The _perfect man_, then, is the joining link. On the one hand he receives illumination from all the Essential names, on the other hand all Divine attributes reappear in him. These attributes are:-- 1. Independent life or existence. 2. Knowledge which is a form of life, as he proves from a verse from the Qur’an. 3. Will--the principle of particularisation, or the manifestation of Being. He defines it as the illumination of the knowledge of God according to the requirements of the Essence; hence it is a particular form of knowledge. It has nine manifestations, all of which are different names for love; the last is the love in which the lover and the beloved, the knower and the known merge into each other, and become identical. This form of love, he says, is the Absolute Essence; as Christianity teaches, God is love. He guards, here, against the error of looking upon the individual act of will as uncaused. Only the act of the universal will is uncaused; hence he implies the Hegelian Doctrine of Freedom, and holds that the acts of man are both free and determined. 4. Power, which expresses itself in self-diremption i.e. creation. He controverts S̱ẖaiḵẖ Muḥy al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī's position that the Universe existed before the creation in the knowledge of God. He says, this would imply that God did not create it out of nothing, and holds that the Universe, before its existence as an idea, existed in the self of God. 5. The word or the reflected being. Every possibility is the word of God; hence nature is the materialisation of the word of God. It has different names--The tangible word, The sum of the realities of man, The arrangement of the Divinity, The spread of Oneness, The expression of the Unknown, The phases of Beauty, The trace of names and attributes, and the object of God's knowledge. 6. The Power of hearing the inaudible. 7. The Power of seeing the invisible. 8. Beauty--that which seems least beautiful in nature (the reflected beauty) is in its real existence, beauty. Evil is only relative, it has no real existence; sin is merely a relative deformity. 9. Glory or beauty in its intensity. 10. Perfection, which is the unknowable essence of God and therefore Unlimited and Infinite. CHAP. VI. LATER PERSIAN THOUGHT.