A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:192—“Marcion did not speculate as to the origin of evil. The Demiurge and his kingdom are apparently regarded as existing from eternity. Matter he regarded as intrinsically evil, and he practised a rigid asceticism.” Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 210—“Marcion did not, with the majority of the Gnostics, regard the Demiurge as a derived and dependent being, whose imperfection is due to his remoteness from the highest Cause; nor yet, according to the Persian doctrine, did he assume an eternal principle of pure malignity. His second principle is independent of and co-eternal with, the first; opposed to it however, not as evil to good, but as imperfection to perfection, or, as Marcion expressed it, as a just to a good being. 218—Non-recognition of any principle of pure evil. Three principles only: the Supreme God, the Demiurge, and the eternal Matter, the two latter being imperfect but not necessarily evil. Some of the Marcionites seem to have added an evil spirit as a fourth principle.... Marcion is the least Gnostic of all the Gnostics.... 31—The Indian influence may be seen in Egypt, the Persian in Syria.... 32—To Platonism, modified by Judaism, Gnosticism owed much of its philosophical form and tendencies. To the dualism of the Persian religion it owed one form at least of its speculations on the origin and remedy of evil, and many of the details of its doctrine of emanations. To the Buddhism of India, modified again probably by Platonism, it was indebted for the doctrines of the antagonism between spirit and matter and the unreality of derived existence (the germ of the Gnostic Docetism), and in part at least for the theory which regards the universe as a series of successive emanations from the absolute Unity.”