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

effect should have knowledge of its cause, it even seems more fitting that
it is not a necessity of its existence that the cause should know its effect.
My answer to this is that all this is sophistical. If we assume that the
cause is an intellect and knows its effect, it does not follow that this is an
addition to the essence of the cause; on the contrary, it belongs to the
essence itself, since the emergence of the effect is the consequence of its
essences And it is not true that if the effect proceeds from the First
Principle not because of a cause, but because of the essence of this
principle, a plurality proceeds from it, for according to the thesis of the
philosophers the emergence of the effect depends on the essence of the
First Principle: if its essence is one, one proceeds from it; if many, many
proceed from it. What he assumes in this discussion, namely, that every
effect is a possible existent, is only true for the composite effect, for there
cannot be a compound that is eternal, and everything that is of a possible
existence is generated, according to the philosophers, as Aristotle has
shown in different passages of his works;’ and we shall prove this more
fully later in our discussion of the necessary being. What Avicenna calls
the possible existent has only its name in common with what is in reality
the possible existent; it is, therefore, by no means clear that it needs an
agent in the way it is clear that the possible existent needs an agent.
Ghazali says:
I say:
The third objection is: Is the self-knowledge of the first
effect identical with its essence or not? If the former , this is
impossible, for knower and known cannot be identical; if the
latter, let the same apply to the First Principle, so that
plurality will follow from the First Principle. And if the selfknowledge
of the effect is not identical with the essence of
the effect, there will not only be a triplicity in the effect, as
they affirm, but a quadruplicity, to wit: its essence, its
knowledge of itself, its knowledge of its principle, and its
being a possible existent by itself, and to this it should
perhaps be added that it is an existent necessary through
another-and then it would be fivefold. From this you can see
and measure the depth of their ignorance.
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