ell-founded. All that Aristeas and Aristobulus and the
Apocryphal authors had done was to assimilate certain philosophemes to
their religious ideas; they had not re-interpreted the whole system of
philosophy from a Jewish point of view or traced an independent
system, or an eclectic doctrine in the Holy Scriptures. This was the
achievement of Philo. His thought is not original in the sense of
presenting a new scheme of philosophy, but it is original in the sense
of giving a fresh interpretation to the philosophical ideas of his age
and environment. He ranges them under a new principle, puts them in a
new light, and combines them in a new synthesis. This again is
characteristic of the Jewish mind. Intent on God, it does not endeavor
to make its own analysis of the universe by independent reasoning, but
it utilizes the systems of other nations and endeavors to harmonize
them with its religious convictions. Hence it is that nearly all
Jewish philosophy appears to be eclectic; its writers have ranged
through the fields of thought of many schools and culled flowers from
each, which they bind together into a crown for their religion. They
do not, with few exceptions, pursue philosophy with the purpose of
widening the borders of secular knowledge; but rather in order to
bring the light of reason to illuminate and clarify faith, to
harmonize Judaism with the general culture of its environment, and to
revivify belief and ceremony with a new interpretation. All this
applies to our worthy, but at the same time he was a philosopher at
heart, because he believed that the knowledge of God came by
contemplation as well as by practice, and, further, because he had a
firm faith in the universalism of Judaism; and he believed that this
universal religion must comprehend all that is highest and truest in
human thought. Like most Jewish philosophers he is synthetic rather
than analytic, believing in intuition and distrusting the discursive
reason, careless of physical science and soaring into religious
metaphysics. Again, like most Jewish philosophers, he is deductive,
starting with a synthesis 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