There were thus at the beginning of the Christian era two concurrent conceptions of the nature of the superhuman forces which determine the existence and control the activity of all created things, the conceptions of Destiny and of Providence. The two conceptions, though apparently antagonistic, had tended, like all conceptions which have a strong hold upon masses of men, to approach each other. The meeting-point had been found in the conception of the fixed order of the world as being at once rational and beneficent. It was rational because it was the embodiment of the highest reason; and it was beneficent because happiness is incident to perfection, and the highest reason, which is the law of the perfection of the whole, is also the law of the perfection of the parts. There were two stages in this blending of the two conceptions into one: the identification, first of Destiny with Reason;[398] and, secondly, of Destiny or Reason with Providence.[399] The former of these is found in Heraclitus, but is absent from Plato, who distinguishes what comes into being by necessity, from what is wrought by mind: the elaboration of both the former and the latter is due to the Stoics, growing logically out of their conception of the universe as a single substance moved by an inherent law. It was probably in many cases a change rather of language than of idea when Destiny or Reason or Providence was spoken of as God;[400] and yet sometimes, whether by the lingering of an ancient belief or by an intuition which transcended logic, the sense of personality mingles with the idea of physical sequence, and all things that happen in the infinite chain of immutable causation are conceived as happening by the will of God. 3. But over against the conception of a perfect Reason or Providence administering the world, was the fact of the existence of physical pain and social inequality and moral failure. The problems which the fact suggested filled a large place in later Greek philosophy, and were solved in many ways. The solution was sometimes found in the denial of the universality of Providence. God is the Author only of good: evil is due to other causes.[401] This view, which found its first philosophical expression in the _Timæus_ of Plato, was transmitted, through some of the Platonic schools, to the later syncretist writers who incorporated Platonic elements. In its Platonic form it assumed the existence of inferior agents who ultimately owed their existence to God, but whose existence as authors of evil He permitted or overlooked. In some later forms the view linked itself with Oriental conceptions of matter as inherently evil.