oncerning the effects of love in this manner; of such we enquire,
what do you suffer respecting fair studies, and beautiful manners,
virtuous works, affections, and habits, and the beauty of souls? What
do you experience on perceiving yourselves lovely within? After
what manner are you roused as it were to a Bacchalian fury; striving
to converse with yourselves, and collecting yourselves separate from
the impediments of body? For thus are true lovers enraptured. But
what is the cause of these wonderful effects. It is neither figure, nor
colour, nor magnitude; but soul herself, fair through temperance,
and not with the false gloss of colour, and bright with the splendours
of virtue herself. And this you experience as often as you turn your
eye inwards; or contemplate the amplitude of another soul; the just
manners, the pure temperance; fortitude venerable by her noble
countenance; and modesty and honesty walking with an intrepid step,
and a tranquil and steady aspect; and what crowns the beauty of
them all, constantly receiving the irradiations of a divine intellect.

In what respect then, shall we call these beautiful? For they are such
as they appear, nor did ever anyone behold them, and not pronounce
them realities. But as yet reason desires to know how they cause the
loveliness of the soul; and what that grace is in every virtue which
beams forth to view like light? Are you then willing we should
assume the contrary part, and consider what in the soul appears
deformed? for perhaps it will facilitate our search, if we can thus
find what is base in the soul, and from whence it derives its original.

Let us suppose a soul deformed, to be one intemperate and unjust,
filled with a multitude of desires, a prey to foolish hopes and vexed
with idle fears; through its diminutive and avaricious nature the
subject of envy; employed solely in thought of what is immoral and
low, bound in the fetters of impure delights, living the life, whatever
it may be, peculiar to the passion of body; and so totally merged in
sensuality as to esteem the base pleasant, and the deformed beautiful
and fair. But may we not say, that this baseness approaches the soul
as an adventitious evil, under the pretext of adventitious beauty;
which, with great detriment, renders it impure, and pollutes it with
much depravity; so that it neither possesses true life, nor true sense,
but is endued with a slender life through its mixture of evil, and this
worn