symposium   

"Well," she said, "I will teach you:-The object which they have in

view is birth in beauty, whether of body or, soul." "I do not

understand you," I said; "the oracle requires an explanation." "I will

make my meaning dearer," she replied. "I mean to say, that all men are

bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a

certain age at which human nature is desirous of

procreation-procreation which must be in beauty and not in

deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and

is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal

principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can

never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and

the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of

parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching

beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign,

and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and

contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up,

and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the

reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming

nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose

approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love,

Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only."

"What then?" "The love of generation and of birth in beauty." "Yes," I

said. "Yes, indeed," she replied. "But why of generation?" "Because to

the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and

immortality," she replied; "and if, as has been already admitted, love

is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily

desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of

immortality."

All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love.

And I remember her once saying to me, "What is the cause, Socrates, of

love, and the attendant desire? See you not how all animals, birds, as

well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they