A. That which holds to two self-existent principles, God and matter. These are distinct from and coëternal with each other. Matter, however, is an unconscious, negative, and imperfect substance, which is subordinate to God and is made the instrument of his will. This was the underlying principle of the Alexandrian Gnostics. It was essentially an attempt to combine with Christianity the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of the ὕλη. In this way it was thought to account for the existence of evil, and to escape the difficulty of imagining a production without use of preëxisting material. Basilides (flourished 125) and Valentinus (died 160), the representatives of this view, were influenced also by Hindu philosophy, and their dualism is almost indistinguishable from pantheism. A similar view has been held in modern times by John Stuart Mill and apparently by Frederick W. Robertson. Dualism seeks to show how the One becomes the many, how the Absolute gives birth to the relative, how the Good can consist with evil. The ὕλη of Plato seems to have meant nothing but empty space, whose not-being, or merely negative existence, prevented the full realization of the divine ideas. Aristotle regarded the ὕλη as a more positive cause of imperfection,—it was like the hard material which hampers the sculptor in expressing his thought. The real problem for both Plato and Aristotle was to explain the passage from pure spiritual existence to that which is phenomenal and imperfect, from the absolute and unlimited to that which exists in space and time. Finiteness, instead of being created, was regarded as having eternal existence and as limiting all divine manifestations. The ὕλη, from being a mere abstraction, became either a negative or a positive source of evil. The Alexandrian Jews, under the influence of Hellenic culture, sought to make this dualism explain the doctrine of creation.