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,