2. In the second place Plotinus conceived God in His relation to the world in the terms of _dynamic pantheism_. This is a pantheism of a peculiar type. God does not create the world; the world is not the act of His will; nor is the world the result of a transference of part of His nature. In ordinary pantheism the world is a diffusion of the substance of God and the whole is static. Not so in the teaching of Plotinus! God permeates the world by His activity, and the world is dynamic through and through. But this dynamic activity of God must not be conceived as an historical or time process. _The process is timeless. It is a process of essence or worth._ The grades in the process are those of _significance or value_. All are within the all-embracing unity of God and each particular draws its life from Him. _This is called the theory of emanations._ Plotinus used the figure which mystics have always employed in this connection,――the figure of the sun and its rays of light in the darkness. The rays become less and less intense with the increasing distance from the Godhead, until they end in darkness. The process is an overflowing from the Godhead in which the Godhead remains unchanged. =The Two Problems of Plotinus.= Starting with this conception of the Godhead as a dynamic contentless Being, Plotinus is bound to explain the world of sense-phenomena. His problem is twofold: he must explain the sequence of phenomena from the Godhead, which is the metaphysical problem; he must explain how man, living in the world of sense, can rise to communion with the Godhead, which is the ethical problem. Metaphysics and ethics are to Plotinus in inverted parallelism. =The World of Emanations.――The Metaphysical Problem of Plotinus.= The aim of Plotinus in this is to construct a metaphysical monism out of the dualistic factors which had so long been present in Greek thought. The two fundamental principles upon which he raised his structure were (1) his dynamic series of emanations, and (2) his conception of matter as entirely negative. The highest Being, God, by an excess of energy or goodness, has the natural impulse to create something similar to himself. This creative impulse exists in each creature in turn and the movement propagates itself. Stage is added to stage in a descending series, until the impulse dies out in non-Being as the limit. The ordinary pantheism of co-existence of phenomena is transformed into a succession of stages of values, and all make up a harmony of more or less distinct copies of God. There are three steps in which the process of emanation proceeds,――spirit, soul, and matter.