elf was inspired.

Philo's first ideal of life was to attain to the profoundest knowledge
of God so as to be fitted for the mission of interpreting His Word:
and he relates in one of his treatises how he spent his youth and his
first manhood in philosophy and the contemplation of the universe.[56]
"I feasted with the truly blessed mind, which is the object of all
desire (_i.e._, God), communing continually in joy with the Divine
words and doctrines. I entertained no low or mean thought, nor did I
ever crawl about glory or wealth or worldly comfort, but I seemed to
be carried aloft in a kind of spiritual inspiration and to be borne
along in harmony with the whole universe." The intense religious
spirit which seeks to perceive all things in a supreme unity Philo
shares with Spinoza, whose life-ideal was the intuitional knowledge of
the universe and "the intellectual love of God." Both men show the
pursuit of righteousness raised to philosophical grandeur.

In his early days the way to virtue and happiness appeared to Philo to
lie in the solitary and ascetic life. He was possessed by a noble
pessimism, that the world was an evil place,[57] and the worldly life
an evil thing for a man's soul, that man must die to live, and
renounce the pleasures not only of the body but also of society in
order to know God. The idea was a common one of the age, and was the
outcome of the mingling of Greek ethics and psychology and the Jewish
love of righteousness. For the Greek thinkers taught a psychological
dualism, by which the body and the senses were treated as antagonistic
to the higher intellectual soul, which was immortal, and linked man
with the principle of creation. The most remarkable and enduring
effect of Hellenic influence in Palestine was the rise of the sect of
Essenes,[58] Jewish mystics, who eschewed private property and the
general social life, and forming themselves into communistic
congregations which were a sort of social Utopia, devoted their lives
to the cult of piety and saintliness. It cannot be doubted that their
manner of life was to some degree an imitation of the Pythagorean
brotherhoods, which ever since the sixth century had spread a sort of
monasticism through the Greek world. Nor is it unlikely that Hindu
teachings exercised an influence over them, for Buddhism was at this
age, like Judaism, a missionizing religion, and had teachers in the
West. Philo speaks in several places of its doctrines.[59] Whateve