the scripture has sufficiently spoken, and what has been said is sufficient for the instruction of those whose imaging has been perfected, viz.:  “All flesh is grass, and every glory of the flesh as the flower of grass.  The grass is dried up and the flower thereof falleth, but the speech of the Lord endureth for the eternity (aeon)."[15] Now the Speech of the Lord, he says, is the Speech engendered in the mouth and the Word (Logos), for elsewhere there is no place of production.

11.  To be brief, therefore, the Fire, according to Simon, being of such a nature—­both all things that are visible and invisible, and in like manner, those that sound within and those that sound aloud, those which can be numbered and those which are numbered—­in the Great Revelation he calls it the Perfect Intellectual, as (being) everything that can be thought of an infinite number of times, in an infinite number of ways, both as to speech, thought and action, just as Empedocles[16] says: 

     “By earth earth we perceive; by water, water; by aether [divine],
     aether; fire by destructive fire; by friendship, friendship; and
     strife by bitter strife.”

12.  For, he says, he considered that all the parts of the Fire, both visible and invisible, possessed perception[17] and a portion of intelligence.  The generable cosmos, therefore, was generated from the ingenerable Fire.  And it commenced to be generated, he says, in the following way.  The first six Roots of the Principle of generation which the generated (sc., cosmos) took, were from that Fire.  And the Roots, he says, were generated from the Fire in pairs,[18] and he calls these Roots Mind and Thought, Voice and Name, Reason and Reflection, and in these six Roots there was the whole of the Boundless Power together, in potentiality, but not in actuality.  And this Boundless Power he says is He who has stood, stands and will stand; who, if his imaging is perfected while in the six Powers, will be, in essence, power, greatness and completeness, one and the same with the ingenerable and Boundless Power, and not one single whit inferior to that ingenerable, unchangeable and Boundless Power.  But if it remain in potentiality only, and its imaging is not perfected, then it disappears and perishes, he says, just as the potentiality of grammar or geometry in a man’s mind.  For potentiality when it has obtained art becomes the light of generated things, but if it does not do so an absence of art and darkness ensues, exactly as if it had not existed at all; and on the death of the man it perishes with him.

13.  Of these six Powers and the seventh which is beyond the six, he calls the first pair Mind and Thought, heaven and earth; and the male (heaven) looks down from above and takes thought for its co-partner, while the earth from below receives from the heaven the intellectual fruits that come down to it and are cognate with the