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Part One · Chapter Seventeen — Concealing Knowledge
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Do not suppose that it is metaphysics alone that is to be withheld from the multitude — rather, most of physics as well. We have repeatedly cited to you the dictum: 'nor [expound] the Account of Creation before two' (Hag. 2:1).
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And this is not so among the people of the Law alone, but also among the philosophers and the religious scholars of antiquity: they would conceal their discourse on the first principles and cast it in riddles. Plato and those before him would call matter 'the female' and call form 'the male.'
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Now you know that the principles of generated, perishable beings are three: matter, form, and the particular privation that is always coupled to matter. Were privation not coupled to it, no form would ever come to be for it — and in this respect privation is among the principles.
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When a form is attained, that privation lapses — I mean the privation of the form now attained — and another privation couples to the matter, and so on without end, as is shown in physics.
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So if those men, who risked no harm from plain explanation, would nonetheless borrow names and employ analogies in teaching, how much more must we, the community of the followers of the Law, refrain from declaring openly anything that the multitude cannot grasp — or that would make them imagine the truth of the matter to be the opposite of what we intend. Understand this too.