Franz Hartmann 
In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom 
Containing the History of the True and the False Rosicrucians; With an Introduction Into the Mysteries of the Hermetic Philosophy

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. According to the philosophy of Plotinus, God is the foundation of all things. There is only one Substance; Matter and Form are merely illusions, or shadows of the Spirit. God is eternal and everywhere. He is pure light, a Unity, the basis of all existence and thought. The Mind (was) is the image of this Unity; it is, so to say, the image created by the Eternal by looking within itself. Thus the Mind is the product or creation of God, and yet God itself, and receiving its power from the latter. The Mind is the eternal activity of the Eternal. It is Light, primordial and unchangeable. Thought and every thinkable object exists within the mind. The world of Mind is the internal world; the external, sensual world is the external expression of the former. Mind being a Unity, and all beings and objects consisting of Mind substance, all are fundamentally identical, but they differ in form. The activity by which the inner world of Mind came into existence 18 an interior power acting towards the centre. If an external World, corresponding to the inner world, is to come into existence, there must be another activity by which this internal activity is reversed, so as to be directed towards the periphery. This centrifugal activity is the Soul, a product or reaction of the centripetal activity of the Mind, in other words a product of Thought, entering within itself. There is a universal law according to which something real may produce something approaching its own state of perfection, but not quite as perfect as itself, and therefore the activity of the soul resembles the activity of the mind, but is not as perfect as the latter.