The question of how the full causal efficacy itself comes to be is identical to the question of how the produced effect comes to be; inevitably one must trace matters back to the First Agent. A state must arise anew for Him that entails complete efficacy at the very moment each effect is produced—even though the perfection of that efficacy is grounded in His Essence. If His Essence demands that He bring about one thing after another, then it is He Himself who acts first with respect to this, then with respect to that, and then with respect to the next; no external factor renders Him an agent, for any such factor would itself be one of His effects, and it is He who made it an effect. Thus nothing exists but the Agent and His products, and none of His products issues from any but Him.

This, intellectually, is possible. Quite different is the claim that He is perpetually generating the various contingent kinds while His state at the moment He produces one of them is identical to His state beforehand. If such a claim were acceptable, it would also be acceptable for Him not to act and then to become acting with no new circumstance arising. Conversely, if it is impossible for Him to act after not acting without something new, it is likewise impossible for Him to produce this particular effect after not having produced it, unless something new arises. They censure their opponents for affirming that a contingent event proceeds from the Eternal without a new cause, yet their own doctrine entails that every successive and diverse contingent proceeds from the Eternal without a new cause—whether they posit the mediation of the Intellect or no mediation at all. For, in their view, the Intellect is inseparable from His Essence and nothing contingent ever arises within it.

It therefore becomes evident that the position to which they have fled is more unsound and self-contradictory than the position from which they fled. To clarify: if the occurrence of events from the Eternal, the Necessary-in-Himself, without a new cause were possible, their adversaries’ stance would be possible as well, and their proof for the pre-eternity of any part of the world would collapse. But if such occurrence is impossible, then their own view is even more invalid than that of their adversaries.