(i.) The dualistic hypothesis assumed a co-existence of matter and God. The assumption was more frequently tacit than explicit. The difficulty of the assumption varied according to the degree to which matter was regarded as having positive qualities. There was a universal belief that beneath the qualities of all existing things lay a substratum or substance on which they were grafted, and which gave to each thing its unity. But the conception of the nature of this substance varied from that of gross and tangible material to that of empty and formless space. The metaphysical conception of substance tended to be confused with the physical conception of matter. Matter was sometimes conceived as a mass of atoms not coalescing according to any principle or order of arrangement:[357] the action of the Creator upon them was that of a general changing a rabble of individuals into an organized army. It was sometimes conceived as a vast shapeless but plastic mass, to which the Creator gave form, partly by moulding it as a potter moulds clay, partly by combining various elements as a builder combines his materials in the construction of a house.[358] Both these conceptions of matter tended to regard it as more or less gross. It was plastic in the hands of the Divine Workman, but still possessed the quality of resistance. With Basilides, the conception of matter was raised to a higher plane. The distinction of subject and object was preserved, so that the action of the Transcendent God was still that of creation and not of evolution; but it was “out of that which was not” that He made things to be. That which He made was expressed by the metaphor of a seed which contained in itself possibilities, not only of growth, but of different kinds of growth. Three worlds were involved in it: the world of spirit, and the world of matter, and between the two the world of life. The metaphor is sometimes explained by the help of the Aristotelian conception of _genera_ and _species_.[359] The original seed which God made is the ultimate _summum genus_. The process by which all things came into being followed in inverse order the process of our knowledge. The steps by which our ideas ascend, by an almost infinite stairway of subordinated groups, from the visible objects of sense to the highest of all abstractions, the Absolute Being and the Absolute Unity, are the steps by which that Absolute Being and Absolute Unity, who is God, evolved or made the world from that which was not. The basis of the theory was Platonic, though some of the terms were borrowed from both Aristotle and the Stoics. It became itself the basis of the theory which ultimately prevailed in the Church. The transition appears in Tatian. In him, God is the author, not only of the form or qualities, but also of the substance or underlying ground of all things.[360] “The Lord of the universe being Himself the substance of the whole, not yet having brought any