scientific; 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 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 huma