It is at this point that the writings of Philo become of special importance. They gather together, without fusing into a symmetrical system, the two dominant theories of the past, and they contain the seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil. It is possible that those writings cover a much larger period of time than is commonly supposed, and that if we could find a key to their chronological arrangement, we should find in them a perfect bridge from philosophical Judaism to Christian theology. And even without such a key we are able to see in them a large representation of the processes of thought that were going on, and can better understand by the analogies which they offer both the tentative theories and those that ultimately became dominant in the sphere of Christianity. It is consequently desirable to give a brief account of the view which they present. The ultimate cause of the world is to be found in the nature of God. As in Plato, though perhaps in a different sense, God is regarded as good. By His goodness He was impelled to make the world: He was able to make it by virtue of His power. “If any one wished to search out the reason why the universe was made, I think that he would not be far from the mark if he were to say, what, in fact, one of the ancients said, that the Father and Maker is good, and that being good He did not grudge the best kind of nature to matter (οὔσίᾳ) which of itself had nothing excellent, though it was capable of becoming all things.”[324] And again: “My soul once told me a more serious story (than that of the Greek mythology), when seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy.... It told me that in the one really existing God there are two chief and primary faculties, Goodness and Power, and that by Goodness He begat the universe, and by Power He governs it.”[325] God is thus the Creator, the Fashioner and Maker of the world, its Builder and Artificer.[326] But when the conception of His relation to the world is more precisely examined, it is found to be based upon a recognition of a sharp distinction between the world of thought and that of sense; and to be monistic in regard to the one, dualistic in regard to the other. God is mind. From Him, as from a fountain, proceed all forms of mind and reason. Reason, whether unconscious in the form of natural law, or conscious in the form of human thought, is like a river that flows forth from Him and fills the universe.[327] In man the two worlds meet. The body is fashioned by the Artificer from the dust of the earth: “The soul came from nothing that is created, but from the Father and Leader of all things. For what He breathed into Adam was nothing else than a divine breath, a colony from that blissful and happy nature, placed here below for the benefit of our race; so that granting man to be mortal in respect of his visible part, yet in respect of that which is invisible he is the heir of