At this juncture, the agent who perfects that influence can be none other than He Himself, for everything besides Him is something He has brought into existence, and His producing that “other” is counted among His very acts of creation. It is therefore impossible that the factor by which the Creator became an operative and efficacious agent be something He derives from outside Himself; rather, He alone is the creator of all things, and the antecedent acts that serve as conditions for later effects are His acts, not the acts of anyone else.

If, however, He Himself performed nothing by His own agency, while events took place apart from Him, one after another, and He did nothing at all, it would follow that those events did not proceed from Him. Indeed, every increment of motion is originated and therefore requires an originated cause; and the moving entity is a contingent body, so whatever arises within it of the motives that necessitate motion—such as successive perceptions and volitions—is likewise originated within it, moment after moment; this, too, is a form of motion.

The agent responsible for all this cannot be an eternal, complete cause that necessitates its effect by its very essence, for were that so, none of those motions would proceed from it. Yet these motions are contingent and newly arisen, and thus they must have an agent. Moreover, the very body that is perpetually in motion cannot, by its own essence, be an eternally complete cause that necessarily entails its effect, for among its effects is motion that occurs successively. What necessitates such successive motion cannot be eternal; otherwise the motion itself would be eternal—an evident contradiction, all the more so given the multiplicity and diversity of motions and events.

Consequently, for differentiated, contingent happenings to issue from a single, simple, complete cause that necessarily entails its effect is, to sound reason, an impossibility—whether they proceed from it directly or through some intermediary.