Respecting the Beautiful, I transcribe here a passage from Ficinus, in his Argument prefixed to the Hippias Major, p. 757. “Unumquodque è singulis pulchris, pulchrum hoc Plato vocat: formam in omnibus, pulchritudinem; speciem et ideam supra omnia, ipsum pulchrum. Primum sensus attingit opinioque. Secundum ratio cogitat. Tertium mens intuetur.
“Quid ipsum Bonum? Ipsum rerum omnium principium, actus purus, actus sequentia cuncta vivificans. Quid ipsum Pulchrum? Vivificus actus e primo fonte bonorum effluens, Mentem primo divinam idearum ordine infinité decorans, Numina deinde sequentia mentesque rationum serie complens, Animas tertio numerosis discursibus ornans, Naturas quarto seminibus, formis quinto materiam.”
All men love Good, as the means of Happiness, but they pursue it by various means. The name Eros is confined to one special case of this large variety.
Such is Plato’s conception of Eros or Love and its object. He represents it as one special form or variety of the universal law of gravitation pervading all mankind. Every one loves, desires, or aspires to happiness: this is the fundamental or primordial law of human nature, beyond which we cannot push enquiry. Good, or good things, are nothing else but the means to happiness:[7] accordingly, every man, loving happiness, loves good also, and desires not only full acquisition, but perpetual possession of good. In this wide sense, love belongs to all human beings: every man loves good and happiness, with perpetual possession of them — and nothing else.[8] But different men have different ways of pursuing this same object. One man aspires to good or happiness by way of money-getting, another by way of ambition, a third by gymnastics — or music — or philosophy. Still no one of these is said to love, or to be under the influence of Eros. That name is reserved exclusively for one special variety of it — the impulse towards copulation, generation, and self-perpetuation, which agitates both bodies and minds throughout animal nature. Desiring perpetual possession of good, all men desire to perpetuate themselves, and to become immortal. But an individual man or animal cannot be immortal: he can only attain a quasi-immortality by generating a new individual to replace himself.[9] In fact even mortal life admits no continuity, but is only a succession of distinct states or phenomena: one always disappearing and another always appearing, each generated by its antecedent and generating its consequent. Though a man from infancy to old age is called the same, yet he never continues the same for two moments together, either in body or mind. As his blood, flesh, bones, &c., are in perpetual disappearance and renovation, always coming and going — so likewise are his sensations, thoughts, emotions, dispositions, cognitions, &c. Neither mentally nor physically does he ever continue the same during successive instants. The old man of this instant perishes and is replaced by a new man during the next.[10] As this is true of the individual, so it is still more true of the species: continuance or immortality is secured only by perpetual generation of new individuals.
[7] Plato, Sympos. pp. 204-205. Φέρε, ὁ ἐρῶν τῶν ἀγαθῶν, τί ἐρᾷ; Γενέσθαι, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, αὐτῷ. Καὶ τί ἔσται ἐκείνῳ ᾧ ἂν γένηται τἀγαθά; Τοῦτ’ εὐπορώτερον, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ἔχω ἀποκρίνασθαι, ὅτι εὐδαίμων ἔσται. Κτήσει γάρ, ἔφη, ἀγαθῶν, οἱ εὐδαίμονες εὐδαίμονες· Καὶ οὐκέτι προσδεῖ ἐρέσθαι, ἵνα τί δὲ βούλεται εὐδαίμων εἶναι ὁ βουλόμενος, ἀλλὰ τέλος δοκεῖ ἔχειν ἡ ἀπόκρισις.… Ταύτην δὴ τὴν βούλησιν καὶ τὸν ἔρωτα τοῦτον, πότερα κοινὸν εἶναι πάντων ἀνθρώπων, καὶ πάντας τἀγαθὰ βούλεσθαι αὐτοῖς εἶναι ἀεί, ἢ πῶς λέγεις; Οὕτως, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, κοινὸν εἶναι πάντων.
[8] Plato, Sympos. p. 206 A. ὡς οὐδέν γε ἄλλο ἐστὶν οὖ ἐρῶσιν ἄνθρωποι ἢ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ.
[9] Plato, Sympos. p. 207 C.
[10] Plato, Sympos. pp. 207-208.
Desire of mental copulation and procreation, as the only attainable likeness of immortality, requires the sight of personal beauty as an originating stimulus.
The love of immortality thus manifests itself in living beings through the copulative and procreative impulse, which so powerfully instigates living man in mind as well as in body. Beauty in another person exercises an attractive force which enables this impulse to be gratified: ugliness on the contrary repels and stifles it. Hence springs the love of beauty — or rather, of procreation in the beautiful — whereby satisfaction is obtained for this restless and impatient agitation.[11] With some, this erotic impulse stimulates the body, attracting them towards women, and inducing them to immortalise themselves by begetting children: with others, it acts far more powerfully on the mind, and determines them to conjunction with another mind for the purpose of generating appropriate mental offspring and products. In this case as well as in the preceding, the first stroke of attraction arises from the charm of physical, visible, and youthful beauty: but when, along with this beauty of person, there is found the additional charm of a susceptible, generous, intelligent mind, the effect produced by the two together is overwhelming; the bodily sympathy becoming spiritualised and absorbed by the mental. With the inventive and aspiring intelligences — poets like Homer and Hesiod, or legislators like Lykurgus and Solon — the erotic impulse takes this turn. They look about for some youth, at once handsome and improvable, in conversation with whom they may procreate new reasonings respecting virtue and goodness — new excellences of disposition — and new force of intellectual combination, in both the communicants. The attachment between the two becomes so strong that they can hardly live apart: so anxious are both of them to foster and confirm the newly acquired mental force of which each is respectively conscious in himself.[12]