5. How then can a multitude of essential beings be really one?
Obviously either the one essence will be entire in all, or the many will rise from a one which remains unaltered and yet includes the one — many in virtue of giving itself, without self-abandonment, to its own multiplication.
It is competent thus to give and remain, because while it penetrates all things it can never itself be sundered: this is an identity in variety.
There is no reason for dismissing this explanation: we may think of a science with its constituents standing as one total, the source of all those various elements: again, there is the seed, a whole, producing those new parts in which it comes to its division; each of the new growths is a whole while the whole remains undiminished: only the material element is under the mode of part, and all the multiplicity remains an entire identity still.
It may be objected that in the case of science the constituents are not each the whole.
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