It was inevitable, in the syncretism which results when an age of philosophical reflection succeeds an age of philosophical origination, that these two great drifts of thought should tend in some points to approach each other. The elements in them which were most readily fused together were the theories of the processes by which the actual world came into being, and of the nature of the forces which lay behind those processes. In Stoicism, there was the theory of the one Law or _Logos_ expressing itself in an infinite variety of material forms: in Platonism, there was the theory of the one God, shaping matter according to an infinite variety of patterns. In the one, the processes of nature were the operations of active forces, containing in themselves the law of the forms in which they exhibit themselves, self-developing seeds, each of them a portion of the one _Logos_ which runs through the whole.[321] In the other, they were the operations of the infinitely various and eternally active energy of God, moving always in the direction of His thoughts, so that those thoughts might themselves be conceived as the causes of the operations.[322] In both the one theory and the other, the processes were sometimes regarded in their apparent multiplicity, and sometimes in their underlying unity: and in both also the unity was expressed sometimes by the impersonal term _Logos_, and sometimes by the personal term God. But while the monism of the Stoics, by laying stress upon the antithesis between the two phases of the one substance, was tending to dualism, the dualism of the Platonists, by laying stress upon the distinction between the creative energy of God and the form in the mind of God which His energy embodied in the material universe, was tending to introduce a third factor into the conception of creation. It became common to speak, not of two principles, but of three—God, Matter, and the Form, or Pattern.[323] Hence came a new fusion of conceptions. The Platonic Forms in the mind of God, conceived, as they sometimes were, as causes operating outside Him, were more or less identified with the Stoical _Logoi_, and, being viewed as the manifold expressions of a single _Logos_, were expressed by a singular rather than a plural term, the _Logos_ rather than the _Logoi_ of God.