in the Wisdom of Solomon.  “For Thine all-powerful hand that created the world out of formless matter,” says the author (xi. 17), establishing before Philo the compromise between two competing influences in his mind.  More emphatically Philo rejects the notion of creation in time.[246] Time, he says, came into being after God had made the universe, and has no meaning for the Divine Ruler, whose life is in the eternal present.

Summing up, we may say that Philo regards the universe as the image of the Divine manifestation or evolution in thought produced by His beneficent will; and this view is true to the religious standpoint of traditional Judaism in spirit if not in letter.

In his conception of the human soul, Philo again harmonizes the simple Jewish notion with the developed Greek psychology by means of the Platonic idealism.  The soul in the Bible is the breath of God; in Plato it is an Idea incarnate, represented in “The Timaeus” as a particle of the Supreme Mind.  Philo, following the psychology of his age, divides the soul into a higher and a lower part:  (1) the Nous; (2) the vital functions, which include the senses.  He lays all the stress upon the former, which gives man his kinship with God and the ideal world, while the other part is the necessary result of its incarnation in the body.  He variously describes the Nous as an inseparable fragment of the Divine soul, a Divine breath which God inspires into each body, a reflection, an impression, or an image of the blessed Logos, sealed with its stamp.[247] Following the Platonic conception, Philo occasionally speaks of the Divine soul as having a prenatal existence,[248] holding, as the English poet put it, that

  “The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
    Hath had elsewhere its setting
  And cometh from afar.”

Here, too, he follows an older Jewish-Hellenistic tradition, which appears in the Wisdom of Solomon (viii. 19 and 20), where it is written:  “A good soul fell to my lot.  Nay rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled.”  The Nous is in fact the god within, and it bears to the microcosm Man the relation which the infinite God bears to the macrocosm.[249] Indeed, it is the Logos descended from above, but yearning to return to its true abode.  Thus Philo sings its Divine nature: 

“It is unseen, but sees all things:  its essence is unknown, but it comprehends the essence of all things.  And by arts and sciences it makes for itself many roads and ways, and traverses sea and land, searching out all things within them.  And it soars aloft on wings, and when it has investigated the sky and its changes it is borne upwards towards the aether and the revolutions of the heavens.  It follows the stars in their orbits, and passing the sensible it yearns for the intelligible world.”

The Nous is the king of the whole organism, the governing and unifying power, and hence is often called the man himself.  The senses, resembling the powers