  God’s power of emanation, which is creative, although simple in its origins and principle, is complex in its effects. Divine emanation gives rise to the vast complexity of both ens reale and ens conceptionale. We have already seen that Dietrich viewed this vast complexity as itself a likeness to God—the world in all of its wonderful complexity revealed something of God to a mind willing to inquire into it. It gives glory to God in its very complexity. Perhaps Dietrich’s metaphysical vision of the universe explains his keen interest in science, an interest that led him to write treatises summing up his research into light and color and into the material elements of the universe. All these things revealed something of the first cause to him. There was no chasm between his metaphysics and his science. The link between the two is perhaps discovered in his theory of mind. For it is mind that is most like God. And thus, just as God as first cause is the source of a creative emanation so is the intellect.