to achieve a synthesis by imaginative flight where he had failed by discursive reason.  He unifies experience by striking intuitions, something in the spirit of a Hebrew prophet.  Moreover his style, as well as his thought, has here affinity with Jewish modes of thought.  As Zeller says, speaking of the myths:  “From the first, in the act of producing his work he thinks in images.  They mark the point where it becomes evident that he cannot be wholly a philosopher because he is still too much of a poet.”  And this is true of all Philo’s writings, and to generalize somewhat widely, of most Jewish philosophy.  In “The Timaeus,” particularly, Plato, throughout, is the poet-philosopher, writing imaginative myths, which present pictorially an idealistic scheme of the universe; and “The Timaeus” is for Philo, after the Bible, the most authoritative of books, the source of his chief philosophical ideas.

The dominant philosophical principle of Plato is what is known as the Theory of Ideas.  He imagined a world of real existences, invisible, incorporeal, eternal, grasped only by thought, prior to the objects of the physical universe, and the models or archetypes of them.  In “The Timaeus,” which is a system of cosmology at once religious and metaphysical, the “Ideas” are represented as the thoughts of the one Supreme Mind, the intermediate powers by which the Supreme Unity, known as the “Idea of the Good,” or “the Creator,” evolves the material universe.  Thus the universe is seen as the manifestation of one Beneficent Spirit, who brings it into existence and rules over it through His “ideal” thoughts.  Philo adopts completely and uncritically this theory of transcendental ideas in his philosophical exegesis of the cosmogony in Genesis.  “Without an incorporeal archetype God brings no simple thing to fulfilment."[238] There is an idea of stars, of grass, of man, of virtue, of music.  And the Platonic conception receives a religious sanction.  The ideas are a necessary step between God and the material universe, and those who deny them throw all things into confusion.[239] “God would not touch matter Himself, but He did not grudge a share of His nature to it through His powers, of which the true name is ideas.”  We have already noticed[240] how ingeniously Philo deduces the Theory of Ideas from the Biblical account of the creation, and associates it with the Hebraic conception of the ministerial Wisdom and Word.  He, however, gives a new direction to the Platonic theory, owing to his Hebraic conception of God.  The ideas with him are not the thoughts of an impersonal mind, but the emanations of a personal, volitional Deity.  Keeping close to Jewish tradition, he says that they are the words of the Deity speaking.  As human speech consists of incorporeal ideas, which produce an effect upon the minds of others, so the Divine speech is a pattern of incorporeal ideas which impress themselves upon a formless void, and so create the material world.[241] In this way Philo associates