his cosmology with his theology.  The creative “Ideas” are equated collectively with the Supreme Logos,[242] individually with the Logoi which represent God’s particular activities.  Thus the Logos represents the whole ideal or noetic world, “the kingdom of Heaven”; and it is in this metaphysical sense that the Logos is the first creation, “the first-born son of God,” prior to the physical universe, which is His grandson.  The whole universe is thus seen as the orderly manifestation of one principle.  Philo, expanding a favorite image of the Haggadah, illustrates God’s creation by the simile of a king founding a city.  “He gets to him an architect, who first designs in his mind the parts of the perfect city, and then, looking continually to his model, begins to construct the city of stones and wood.  So when God resolved to found the world-city, He first brought its form into mind, and using this as a model he completed the visible world."[243]

The theory of religious idealism is the centre of Philo’s philosophy, and provides the basis of his explanation of the material universe.  Physics, indeed, he considered of small account, because he believed there could be no certainty in such speculations.[244] His mind was utterly unscientific; but as a religious philosopher he found it necessary to give a theory of the creation.  Jewish dogma held that the world had been called into being out of nothing; the Greek philosophers repudiated such an idea, and held that creation must be the result of a reasonable process; Aristotle had imagined that matter was a separately existent principle with mind, and that the world was eternal; and the Stoics held that matter was the substance of all things, including the pantheistic power itself: 

  “All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
  Whose body nature is, and God the soul.”

Philo impugns both these theories,[245] the one because it denies the creative power of God, the other because it confuses the Creator with His creation.  He looked for a system which should satisfy at once the Jewish notion that the world was brought out of nothing by the will of God, and the philosophical concept that God is all reality; and he found in Plato’s idealism a view of the creation which he could harmonize with the religious view.  Plato declared that the material world had been created out of the Non-Ens ([Greek:  me on]) i.e., that which has no real existence.  He conceived space and matter as the mere passive receptacle of form, which is nothing till the form has given it quality.  Though Philo’s language is vague, this seems to be his view when he is speaking philosophically.  It is, perhaps, a slight deviation from the earlier religious standpoint of the Jews, which looks to a direct and deliberate creation of the world-stuff, rather than to the informing of space by spirit, and regards the world as separate from God, and not as a manifestation of His being.  But the more philosophical conception appears likewise