them, nor with one another, for the reasons you have mentioned, and you then concede that