74] probably hinting at
the extreme sects of the Essenes and the Therapeutae. "Those who follow
a gentler wisdom seek after God, but at the same time do not despise
human things."

"Truth will properly blame those who without discrimination
shun all concern with the life of the State, and say that
they despise the acquisition of good repute and pleasure.
They are only making grand pretensions, and they do not
really despise these things. They go about in torn raiment
and with solemn visage, and live the life of penury and
hardship as a bait, to make people believe that they are
lovers of good conduct, temperance, and self-control."[275]

Philo's aphorism, which follows, "Be drunk in a sober manner," is
characteristic. The Stoic extreme of passionlessness is almost as
false as the Epicurean hedonism, and the mean between them is the
ideal Jewish life, in which godliness and humanity are blended.

We have now examined the main divisions of Philo's philosophy, and we
see that his metaphysics, cosmology, theory of knowledge, and ethics
are all religious in tone, and all determined in their main lines by
his Jewish outlook. His Hebraism is a seal which stamps all that
enters his mind from Greek sources, and the Bible, spiritually
interpreted, is the canon of all his wisdom.

There remains one minor aspect of his work which must be briefly
examined, because it has become closely associated with his name. This
is his number-symbolism, by which he ascribes important powers to
certain numbers, so that they are regarded as holy themselves and
sanctifying that to which they are attached. This feature of his
thought is commonly ascribed to Pythagorean influence, which was
strong at Alexandria, and, indeed, throughout the world, at this era.
The exact details of the holiness of four, seven, ten, fifty, etc.,
Philo may have borrowed from neo-Pythagorean sources, but the general
tendency was the natural result of his environment and his stage of
thought. It was a feature of the recurring childishness of ideas and
the renascence of wonder at common things which is apparent on many
hands. To have denied the powers of numbers would have seemed as
absurd and eccentric then as to deny the powers of electricity to-day.
And in all ages people have been found to regard numbers mystically as
a link between God and earth, and a means of solving all physical and
metaphysical problems. The Hebrew intel