De docta ignorantia

Since it is manifest of itself that there is no proportion of the infinite to the finite, it is also most clear from this that where exceeding and exceeded are found, one does not arrive at the maximum simply, since things exceeding and exceeded are finite, while such a maximum is necessarily infinite. Given therefore anything whatever that is not the maximum simply itself, it is manifest that a greater can be given. And since we find equality to be gradual, so that one thing is more equal to one thing than to another according to generic, specific, local, influential, and temporal agreement and difference, with the like: it is plain that neither two nor more things can be found so similar and equal but that still more similar ones could be in infinitum. Hence measure and measured, however equal, will always remain different. The finite intellect therefore cannot precisely understand the truth of things through likeness. For truth is neither more nor less, consisting in a certain indivisible point, which everything existing that is not the true itself cannot precisely measure; just as what is not a circle cannot measure the circle, whose being consists in a certain indivisible point. The intellect, therefore, which is not the truth, never comprehends the truth so precisely that it could not be comprehended more precisely to infinity, standing to the truth as a polygon to a circle, which, the more angles it has inscribed, is the more like the circle, yet never becomes equal, even if it multiplies its angles to infinity, unless it resolves itself into identity with the circle. It is plain, therefore, that of the true we know nothing other than that we know it to be precisely incomprehensible as it is, truth standing as the most absolute necessity, which can be neither more nor less than it is, and our intellect as possibility. The quiddity of things, therefore, which is the truth of beings, is in its purity unattainable, investigated by all philosophers but found by none as it is; and the more profoundly learned we shall have been in this ignorance, the more we shall draw near to truth itself.