It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’, as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of words and their origin, that we owe the word _etymology_, the first half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning ‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’. It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.