(28) For as the seven Spirits of God had, before the Time of the Wrath, generated themselves infinitely by their Rising up and Efficiencies, whence rose up so many several Varieties of Figures and heavenly Ideas or Vegetations; so also the holy God formed his old Body of this corrupted Nature, into as many and various Powers, as ever stood in the Birth or Geniture in the Holiness. Understand this high Thing rightly.

(4) Now the Question is: How is this Form? Or in what Manner is this so? Answer. If thou art a rational mercurial Spirit, which presses through all the seven Spirits of God, and beholds, proves and examines them, how they are, then thou wilt, by the Explanation of this seventh Spirit, conceive and understand the Operation, and the Being of the whole Deity, and apprehend it in thy Sense or Mind.

(10) And this is that Spirit of all the seven, which goes forth out of the Heart of God, which forms, frames, and images all in the seventh, and wherein the qualifying or fountain Spirits, with the Love-wrestling, present and show themselves infinitely.

(3) Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee, And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse Fit in the truth as centre in a circle. That which can die, and that which dieth not, Are nothing but the splendour of the idea Which by his love our Lord brings into being; Because that living Light, which from its fount Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not From Him nor from the Love in them intrined, Through its own goodness reunites its rays In nine subsistences, as in a mirror, Itself eternally remaining One. Thence it descends to the last potencies, Downward from act to act becoming such That only brief contingencies it makes; And these contingencies I hold to be Things generated, which the heaven produces By its own motion, with seed and without. Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it, Remains immutable, and hence beneath The ideal signet more and less shines through; Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree After its kind bears worse and better fruit, And ye are born with characters diverse.

(1) The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession- running back, so to speak, to it- or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be.

But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality?

It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being's generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle.

That station towards the one establishes Being; that vision directed upon the One establishes the Intellectual-Principle; standing towards the One to the end of vision, it is simultaneously Intellectual-Principle and Being; and, attaining resemblance in virtue of this vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring forth a vast power.

This second outflow is a Form or Idea representing the Divine Intellect as the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, The One.

This active power sprung from essence is Soul.

Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual-Principle- which itself sprang from its own motionless prior- but the soul's operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its movement. It takes fulness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by adopting another, a downward, movement.

This image of Soul is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle.

Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the human Soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is within its province; but it is not present entire; when it has reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus far downwards it produces- by its outgoing and its tendency towards the less good- another hypostasis or form of being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the Soul) is produced from the Intellectual-Principle which yet remains in untroubled self-possession.

(46) And that is a Spirit, as all the rest of the seven Spirits are, only the other six are an incomprehensible Being therein; for the divine Power generates itself in the Comprehensibility of the seventh Nature-spirit, as it were hidden or concealed, and incomprehensible to the Creatures.

(114) In that seventh Spirit of Nature rise up also the heavenly Fruits and Colours, and whatsoever is apprehensible or comprehensible, and is like to such a Form, or Manner, as if the Angels dwelt betwixt Heaven and Earth in the Deep, where they ascend and descend, and wherever they are, there their Foot rests, as if it stood upon the Earth. [Text Forma.]

(30) Now as there are in him chiefly seven Qualities, whereby the whole Divine Being is driven on, and floweth itself infinitely in these seven Qualities, and yet these seven Qualities are the chief or prime in the Infininude, whereby the Divine Birth or Geniture stands eternally in its Order unchangeably;

(16) For the whole or total God stands in seven Species or Kinds, or in a sevenfold Form or Generating; and if these Births or Genitures were not, then there would be neither God, nor Life, nor Angel, nor any Creature.

(17) In such wise than, as I have said, the generation of these seven came to pass. Earth was as woman, her Water filled with longing; ripeness she took from Fire, spirit from Aether. Nature thus brought forth frames to suit the form of Man. And Man from Light and Life changed into soul and mind - from Life to soul, from Light to mind. And thus continued all the sense-world's parts until the period of their end and new beginnings.

(101) when the Light rises up in this striving, then the Holy Ghost moves in the Power of the Light, in the Play of the other six Spirits, and so in the seventh spring up all Manner of Fruits of Life, and all Manner of Colours and Vegetations, or Ideas and Forms.

(6) Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried, shapeless within that unbroken whole: none of the real beings would exist if that unity remained at halt within itself: the plurality of these beings, offspring of the unity, could not exist without their own nexts taking the outward path; these are the beings holding the rank of souls.

In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls, their issue stifled: every Kind must produce its next; it must unfold from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance to its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat; but there is the lower phase, begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the Supreme.

To this power we cannot impute any halt, any limit of jealous grudging; it must move for ever outward until the universe stands accomplished to the ultimate possibility. All, thus, is produced by an inexhaustible power giving its gift to the universe, no part of which it can endure to see without some share in its being.

There is, besides, no principle that can prevent anything from partaking, to the extent of its own individual receptivity in the Nature of Good. If therefore Matter has always existed, that existence is enough to ensure its participation in the being which, according to each receptivity, communicates the supreme good universally: if on the contrary, Matter has come into being as a necessary sequence of the causes preceding it, that origin would similarly prevent it standing apart from the scheme as though it were out of reach of the principle to whose grace it owes its existence.

In sum: The loveliness that is in the sense-realm is an index of the nobleness of the Intellectual sphere, displaying its power and its goodness alike: and all things are for ever linked; the one order Intellectual in its being, the other of sense; one self-existent, the other eternally taking its being by participation in that first, and to the full of its power reproducing the Intellectual nature.

(7) This seventh Spirit has a Colour and Condition or Kind, of its own, as all the other Spirits have; for it is the Body of all the Spirits, wherein they generate themselves as in a Body: Also out of this Spirit, all Figures, Shapes and Forms are imaged or fashioned; moreover, the Angels also are created out of it, and all Naturality stands therein. [Or the Universal Nature.]

(15) therefore also the Figures, and Transitory Forms and Creatures, are changed according to the Condition of the seventh Nature-Spirit, in which they rise up. But

(45) But that there are so many Formings, Figurings, or Framings in him, is caused by his eternal Birth or Geniture, which first is threefold, and out of or from that Trinity, or Ternary, it generates itself infinitely, or immensely, inconceivably.