This brings us to a consideration of the teachings of Simon with regard to the Lesser World, the Microcosm, Man, and to the scheme of his soteriology.  Evidently Simon taught the ancient, immemorial doctrine that the Microcosm Man was the Mirror and Potentiality of the Cosmos, the Macrocosm, as we have already seen above.  Whatever was true of the emanation of the Universe, was also true of Man, whatever was true of the Macrocosmic Aeons was true of the Microcosmic Aeons in Man, which are potentially the same as those of the Cosmos, and will develop into the power and grandeur of the latter, if they can find suitable expression, or a fit vehicle.  This view will explain the reason of the ancients for saying that we could only perceive that of which we have a germ already within us.  Thus it is that Empedocles taught: 

     By earth earth we perceive; by water, water; by aether, aether;
     fire, by destructive fire; by friendship, friendship; and strife by
     bitter strife.

And if the potentiality of all resided in every man, the teaching on this point most forcibly has been, Qui se cognoscit, in se omnia cognoscit—­He who knows himself, knows all in himself—­as Q. Fabius Pictor tells us.  And, therefore, the essential of moral and spiritual training in ancient times was the attainment of Self-Knowledge—­that is to say, the attainment of the certitude that there is a divine nature within every man, which is of infinite capacity to absorb universal Wisdom; that, in brief, Man was essentially one with Deity.

With Simon, as with the Hermetic philosophers of ancient Egypt, all things were interrelated by correspondence, analogy, and similitude.  “As above, so below,” is the teaching on the Smaragdine Table of Hermes.  Therefore, whatever happened to the divine Epinoia, the Supreme Mother, among the Aeons, happened also to the human Spiritual Soul or Monadic Essence, in its evolution through all stages of manifestation.  This Soul is shut into all forms and bodies, successively up to the stage of man.

From one point of view this teaching has been conclusively proved by Modern Science.  The evolution of the external form has been traced throughout all the kingdoms and is no longer in question.  The ancient teachers of evolution, though less exact in detail, were more accurate in fact, in postulating a “something within” which alone could make the external evolution of form of any intelligible purpose.  The Spiritual Soul—­the Life, Consciousness, Spirit, Intelligence, whatever we may choose to call it—­was formless in itself, but ever assuming new forms by a process called metempsychosis, metasomatosis, metangismos, etc., which in the human stage becomes reincarnation, the rebirth or Punarjanman of the Hindus.