(whatever it be in its kind) derives from the Egyptians, among whom Moses was brought up." "In the first place it attributes to the first principle a name ineffable, from which proceed, in the second place, four names, afterwards resolved into twelve, these into seventy-two, these into one hundred and forty-four, etc., etc. By each name they name a god, an angel, an intelligence, a power that presides over a species of things,--so the whole of divinity is reduced back to one source, as all light is brought back to the first, self-shining light; and the images in the diverse, innumerable mirrors,--particular existences,--are referred to one formal,[187] ideal source."[188] As might be expected, Plato himself was best known to the school through one of the least characteristic of his works, the _Timaeus_, with its fantastic cosmology and demonology, alongside of which was placed the work of (the Pseudo-) Timaeus of Locris, a later writing, based upon that of Plato, although professing to belong to an earlier date: next to these in importance came the _Republic_, with the theory of Ideas. It was from the Chaldaeans, Egyptians, and Pythagoreans that Plato was supposed to have derived his cosmology. It is, however, with the system of Plotinus that Bruno's earlier theory has the closest affinity: he passed far beyond that system, as the following chapters may show, but many of the ideas that had come down from the master remained throughout part of the basis of Bruno's thought: such are, for example, the idea of the Universal Intelligence,--distinct from the One, the Highest and Unknowable Being, or God,--as the soul of the world and the source of the forms of material things;[189] the _rationes_ or ideas which are contained in it mould and form all things from the seed onwards: the seed is a miniature world containing _implicitly_, _i.e._ in its _ratio_, form or soul, the perfect thing.[190] The conception again of the lower, sensible world, as an imitation of the higher, the intelligible, is derived from Plotinus, as is that of the seven grades or steps of emanation from the First Principle to the material world, which correspond to the seven grades by which the human mind rises from the knowledge of sensible things to that of the Highest, the Good.[191] The order of knowledge corresponds step for step with the order of emanation--of creation. Most significant of all for the development of Bruno's philosophy was Plotinus' conception of an "intelligible matter," which is common to all the different beings and species, in the intelligible world, just as brute matter is that which is common to all kinds of corporeal objects.[192] Again from Plotinus derives the distinction that the matter underlying the intelligible world _is_ all things and all together: having in it (implicitly) all forms, there is nothing into which it may change: whereas the matter of the sensible world _becomes_ all by change in its parts, becomes