a powerful moving spirit. This
was provided by Philo when he introduced his overmastering conception
of God. The popular saying, "Either Plato Philonizes or Philo
Platonizes"[237] contains a deep truth in its first as well as in its
second part. It not only marks the likeness in style of the two
writers, but it suggests that Philo, on the one hand, made fruitful
the religious germ in Plato's teaching by his Hebraism, and, on the
other, nourished the philosophical seed in Judaism by his Platonism.
Plato's teaching falls into two main classes, the dialectical and the
mythical, and it is with the latter that Philo is in specially close
connection. For in his myths Plato tries 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 archetyp