The Idea in pure Thought—that God’s way of working is not external, as if He were a subject, and therefore that all this does not come to pass as a casual resolution and decree of God, to whom the thought of so acting happened to occur, but that God is this movement as the self-revealing moments of His essence, as His eternal necessity in Himself, which is not at all conditioned by chance—this we find expressed in the writings of philosophic or expressly Platonic Jews. The place where this point of view took its origin happens to be the country where East and West have met in conflict; for the free universality of the East and the determinateness of Europe, when intermingled, constitute Thought. With the Stoics the universality of thought has a place, but it is opposed to sensation, to external existence. Oriental universality is, on the contrary, entirely free; and the principle of universality, posited as particular, is Western Thought. In Alexandria more especially this form of philosophy was cultivated, but at the same time regard was had to the earlier development of thought, in which lie the partially concealed beginnings of the building up in thought of the concrete, which is now the point mainly regarded. Even in the Pythagorean philosophy we found difference present as the Triad; then in Plato we saw the simple Idea of spirit as the unity of indivisible substance and other-being, though it was only as a compound of both. That is the concrete, but only in simple moments, not in the comprehensive manner in which other-being is in general all reality of nature and of consciousness,—and the unity which has returned as this self-consciousness is not only a thought, but living God. With Aristotle, finally, the concrete is ἐνέργεια, Thought which is its own object, the concrete. Therefore although this philosophy is known as Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic, it may also be termed Neo-Aristotelian; for the Alexandrians studied Aristotle just as much as Plato, and valued both very highly, later on combining their philosophies in one unity.