11. VARIOUS SIMILARITIES. There are many other unclassifiable Numenian traces in Plotinos. Two of them, however, are comparatively important. First, is a reaffirmation of the ancient Greek connection between generation, fertility of birth of souls and wetness,[730] which is later reaffirmed by Porphyry in his "Cave of the Nymphs." Plotinos, however, later denies this.[731] Then we come to a genuine innovation of Numenius's; his theory of divine or intelligible giving. Plato had, of course, in his genial, casual way, sketched out a whole organic system of divine creation and administration of this world. The conceptions he needed he had cheerfully borrowed from earlier Greek philosophy without any rigid systematization, so that he never noticed that the hinge on which all was supposed to turn was merely the makeshift of an assumption. This capital error was noticed by Numenius, who sought to supply it by a psychological observation, namely, that knowledge may be imparted without diminution. Plotinos, with his winning way of dispensing with quotation-marks, appropriated this,[732] as also the idea that life streams out upon the world in the glance of the divinity, and as quickly leaves it, when the Divinity turns away His glance.[733] Other less important points of contact are: the Egyptian ship of souls;[734] the Philonic distinction between "the" God as supreme, and "god" as subordinate;[735] the hoary equivocation on "kosmos;"[736] and the illustration of the divine Logos as the pilot of the world.[737] VALUE OF PLOTINOS. IMPORTANCE IN THE PAST. We must focus our observations on Plotinos as a philosopher. To begin with, we should review his successors, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Sallust, Proclus, Hierocles, Simplicius;[738] Macrobius;[739] Priscus; Olympicdorus and John Philoponus.[740] Among the Arabian philosophers that follow in his steps are Maimonides and Ibn Gebirol.[741] Of the Christian fathers we first have two who paraphrased, rather than quoted him. St. Augustine by name quotes i. 6; iii. 2; iv. 3, and v. 1; he paraphrases parts of i. 2; ii. 1; iii. 6, 7; iv. 2, 7; vi. 5, 6.[742] St. Basil so closely paraphrases parts of Plotinos in his treatise on the Holy Spirit,[743] his letter on the Monastic Life,[744] and his Hexameron,[745] that Bouillet prints the passage in question in deadly parallel. Other Christian Plotonic students were Gregory of Nyssa, Synesius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Theodorus, Aeneas of Gaza, Gennadius;[746] Victorinus;[747] Nicephorus Chumnus;[748] and Cassiodorus.[749] Thomas Aquinas also was much indebted to Plotinos; and after him came Boethius, Fénélon, Bossnet and Leibnitz (all quoted in Bouillet's work). We have frequently pointed out that Plotinos' "bastard reasoning" process of reaching the intelligible was practically paraphrased by Kant's dialectical path to the "thing-in-itself." This dialetic, of course, was capitalized by Hegel.