Philo believed in a world of spirits, both the angels of the Jews and the demons of the Greeks. When God said: “Let us make man,” Philo believed that He was addressing those assistant spirits who should be held responsible for the viciousness to which man alone of all creation is liable.[1592] Of the divine rational natures Philo regarded some as incorporeal, others like the stars as possessed of bodies.[1593] He also believed that there were spirits in the air as well as afar off in heaven. He could not see why the air should not be inhabited when there were stars in the ether and fish in the sea as well as other animals upon land.[1594] Indeed he argued that it would be absurd that the element which was essential for the vitality even of land and aquatic animals should have no living beings of its own. That these spirits of the air must be invisible did not trouble him, since the human soul is also invisible. [Sidenote: Interpretation of dreams.] Of Philo’s five books on dreams only two are extant. They suffice to show, however, that he accepted the art of divination from dreams. Of dreams he distinguished three varieties: those direct from God which require no interpretation; those in which the dreamer’s mind moves in unison with the world soul, and which are neither entirely clear nor yet very obscure—an instance is Jacob’s vision of the ladder; and third, those in which the mind is moved by a prophetic frenzy of its own, and which require the science of interpretation—such dreams were Joseph’s concerning his brothers, and those of the butler and the baker at Pharaoh’s court.[1595] [Sidenote: Politics akin to magic.] The recent war and its accompaniments and sequels have brought home to some the conviction that our modern civilization is after all not vastly superior to that of some preceding ages. To those who still imagine that because modern science has freed us from much past superstition concerning nature, we are therefore free from political fakirs, from social absurdities, and from fallacious procedure and reasoning in many departments of life, the reading may be recommended of a passage in Philo’s treatise on dreams,[1596] in which he classifies the art of politics along with that of magic. He compares Joseph’s coat of many colors to “the much-variegated web of political affairs” where along with “the smallest possible portion of truth” falsehoods of every shade of plausibility are interwoven; and he compares politicians and statesmen to augurs, ventriloquists, and sorcerers, “men skilful in juggling and in incantations and in tricks of all kinds, from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to escape.” He adds that Moses very naturally represented Joseph’s coat as blood-stained, since all statecraft is tainted with wars and bloodshed. [Sidenote: A thought repeated by Moses Maimonides and Albertus Magnus.]