of all in the Divine Unity, and making no fresh inductions from phenomena.  It has been said that, though Philo was a philosopher and a Jew, yet Saadia was the first Jewish philosopher.  But Philo’s philosophical ideas are in complete harmony with his Judaism; and if by the criticism it is meant that most of the content of his works is based upon Greek models, it is true on the other hand that the spirit which pervades them is essentially Jewish, and that by the new force which he breathed into it he reformed and gave a new direction to the Greek philosophy of his age.

Philo’s philosophy is certainly eclectic in some degree, and we find in it ideas taken from the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the Stoics.  Its fixed point was his theology, and wherever he finds anything to support this he adapts it to his purpose.  He approached philosophy from a position opposed to that of the Greeks:  they brought a questioning and free mind to the problems of the universe; he comes full of religious preconceptions.  Yet in this lies his strength as well as his limitation, for he gains thus a point of certainty and a clear end, which other eclectic systems of the day did not possess.  He welds together all the different elements of his thought in the heat of his passion for God.  His cosmology and his ontology are a philosophical exposition of the Jewish conception of God’s relation to the universe, his ethics and his psychology of the Jewish conception of man’s relation to God.

The religious preconceptions of Philo drew him to Plato above all other philosophers, so that his thought is essentially a religious development of Platonism.  It is not too much to say that Philo’s work has a double function, to interpret the Bible according to Platonic philosophy and to interpret Plato in the spirit of the Bible.  The agreement was not the artificial production of the commentator, for in truth Plato was in sympathy with the religious conscience as a whole.  The contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism is true, if we restrict it to the average mind of the two races.  The one is intent on things secular, the other on God.  But the greatest genius of the Hellenic race, influenced perhaps by contact with Oriental peoples, possessed, in a remarkable degree, the Hebraic spirit, which is zealous for God and makes for righteousness.  Plato was not only a great philosopher, but also a great theologian, a great religious reformer, and a great prophet, the most perfectly developed mind which the world, ancient or modern, has known.  His “Ideas,” which are the archetypes of sensible things, were not only logical concepts but also a kingdom of Heaven connected with the human individual by the Divine soul.  And as he grew older so his religious feeling intensified, and he translated his philosophy into theology and positive religion.  Platonism, it has been well said, is a temper as much as a doctrine; it is the spirit that turns from the earth to Heaven, from creation