“One and the same God,” said Noetus, “is the Creator and Father of all things, and, because it was His good pleasure, He appeared to righteous men of old. For when He is not seen He is invisible, and when He is seen He is visible: He is uncontained when He wills not to be contained, and contained when He is contained.... When the Father had not been born, He was rightly styled Father: when it was His good pleasure to undergo birth, He became on being born His own son, not another’s.”[517] But the dominant conception was in a line with that of both Greek philosophy and Greek religion. From the Supreme God came forth, or in Him existed, special forms and modifications by which He both made the world and revealed Himself to it. (i.) The speculations as to the nature of these forms varied partly with the large underlying variations in the conception of God as supra-cosmic or as transcendental, and partly with the greater or less development of the tendency to give a concrete shape to abstract ideas. They varied also according as the forms were viewed in relation to the universe, as its types and formative forces; or in relation to the Supreme Being and His rational creatures, as manifestations of the one and means of knowledge to the other. The variations are found to exist, not only between one school of philosophers and another, but also in the same school. For example, Tertullian distinguishes between two schools of Valentinians, that of Valentinus himself and that of his great, though independent, follower Ptolemy.[518] The former regarded the Æons as simply modes of God’s existence, abiding within His essence: the latter, in common with the great majority of the school, looked upon them as “personal substances” which had come forth from God and remained outside Him. And again, most philosophers of the same school made a genealogy of Æons, and furnished their opponents thereby with one of their chief handles for ridicule: but Colorbasus regarded the production of the Æons as a single momentary act.[519] Sometimes, however, the expressions, which came from different sources, were blended. Almost all these conceptions of the means by which God communicated Himself to the world were relative to the conception of Him as Mind. It is as inherent a necessity for thought to reveal itself as it is for light to shine. Following the tendency of current psychology to regard the different manifestations of mind as relative to different elements in mind itself, some schools of philosophers gave a separate personality to each supposed element in the mind of God. There came forth thought and reflexion, voice and name, reasoning and intention:[520] or from the original Will and Thought came forth Mind and Truth (Reality) as visible forms and images of the invisible qualities (διαθέσεων) of the Father.[521]