through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation.
Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no
revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature
nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides
power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown
to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of
God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Windelband's fine exposition, _Geschichte der neueren
Philosophie_, vol. i. §19. The following have written on Böhme: Fr. Baader
(in vols. iii. and xiii. of his _Werke_); Hamberger, Munich, 1844: H. A.
Fechner, Görlitz, 1857; A. v. Harless, Berlin, 1870, new edition, Leipsic,
1882.]

At the beginning of the first development God is will without object,
eternal quietude and rest, unqualified groundlessness without determinate
volition. But in this divine nothingness there soon awakes the hunger after
the aught (somewhat, existence), the impulse to apprehend and manifest
self, and as God looks into and forms an image of himself, he divides into
Father and Son. The Son is the eye with which the Father intuits himself,
and the procession of this vision from the groundless is the Holy Ghost.
Thus far God, who is one in three, is only understanding or wisdom, wherein
the images of all the possible are contained; to the intuition of self must
be added divisibility; it is only through the antithesis of the revealed
God and the unrevealed groundless that the former becomes an actual
trinity (in which the persons stand related as essence, power, and
activity), and the latter becomes desire or nature in God.

At the creation of the world seven equally eternal qualities,
source-spirits or nature-forms, are distinguished in the divine nature.