THE SUPREME IS ONE ONLY IN A FIGURATIVE SENSE.
The principle that is superior to what is highest among beings, to Intelligence (or intellect, or intelligible world) (may well be sought after). There must indeed be some principle above Intelligence; for intelligence does indeed aspire to become one, but it is not one, possessing only the form of unity. Considered in itself, Intelligence is not divided, but is genuinely present to itself. It does not dismember itself because it is next to the One, though it dared to withdraw therefrom. What is above Intelligence is Unity itself, an incomprehensible miracle, of which it cannot even be said that it is essence, lest we make of it the attribute of something else, and to whom no name is really suitable. If however He must be named, we may indeed call Him in general Unity, but only on the preliminary understanding that He was not first something else, and then only later became unity. That is why the One is so difficult to understand in Himself; He is rather known by His offspring; that is, by Being, because Intelligence leads up to Being. The nature of the One, indeed, is the source of excellent things, the power which begets beings, while remaining within Himself, without undergoing any diminution, without passing into the beings to which He gives birth.[196] If we call this principle Unity, it is only for the mutual convenience of rising to some indivisible conception, and in unifying our soul. But when we say that this principle is one and indivisible, it is not in the same sense that we say it of the (geometric) point, and of the (arithmetical unity called the) monad. What is one in the sense of the unity of the point or the monad, is a principle of quantity, and would not exist unless preceded by being and the principle which precedes even that being. It is not of this kind of unity that we must think; still we believe that the point and the monad have analogy with the One by their simplicity as well as by the absence of all manifoldness and of all division.