It is not easy to determine in regard to many of these expressions whether they are relative in the writer’s mind to a supra-cosmic or to a transcendental conception of God. The case of Tertullian clearly shows that they are compatible with the former conception no less than with the latter; for though he speaks of God as “the great Supreme, existing in eternity, unborn, unmade, without beginning, and without end,”[502] yet he argues that He is material; for “how could one who is empty have made things that are solid, and one who is void have made things that are full, and one who is incorporeal have made things that have body?”[503] But there were some schools of philosophers in which the transcendental character of the conception is clearly apparent. The earliest of such schools, and the most remarkable, is that of Basilides. It anticipated, and perhaps helped to form, the later developments of Neo-Platonism. It conceived of God as transcending being. He was absolutely beyond all predication. Not even negative predicates are predicable of Him. The language of the school becomes paradoxical and almost unmeaning in the extremity of its effort to express the transcendence of God, and at the same time to reconcile the belief in His transcendence with the belief that He is the Creator of the world. “When there was nothing, neither material, nor essential, nor non-essential, nor simple, nor compound, nor unthought, nor unperceived, nor man, nor angel, nor god, nor absolutely any of the things that are named or perceived or thought, ... God who was not (οὐκ ὢν θεός), without thought, without perception, without will, without purpose, without passion, without desire, willed to make a world. In saying ‘willed,’ I use the word only because some word is necessary, but I mean without volition, without thought, and without perception; and in saying ‘world,’ I do not mean the extended and divisible world which afterwards came into being, with its capacity of division, but the seed of the world.”[504] This was said more briefly, but probably with the same meaning, by Marcus: There is no conception and no essence of God.[505]