as gone before, creates that which ensues, the result
being that, though from womb to tomb a man be called the same, never,
either mentally or physically, is he. The constant disintegration and
renovation of tissues correspond with the constant flux and reflux of
sensations, emotions, thoughts. The man of this instant perishes. He is
replaced by a new one during the next. That proposition true of the
individual is equally true of the species, continuance of either being
secured only through reproduction. The love of immortality manifests
itself therefore through the reproductive impulse. Beauty, in another,
exercises an attractive force that enables a gratification of the impulse
which ugliness arrests. Hence comes the love of beauty. In some, it
stimulates the body, attracting them to women and inducing them to
perpetuate themselves through the production of children. In others, it
stimulates the mind, inducing the creation of children such as Lycurgus
left to Sparta, Solon to Athens, Homer and Hesiod to humanity, children
that built them temples which women-born offspring could not erect.

These are the lesser mysteries of love. The higher mysteries, then
unveiled, disclose a dialectic ladder of which the first rung touches
earth, the last the divine. To mount from one to the other, love should
rise as does the mind which from hypothesis to hypothesis reaches truth.
In like manner, love, mounting from form to form, reaches the primordial
principle from which all beauty proceeds. The rightful order of going
consists in using earthly beauties as ascending steps, passing from one
fair form to all fair forms, from fair forms to beautiful deeds, from
beautiful deeds to beautiful conceptions, until from beautiful conceptions
comes the knowledge of beauty supreme.

"There," Socrates continued, "is the home of every science and of all
philosophy. It is not, though, initiation's final stage. The heart
requires more. Drawn by the power of love, it cannot rest in a sphere of
abstraction. It must go higher, higher yet, still higher to the ultimate
degree where it unites with beauty divine."

That union which is the true life is not, Socrates explained,
annihilation, nor is it unity, or at least not unity which excludes
division. The lover and the beloved are distinct. They are two and yet but
one, wedded in immaculate beauty.

"If anything," Socrates concluded, "can lend value to life it is the
spectacle of that beauty, pure,