impulse
or desire for the divine must be present in it. Unconsciously the
divine must draw man to what afterwards, when raised into his
consciousness, constitutes his supreme happiness. What Heraclitus
calls the "daimon" in man (see p. 49) is connected with the idea of
love. In the _Symposium_, people of the most various ranks and views
of life speak about love,--the ordinary man, the politician, the
scientific man, the satiric poet Aristophanes, and the tragic poet
Agathon. They each have their own view of love, in keeping with their
different experiences of life. The way in which they express
themselves shows the stage at which their "daimon" has arrived (_cf._
p. 49). By love one being is attracted to another. The multiplicity,
the diversity of the things into which divine unity was poured,
aspires towards unity and harmony through love. Thus love has
something divine in it, and owing to this, each individual can only
understand it as far as he participates in the divine.

After these men and others at different degrees of maturity have given
utterance to their ideas about love, Socrates takes up the word. He
considers love from the point of view of a man in search of knowledge.
For him, it is not a divinity, but it is something which leads man to
God. Eros, or love, is for him not divine, for a god is perfect, and
therefore possesses the beautiful and good; but Eros is only the
desire for the beautiful and good. He thus stands between man and God.
He is a "daimon," a mediator between the earthly and the divine.

It is significant that Socrates does not claim to be giving his own
thoughts when speaking of love. He says he is only relating what a
woman once imparted to him as a revelation. It was through mantic art
that he came to his conception of love. Diotima, the priestess,
awakened in Socrates the daimonic force which was to lead him to the
divine. She initiated him.

This passage in the _Symposium_ is highly suggestive. Who is the "wise
woman" who awakened the daimon in Socrates? She is more than a merely
poetic mode of expression. For no wise woman on the physical plane
could awaken the daimon in the soul, unless the daimonic force were
latent in the soul itself. It is surely in Socrates' own soul that we
must also look for this "wise woman." But there must be a reason why
that which brings the daimon to life within the soul should appear as
an outward being on the physical plane. The force cannot work in th