And the manifest (part) of the fire contains within itself all which one can perceive[18] or which can escape one, but remains visible; but the hidden (part) contains everything which one can perceive as something intelligible but which evades the sense or which as not being thoroughly understood one passes over. But it must be said generally that of all things which are perceptible and intelligible, which Simon calls hidden and manifest,[19] the supercelestial fire is the Treasure-house,[20] like unto the great tree which was seen by Nebuchadnezzar in a dream, from which all flesh is fed.[21] [Sidenote: p. 248.] And he considers the trunk, the boughs, the leaves, and the bark on the outside of it to be the manifest part of the fire. All these things which are attached to the great tree the flame of the all-devouring fire causes to vanish. But the fruit of the tree, if it be made a perfect likeness[22] and has received its own shape, is placed in a storehouse and not in the fire. For the fruit, he says, has been produced that it may be put in a storehouse, but the chaff that it may be cast into the fire, which (chaff) is the trunk which has not been produced for its own sake, but for that of the fruit. 10. And this is, he says, what is written in the Scripture: “The vine of the Lord Sabaoth is the house of Israel, and a man of Judah his beloved plant.”[23] But if a man of Judah is his beloved plant, it proves, he says, that a tree is nothing else than a man. But of its secretion and dissolution, he says, the Scripture has spoken sufficiently, and for the instruction of those who have been made completely after (its) likeness,[24] the saying is enough that: “All flesh is grass and all the glory of the flesh as the flower of grass. The grass withereth and the flower fadeth away: but the word [Sidenote: p. 249.] of the Lord abideth for ever.”[25] But the word, he says, is the word and speech of the Lord born in the mouth, save which there is no other place of generation. 11. But, to be brief, since the fire is such according to Simon, and all things are seen and unseen as they are heard and unheard, numbered and unnumbered, in the _Great Announcement_ he calls a perfect intellectual[26] every one of those (beings) which can be boundlessly conceived by the mind in a boundless way[27] and can speak and think and act, as says Empedocles:-- For earth by earth we see, and water by water And (divine) æther by æther, yet destroying fire by fire, And (love) by love, and strife in gloomy strife.-- (Karsten, v. 321.)