In the reaction from Platonic dualism, however, the Logos doctrine reappears in great breadth. It is a capital element in the system of the Stoics. With their teleological views of the world they naturally predicated an active principle pervading it and determining it. This operative principle is called both Logos and God. It is conceived of as material, and is described in terms used equally of nature and of God. There is at the same time the special doctrine of the [Greek: logos spermatikos], the seminal Logos, or the law of generation in the world, the principle of the active reason working in dead matter. This parts into [Greek: logoi spermatikoi], which are akin, not to the Platonic ideas, but rather to the [Greek: logoi enuloi] of Aristotle. In man, too, there is a Logos which is his characteristic possession, and which is [Greek: endiathetos], as long as it is a thought resident within his breast, but [Greek: prophorikos] when it is expressed as a word. This distinction between Logos as ratio and Logos as _oratio_, so much used subsequently by Philo and the Christian fathers, had been so far anticipated by Aristotle's distinction between the [Greek: exô logos] and the [Greek: logos en tê psychê]. It forms the point of attachment by which the Logos doctrine connected itself with Christianity. The Logos of the Stoics (q.v.) is a reason in the world gifted with intelligence, and analogous to the reason in man. 2. _The Hebrew Logos._--In the later Judaism the earlier anthropomorphic conception of God and with it the sense of the divine nearness had been succeeded by a belief which placed God at a remote distance, severed from man and the world by a deep chasm. The old familiar name Yahweh became a secret; its place was taken by such general expressions as the Holy, the Almighty, the Majesty on High, the King of Kings, and also by the simple word "Heaven." Instead of the once powerful confidence in the immediate presence of God there grew up a mass of speculation regarding on the one hand the distant future, on the other the distant past. Various attempts were made to bridge the gulf between God and man, including the angels, and a number of other hybrid forms of which it is hard to say whether they are personal beings or abstractions. The wisdom, the Shekinah or Glory, and the Spirit of God are intermediate beings of this kind, and even the Law came to be regarded as an independent spiritual entity. Among these conceptions that of the word of God had an important place, especially the creative word of Genesis i. Here as in the other cases we cannot always say whether the Word is regarded as a mere attribute or activity of God, or an independent being, though there is a clear tendency towards the latter. The ambiguity lies in the twofold purpose of these activities: (1) to establish communication with God; (2) to prevent direct connexion between God and the world. The word of the God of revelation is