In this all-important doctrine of the Sephiroth, the Kabbalah insists upon the fact that these potencies are not creations of the En Soph, which would be a diminution of strength; that they form among themselves and with the En Soph a strict unity, and simply represent different aspects of the same being, just as the different rays which proceed from the light, and which appear different things to the eye, are only different manifestations of one and the same light; that for this reason they all alike partake of the perfections of the En Soph; and that as emanations from the Infinite, the Sephiroth are infinite and perfect like the En Soph, and yet constitute the first finite things. They are infinite and perfect when the En Soph imparts his fullness to them, and finite and imperfect when that fullness is withdrawn from them. The Universe. The conjunction of the Sephiroth, or, according to the language of the Kabbalah, the union of the crowned King and Queen, produced the universe in their own image. Worlds came into existence before the En Soph manifested himself in the human form of emanations, but they could not continue, and necessarily perished because the conditions of development which obtained with the sexual opposites of the Sephiroth did not exist. These worlds which perished are compared to sparks which fly out from a red-hot iron beaten by a hammer, and which are extinguished according to the distance they are removed from the burning mass. Creation is not _ex nihilo_; it is simply a further expansion or evolution of the Sephiroth.[3] The world reveals and makes visible the Boundless and the concealed of the concealed. And, though it exhibits the Deity in less splendour than its Sephiric parents exhibit the En Soph, because it is farther removed from the primordial source of light than the Sephiroth, still, as it is God manifested, all the multifarious forms in the world point out the unity which they represent. Hence nothing in the whole universe can be annihilated. Everything, spirit as well as body, must return to the source whence it emanated (_Zohar_, ii. 218). The universe consists of four different worlds, each of which forms a separate Sephiric system of a decade of emanations.