ea of clouds. Flashes of insight and sublime allegory mix
with fantastic theory and word-play.

The vast range of his thought we will touch only at two points. In the
Symposium and the Phaedrus he discusses in his most brilliant vein the
problem of love. To the reader who has inherited the ethical ideal of
Christianity, Plato's love will seem like the image in Nebuchadnezzar's
vision,--the head of gold, the feet of miry clay. He has a toleration
for some aspects of sensuality of which Paul said, "it is a shame even to
speak;" and this tolerance, in the greatest of the classic philosophers,
is the most pregnant suggestion of the cleansing work which it was left
for Christianity to undertake. Yet Plato teaches most impressively the
subordination of sense to spirit in love, and the struggle of the two in
man has seldom been set forth more powerfully than in his figure of the
two yoked horses: the white, celestial steed struggling upward; the
black, unruly one plunging down, while Reason, the charioteer, strives to
guide. In the description of Love which Socrates professes to quote from
the wise woman of Mantineia, there is the very height of the Platonic
philosophy,--the gradual sublimation of human passion to the recognition
of all noble forms and ideas, and at last to the vision of the Divine
Beauty which is one with Wisdom and with Love.

"The true order of going or being led by another to the things of love is
to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for
the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all
fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to
fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

"What if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean,
pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of
mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life--thither looking
and holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringing
into being and educating true creations of virtue, and not idols only?
Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye
of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but
realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality,--and will be
enabled, bringing forth and educating true virtue, to become the friend
of God and be immo