Mentalism — "The All is Mind"

The first principle: the universe is mental, a thought held in the mind of the All. Its Kabbalistic rhyme is Sefer Yetzirah's own claim — the world is spoken, engraved, hewn out in letters and number; creation is language before it is stuff, and Chokhmah is the flash of thought before thought has parts. Where they differ: Hermeticism makes mind the substance, while the Kabbalah makes speech the act — the letters are not merely thought, they are uttered, and utterance is a relation between speaker and world.