Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

order, which he who contemplates reality and aspires to the knowledge of
the First Principle perceives, is difficult, and what human understanding
can grasp of it is only its general principle. What led the philosophers to
believe in a gradation of these principles, in conformity with the spatial
order of their spheres, is that they saw that the highest sphere seems in its
action superior to what is under it, and that all the other spheres follow its
movement . And therefore they believed that what was said about their
order was based on their spatial order. But one might perhaps object that
the order in the spheres is perhaps only based on their activity, not on
their spatial order; for since it seemed that the activities and movements of
the planets exist because of the movement of the sun, perhaps their
movers in setting them in motion follow the sun, and the movement of the
sun derives perhaps directly from the First. For this reason there are in
this question no indubitable assertions, but only assertions more or less
plausible and likely to be true. And since this is established, let us now
return to our subject.
Ghazali says:
The second answer is: people say of the First Principle
that it knows only itself, because they want to avoid the
implication of plurality in it, for the statement that it ]snows
another would imply a duality: its knowing itself and its
knowing another. However, the same applies to the first
effect: it must necessarily know only itself. If it knew another
and not itself alone, there would have to be a different cause
for its knowing another than that for its knowing itself, but
there is no other cause than that for its knowing itself,
namely the First Principle. So it can only know itself, and the
plurality which arose in this way disappears.
If it is said that it follows from its existence and from its
knowing itself that it must know its principle, we answer:
Does this necessity arise from a cause or without a cause? If
the former is the case, there is no other cause than the one
first cause from which only one effect can proceed, and
indeed has proceeded, namely this first effect itself; how,
therefore, could this second effect proceed from it? In the
latter case, then, let the existence of the First Principle imply
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