 In Metaphysics XIV 4–5, Aristotle discusses various Platonistic views about the relationships between the first principles and goodness; XIV 4. 1091a34–36 refers to contemporaries of Aristotle’s who deny that the good is among the principles but suppose it comes in later in the development; the second of our two anchor texts warrants the guess that Speusippus is among them. And then some other things about the passage in XIV fall into place: Speusippus’ main way of referring to the principle opposed to the One was ‘plurality’, and, more importantly, he denied a theory about causality that was part of Plato’s Theory of Forms as we find that Theory in, say, the Phaedo: a theory to the effect that the possession of a feature F by a perceptible object was due to its participation in something supremely F that transmits its being F to the perceptible object; as opposed to this ‘Transmission Theory of Causality’, Speusippus adopted what we might call a Principle of Alien Causality: the first cause of Fs is not itself F. This Principle is going to be difficult to formulate, and the word ‘first’ in this formulation needs emphasis: Speusippus surely agrees with Aristotle that the cause of a human being is one or more other human beings, so presumably the Principle has to be restricted in some way to first causes or principles in some more robust sense. Unfortunately, the texts (even the Iamblichean passage cited below) give us no help here.