4. Another consideration is that if The Good [and First] is simplex and without need, it can neither need the intellective act nor possess what it does not need: it will therefore not have intellection. (Interpolation or corruption: It is without intellection because, also, it contains no duality.)
Again; an Intellectual-Principle is distinct from The Good and takes a certain goodness only by its intellection of The Good.
Yet again: In any dual object there is the unity [the principle of identity] side by side with the rest of the thing; an associated member cannot be the unity of the two and there must be a self-standing unity [within the duality] before this unity of members can exist: by the same reasoning there must be also the supreme unity entering into no association whatever, something which is unity-simplex by its very being, utterly devoid of all that belongs to the thing capable of association.
How could anything be present in anything else unless in virtue of a source existing independently of association? The simplex [or absolute] requires no derivation; but any manifold, or any dual, must be dependent.
We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light from the sun: Soul carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the light which makes it essentially intellective; Intellectual-Principle carries the light as its own though it is not purely the light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character.
How can this highest have need of any other? It is not to be identified with any of the things that enter into association; the self-standing is of a very different order.