n soul, Philo again harmonizes the simple
Jewish notion with the developed Greek psychology by means of the
Platonic idealism. The soul in the Bible is the breath of God; in
Plato it is an Idea incarnate, represented in "The Timaeus" as a
particle of the Supreme Mind. Philo, following the psychology of his
age, divides the soul into a higher and a lower part: (1) the Nous;
(2) the vital functions, which include the senses. He lays all the
stress upon the former, which gives man his kinship with God and the
ideal world, while the other part is the necessary result of its
incarnation in the body. He variously describes the Nous as an
inseparable fragment of the Divine soul, a Divine breath which God
inspires into each body, a reflection, an impression, or an image of
the blessed Logos, sealed with its stamp.[247] Following the Platonic
conception, Philo occasionally speaks of the Divine soul as having a
prenatal existence,[248] holding, as the English poet put it, that

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar."

Here, too, he follows an older Jewish-Hellenistic tradition, which
appears in the Wisdom of Solomon (viii. 19 and 20), where it is
written: "A good soul fell to my lot. Nay rather, being good, I came
into a body undefiled." The Nous is in fact the god within, and it
bears to the microcosm Man the relation which the infinite God bears
to the macrocosm.[249] Indeed, it is the Logos descended from above,
but yearning to return to its true abode. Thus Philo sings its Divine
nature:

"It is unseen, but sees all things: its essence is unknown,
but it comprehends the essence of all things. And by arts
and sciences it makes for itself many roads and ways, and
traverses sea and land, searching out all things within
them. And it soars aloft on wings, and when it has
investigated the sky and its changes it is borne upwards
towards the aether and the revolutions of the heavens. It
follows the stars in their orbits, and passing the sensible
it yearns for the intelligible world."

The Nous is the king of the whole organism, the governing and unifying
power, and hence is often called the man himself. The senses,
resembling the powers of God, are only the bodyguard, subordinate
instruments, and inferior modes of the Divine part.[250] So Philo
explains that all our faculties are derived from the Divine principle,