God is the ultimate cause of the world, but He is so transcendent that He can be described only in negative terms. This method of defining God got the name in later times of “negative theology.” It was the common method in these Alexandrian days. God is absolutely inconceivable and inexpressible to man; to Himself He is “I am who am.” The goodness of God impelled Him, and His power enabled Him, to create the world. From this point of view Philo is a monist. But in man reason and sense meet. Man’s soul is from God, but his sense-body is from matter, and from this point of view Philo is a dualist. Matter is outside God. God is so transcendent that He cannot come in contact with matter, and so He created the world and rules the world through mediators or “potencies.” These “potencies” are the same as the Ideas of Plato, the “reasons” of the Stoics, the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the angels of the Old Testament, or the dæmons of popular mythology. The sum-total of God’s activity in the world was called by Philo the Logos. Philo speaks of the Logos in two ways: sometimes as the plural number of teleological forces in the world; sometimes as the unity of these forces, “the first begotten of God,” “the second God,” “the son of God.” The Logos represents the first attempt to overcome the dualism between matter and God. The Logos is the high priest standing between God and the world. It is the everlasting revelation of God’s presence. Philo’s world is made by God and not by others, and is the expression of God’s thought in infinite forms and forces. God is not defiled by coming into contact with matter. God gives orders, the Logos obeys. Philo believed in transmigration of souls, and to him the most important problem is, How the spirit can become like God. The answer is (1) by the acquirement of the Stoic apathy, (2) by possessing the Aristotelian dianoetic virtues, (3) by complete absorption in God.