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Part One · Chapter Fifty-Five — What Must Be Negated of God
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It has been stated in several places in this treatise that everything that implies corporeality must necessarily be negated of Him; and likewise every affective state must be negated of Him, for all affective states entail change, and the agent of these affective states is necessarily other than the one being affected — so that if He, exalted be He, were to undergo any affective state whatever, some other being would be the agent in Him and the changer of Him. And it is likewise necessarily required to negate every privation of Him — so that no perfection should be absent from Him at one time and present at another — for if that were supposed, He would be perfect only potentially, and every potentiality is necessarily accompanied by privation; and everything that passes from potentiality to actuality must have, as its external agent, something other than itself that is actual and brings it to actuality. Therefore it is necessarily required that all His perfections be present actually, and that He possess nothing potentially in any respect whatsoever. And among what is necessarily required is also to negate of Him similarity to any of the existents — and this is something that everyone intuits; and it is explicitly stated in the books of the prophets with the negation of likening: 'To whom will you liken Me and make Me equal?' (Isa 40:25); 'To whom will you liken God and what likeness will you arrange for Him?' (Isa 40:18); 'There is none like You, O Lord' (Jer 10:6). And this is widespread.
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The sum of the matter is: everything that leads to one of these four categories must necessarily be negated of Him by clear demonstration — namely: everything that leads to corporeality; or to affective states and change; or to privation — such as not having something actually and then coming to have it actually; or to similarity to any of His creatures. These are among the benefits of natural science for the knowledge of the Deity — for anyone who does not know those sciences will not sense the deficiency of affective states, nor understand the meaning of 'potentially' and 'actually,' nor know that privation necessarily accompanies everything that is potential, and that something that is merely potential is more deficient than the one who moves it to actualize that potentiality — and that mover is also deficient in relation to what it moved for, until that is achieved actually. And if one knows these things but does not know them through their demonstrations, then one will not know the particular conclusions that follow from these universal premises as necessary conclusions — and therefore one will have no demonstration of the existence of the Deity, nor of the necessity of negating these four categories from Him.
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After presenting this preparatory foundation, I proceed to another chapter in which I shall explain the impossibility of what the believers in essential attributes suppose — and this will only be understood by one who has prior knowledge of the art of logic and of the nature of existence.