h is love's universal sway. The origin of its duality Aristophanes then
explained. Sages, neighbors of the gods, of whom Empedocles was the last
representative, had supposed, that in the beginning of things, those that
loved were one. Later they were separated. Thereafter they sought the
better half which they had lost. This tradition, possibly Orphic,
Aristophanes took for text and embroidered it with his usual
grotesqueness. But beneath the humor of his illustrations there was an
idea less profound perhaps than delicate. Love, however regarded, may not
improperly be defined as the union of two beings who complete each other
and who, from the stand-point of the Orphic tradition, reciprocally
discover in each other what individually they once had and since have
lacked. On the other hand, it may be that in the symbolism which
Aristophanes employed was an attempt to apply to humanity the theory
which Eryximachus had set forth. At the origin of all things is unity,
which divides and becomes multiple only to return to its primal shape.
Human nature, as masculinely and femininely exemplified, is primitive
unity after division has come, and love is the return to that unity which
in itself is of all things the compelling law. In other words, one is
many, and, love aiding, many are one.

But whatever Aristophanes may have meant, his views were subsidiary. It
was to Socrates that Plato reserved the privilege of penetrating into the
essence of love and of displaying its progressus and consummation. "How
many things that I never thought of," Socrates on reading his own
discourse, exclaimed, "this young man has made me say."

Among them was an exposition of the fundamental law of human nature, the
universal desire for happiness. In the demonstrations that followed good
was shown to be a means to happiness; consequently, every one, loving
happiness, loves good also. In this sense love belongs to all. Every one,
in loving happiness, loves good and craves a perpetual possession of both.
But different minds have different ways of attaining the same end. One man
aspires to happiness through wealth, another through place, a third
through philosophy. These are uninfluenced by Eros. The influence of Eros
is exerted when the perpetual possession of happiness is sought in
immortality.

But life itself comports no continuity. Life is but a succession of
phenomena, of which one departs as another appears, and of which each,
created by what h