They exerted a dominating influence in the later period of the Alexandrian school.

Philo, the Jew, who lived in the time of Caligula, based his philosophy on the theory of emanation.

Plotinus not only accepted that theory as applicable to the soul of man, but as affording an illustration of the nature of the Trinity.

For, as a beam of light emanates from the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost.

From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul.
In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness.