Symposium.
Socrates.
content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring Sym- to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he /"-'"""• is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions Socrates. and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle ; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom ; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed ; please to give me your very best attention : ' He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is 211 the final cause of all our former toils) — a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning ; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul He should in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place 7"^* beauty, not fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place relatively, foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of '^"' '^'°^°' ' r • lutely ; and a face or hands or any other part of the bodily trame, or in he should any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other v^^ by being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, stones from or in any other place ; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, earth to and everlasting, which without diminution and without in- crease, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
