subordination of man to the universe, he conceived man to be absorbed by the universe. =Neo-Platonism and the Two Introductory Philosophies.= Neo-Platonism, therefore, shares in the mysticism of the philosophies of Philo and the neo-Pythagoreans. All three teach the transcendence of God; all three were metaphysically monistic and ethically dualistic; all three conceive the existence of intermediaries between God and man. The introductory philosophies sought to build eclectic doctrines, while neo-Platonism became eclectic only in its last phases. Plotinus constructed a positive and original philosophy, and among the three systems the teaching of Plotinus is carefully worked out. Indeed, Plotinus is by far the greatest thinker of this religious period. In the philosophy of Plotinus the relations between man and God are given a more æsthetic character, and the doctrine of immediate experience is more carefully discussed and has greater importance than in neo-Pythagoreanism and the teaching of Philo. =Neo-Platonism and Christianity.= Neo-Platonism and Christianity have one thing at least in common. They have the same problem,――how to spiritualize the universe. This was the problem that both Plotinus and Origen attempted to work out. With the development of the consciousness of spiritual personality and the need of a revelation, the Divine seemed to both to be correspondingly farther away. God is unknown and incomprehensible, and so pure that He cannot come in contact with earthly existence. What, then, is the bond between the heavenly and the earthly? From the point of view of cosmology and of ethics, neither succeeded in overcoming the dualism. The sensuous was regarded as alien to God, and as a thing from which the spirit must free itself. Metaphysically their efforts to construct a spiritual monism were more successful, but their efforts were along different lines. The Christian conceived the universe of God and matter to be bound together by the principle of love; the neo-Platonist, by a series of countless grades of beings in diminishing perfections from the All-perfect. Then again, to the neo-Platonist the question of the return of man to God was a question of the personal inner experience of the individual; to the Christian theologian it was included in the larger problem of the historical process by which the whole human race is redeemed. Thus the metaphysical solution of each works out differently and with different factors.