me
a mythic personage whom philosophy, borrowing from poetry, converted
into an efficient cause of creation. The traces of the existence of
love, as of number and figure, were everywhere discerned; and in the
Pythagorean list of opposites male and female were ranged side by side
with odd and even, finite and infinite.

But Plato seems also to be aware that there is a mystery of love in man
as well as in nature, extending beyond the mere immediate relation of
the sexes. He is conscious that the highest and noblest things in the
world are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be
regarded as a spiritualized form of them. We may observe that Socrates
himself is not represented as originally unimpassioned, but as one who
has overcome his passions; the secret of his power over others partly
lies in his passionate but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and
Symposium love is not merely the feeling usually so called, but the
mystical contemplation of the beautiful and the good. The same passion
which may wallow in the mire is capable of rising to the loftiest
heights--of penetrating the inmost secret of philosophy. The highest
love is the love not of a person, but of the highest and purest
abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on which the eye of
the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth, the consistency
of the warring elements of the world, the enthusiasm for knowledge when
first beaming upon mankind, the relativity of ideas to the human
mind, and of the human mind to ideas, the faith in the invisible,
the adoration of the eternal nature, are all included, consciously or
unconsciously, in Plato's doctrine of love.

The successive speeches in praise of love are characteristic of the
speakers, and contribute in various degrees to the final result; they
are all designed to prepare the way for Socrates, who gathers up the
threads anew, and skims the highest points of each of them. But they are
not to be regarded as the stages of an idea, rising above one another
to a climax. They are fanciful, partly facetious performances, 'yet also
having a certain measure of seriousness,' which the successive speakers
dedicate to the god. All of them are rhetorical and poetical rather than
dialectical, but glimpses of truth appear in them. When Eryximachus says
that the principles of music are simple in themselves, but confused
in their application, he touches lightly upon a difficulty which h