As regards Plutarch’s philosophy, it is easier to say to which of the great schools he did not belong than to determine by what name he would have preferred to be called. He probably would have termed himself a Platonist, but not, like Cicero, of the New Academy, which had incorporated Pyrrhonism with the provisional acceptance of the Platonic philosophy. At the same time, he was a closer follower and a more literal interpreter of Plato than were the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, who had not yet become a distinctly recognized sect, and who in many respects were the precursors of the mysticism of the Reformation era. Plutarch, with Plato, recognized two eternities: that of the Divine Being, supremely good and purely spiritual; and that of matter, as, if not intrinsically evil, the cause, condition, and seat of all evil, and as at least opposing such obstacles to its own best ideal manipulation that the Divine Being could not embody his pure and perfect goodness, unalloyed by evil, in any material form. Herein the Platonists were at variance with both the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Stoics regarded matter as virtually an emanation from the Supreme Being, who is not only the universal soul and reason, but the creative fire, which, transformed into air and water,—part of the water becoming earth,—is the source of the material universe, which must at the end of a certain cosmical cycle be re-absorbed into the divine essence, whence will emanate in endless succession new universes to replace those that pass away. The Epicureans, on the other hand, believed in the existence of matter only, and regarded mind and soul as the ultimate product of material organization. In one respect Plutarch transcends Plato, and, so far as I know, all pre-Christian philosophers. Plato’s theism bears a close kindred to pantheism. His God, if I may be permitted the phrase, is only semi-detached. He becomes the creator rather by blending his essence with eternal matter, than by shaping that matter to his will. He is rather in all things than above all things, rather the Soul of the universe than its sovereign Lord. But in Plutarch’s writings the Supreme Being is regarded as existing independently of material things; they, as subject to his will, not as a part of his essence. Plutarch was, like Plato, a realist. He regarded the ideas or patterns of material things, that is, _genera_, or kinds of objects, as having an actual existence (where or how it is hard to say), as projected from the Divine Mind, floating somewhere in ethereal spaces between the Deity and the material universe,—the models by which all things in the universe are made.