„[T]he first philosophers, in investigating the truth and the nature of things, wandered, as if led by ignorance, into a certain… path. Hence, they say that no being is either generated or corrupted, because it is necessary that what is generated should be generated either from being or non-being: but both these are impossible; for neither can being be generated, since it already is; and from nothing, nothing can be generated… And thus… they said that there were not many things, but that being alone had a subsistence. …the ancient philosophers …through this ignorance added so much to their want of knowledge, as to fancy that nothing else was generated or had a being; but they subverted all generation.“

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