examined in these pages, is his anxiety to avoid any kind of Dualism in his conception of Deity; and it is a necessary corollary of his religious and philosophical conviction on this point that there should be no place in the constitution of the world for a Being regarded as a coequal rival to the One Supreme Omnipotence. As Plutarch, however, himself points out, if nothing can be conceived as originating without a cause, and Good cannot be regarded as furnishing the cause of Evil, it follows that Evil as well as Good must have an originating principle of its own.[366] But neither on the religious nor on the purely philosophic side does he carry this admission to the extent of accepting an Evil personality or principle equivalent in power to the Deity. On the one hand, he accepts the doctrine of subordinate Dæmons, whose evil propensities are ultimately under the control of the Omnipotent Author of Good, inasmuch as they are liable to pains and penances for their infraction of the laws He has imposed upon them; and on the other, he has learned from Greek philosophy the conception of τὸ ἄπειρον, that infinite, formless “Matter,” out of which the Demiurgus, making it the nurse and receptacle of the ideas, had created the Universe. He insists, indeed, that the two conceptions are familiar to Greek philosophers: Empedocles opposed φιλότητα καὶ φιλίαν to νεῖκος οὐλόμενον; the Pythagoreans had two well-known lists of contrary expressions.[367] Anaxagoras expressed the antithesis by νοῦς and ἄπειρον; Aristotle by εἶδος and στέρησις. In all these philosophical distinctions the inferiority of the second term is implied, and Plutarch asserts this inferiority in unmistakable terms. “The creation and formation of this world arose out of opposing, but not equal, Principles, the supreme sway being the portion of the Better.”[368]