writings of Philo are pre-Christian and show a mixture of ideas drawn
from many sources, Jewish, Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean. If these
hospitable systems made the acquaintance of Indian philosophy, we may
be sure that they gave it an unprejudiced and even friendly hearing.
In the centuries just before the Christian era Egypt was a centre of
growth for personal and private religious ideas,[1109] hardly
possessing sufficient organization to form what we call a religion,
yet still, inasmuch as they aspired to teach individual souls right
conduct as well as true knowledge, implicitly containing the same
scheme of teaching as the Buddhist and Christian Churches. But it is
characteristic of all this movement that it never attempted to form a
national or universal religion and remained in all its manifestations
individual and personal, connected neither with the secular government
nor with any national cultus. Among these religious ideas were
monotheism mingled with pantheism to the extent of saying that God is
all and all is one: the idea of the Logos or Divine Wisdom, which
ultimately assumes the form that the Word is an emanation or Son of
God; asceticism, or at least the desire to free the soul from the
bondage of the senses; metempsychosis and the doctrine of conversion
or the new birth of the soul, which fits in well with metempsychosis,
though it frequently exists apart from it. I doubt if there is
sufficient reason for attributing the doctrine of the Logos[1110] to
India, but it is possible that asceticism and the belief in
metempsychosis received their first impulse thence. They appear
late and, like the phraseology of the Hermetic books, they do not grow
naturally out of antecedent ideas and practices in Egypt and
Palestine. The life followed by such communities as the Therapeutae and
Essenes is just such as might have been evolved by seekers after truth
who were trying to put into practice in another country the religious
ideals of India. There are differences: for instance these communities
laboured with their hands and observed the seventh day, but their main
ideas, retirement from the world and suppression of the passions, are
those of Indian monks and foreign to Egyptian and Jewish thought.

The character of Pythagoras's teaching and its relation to Egypt have
been much discussed and the name of the master was clearly extended by
later (and perhaps also by early) disciples to doctrines which he
never held. B