em
also 'too dazzling bright for mortal eye,' and shrinking from them
in amazement. The opposition between these two kinds of love may be
compared to the opposition between the flesh and the spirit in the
Epistles of St. Paul. It would be unmeaning to suppose that Plato, in
describing the spiritual combat, in which the rational soul is
finally victor and master of both the steeds, condescends to allow any
indulgence of unnatural lusts.

Two other thoughts about love are suggested by this passage. First of
all, love is represented here, as in the Symposium, as one of the great
powers of nature, which takes many forms and two principal ones, having
a predominant influence over the lives of men. And these two, though
opposed, are not absolutely separated the one from the other. Plato,
with his great knowledge of human nature, was well aware how easily
one is transformed into the other, or how soon the noble but fleeting
aspiration may return into the nature of the animal, while the
lower instinct which is latent always remains. The intermediate
sentimentalism, which has exercised so great an influence on the
literature of modern Europe, had no place in the classical times of
Hellas; the higher love, of which Plato speaks, is the subject, not of
poetry or fiction, but of philosophy.

Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human
mind that the great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be
expressed in some form of visible beauty, like the absolute purity and
goodness which Christian art has sought to realize in the person of
the Madonna. But although human nature has often attempted to represent
outwardly what can be only 'spiritually discerned,' men feel that in
pictures and images, whether painted or carved, or described in words
only, we have not the substance but the shadow of the truth which is in
heaven. There is no reason to suppose that in the fairest works of Greek
art, Plato ever conceived himself to behold an image, however faint, of
ideal truths. 'Not in that way was wisdom seen.'

We may now pass on to the second part of the Dialogue, which is a
criticism on the first. Rhetoric is assailed on various grounds: first,
as desiring to persuade, without a knowledge of the truth; and secondly,
as ignoring the distinction between certain and probable matter. The
three speeches are then passed in review: the first of them has no
definition of the nature of love, and no order in the top