By acknowledging subsistent attributes and actions, their claim of an entity that produces solely by the necessity of its own essence collapses; under either alternative, therefore, their whole doctrine is invalidated.
Furthermore, the “simple One” of which they speak exists only in the mind, not in external reality. It is sheer, unrestricted being, and what is unrestricted exists solely in thought, never outside it. This is obvious with respect to “the absolute on condition of absoluteness.” As for “the absolute without condition,” which they style the “natural universal,” it likewise does not subsist in the external world as a universal whose very notion rules out multiplicity; it exists only as a determinate, individuated particular. What is found in the mind is called universal merely because it corresponds to those particulars, just as a general term corresponds to its individual instances.
Moreover, if only one effect can issue from that One, then only one could issue from the next, and so on ad infinitum, so that the world could never have reached its observed profusion of multiplicity. Should more than one issue from it, however, their basic axiom is shattered.
When they further allege that this One possesses “aspects” such as necessity and possibility, its knowledge of its originator, its knowledge of itself, and the like—so that from the aspect of necessity an intellect emanates and from the aspect of possibility a body emanates, and other such irrational claims—we reply: these aspects are either real existents or mere privations. If they are real, and the first emanation already bears them, then more than one effect has undeniably issued from the Prime Originator. If they are privative, the One would still produce a plurality by virtue of attributes that are nothing but negations.
In that event, since it is universally admitted that the Necessary Being is characterized by privative predicates, it follows all the more that more than one may proceed from Him—far more plausibly than from the first emanation they call the “First Intellect.”