"counterpart," literally "symbol." The ancient "symbol," or guage of friendship, was some object cut in twain, one-half being preserved by each of the two partakers in the bond, which served as a memorial of their relation, and sign or pass of recognition.

Returning to Jowett's version, we read:"When one of them finds his other half . . . the pair are lost in an amazement of love, and friendship, and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment; these are they who pass their lives with one another; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of intercourse, but of something else which the soul desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment." [Or, as we may paraphrase from Shelley: :-"The soul of each manifestly thirsts for, from the other, something which there are no words to describe, and divines that which it seeks, and traces obscurely the footsteps of its obscure desire."] "Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair, who are lying side by side, and say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose, further, that when he saw their perplexity, he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always, day and night, to be in one another's company?" Do you not desire the closest union and singleness to exist between you, so that you may never be divided night or day?" Shelley's version.] For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one, and let you

grow together, so that being two, you shall become one, and while you live, live a common life, as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'-there is not a man among them when he heard this who would deny, or who would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting in one another's arms, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love." Or in Shelley's words -"The cause of this desire is, that according to our original nature, we were once entire. The desire and the pursuit of integrity and union is that which we call love. First, as I said, we were entire, but now we have been dwindled through our own weakness."

After another bit of comedy about the danger of the second split, and a basso-relievo order of humanity, slit down the nose and body and making a tally one slice to the other; the great dramatist is represented by Plato as yielding to thoughts more sober and profound:-"Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid the evil and obtain the good, of which love is the lord and leader; and let no one oppose him -he is the enemy of the gods who opposes him. For if we are friends of God and reconciled to him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world." This sounds like Plato's hope, else Aristophanes, when he had put off the comedian, was a religious man underneath.

"I

am serious," he says, "and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun. ... My words have a wider application-they include men and women every where; and I believe that if all of us obtained our love, and each one had his particular beloved, thus returning to his original nature, then our race would be happy. And if this would be best of all, that which would be best under present circumstances would be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial love. Therefore we shall do well to praise the god Love, who is the author of this gift, and who is also our greatest benefactor, leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, that if we are pious he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed.* This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of love, which, although different from yours, I must beg you to leave unassailed by the shafts of your ridicule."

Aristophanes manifests a nervousness, with which we can fully sympathise to-day, at disclosing the soul or making any real revealment of its spiritual depths. We have omitted much of the bouncing revel of comedy in which he covers himself. Jowett comments upon his utterance thus :

"Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than the description of the human monster whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with incredible rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of earnestness in this jest; three serious principles seem to be insinuated :-First, that man can

not exist in isolation; he must be re-united if he is to be perfected; secondly, that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor, divided human nature; thirdly, that the loves of this world are an indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realised."

The friends of Aristophanes do not mock at him, but after some commonplace conversation relieving the tensity of the mind drawn up into its more ideal heights and into a field so important to all conscious of immortal life, one of the banqueters turns to discourse of the divine attributes of love, followed by discussion and

anecdotes. "What then is love?' he asks, reproducing a former conversation. Is he mortal?' 'No.' 'What then?' . . . 'He is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between them.'

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What is he then?' He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.' And what is the nature of this spiritual power?' This is the power which interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and men the commands and rewards of the gods; and this power spans the chasm which divides them, and in this all are bound together, and through this the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices, and mysteries, and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; and through this power all the intercourse and speech of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands. this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts,

is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers_are many and divine, and one of them is love.""

There is a great truth that scientific discoveries have brought in, but which is little realised as yet, that through the love of Nature -her large revelations and her minute communications alike, there is an opening for an expansion of the soul, and a growth of powers at once transcendent and realistic, an acquisition that Plato might fairly have called spiritual.

The theory of the absolute rejunction with the other half is too definite and personal for it to be liked by some minds, and an absent friend of Socrates is represented as having discussed the matter with him,-Diotima, who looks upon the soul as yearning for intellect rather than for reunion, Socrates represents her as having said in converse with himself: "You hear people say that lovers are seeking for the half of themselves, but I say that they are seeking neither for the half nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away, if they are evil; for they love them not because they are their own, but because they are good, and dislike them, not because they are another's but because they are evil. There is nothing which men love but the good. Do you think that there is ?' 'Indeed,' I answered, 'I should say not.' 'Then,' she said, ⚫ the conclusion of the whole matter is, that men love the good.' 'Yes,' I said. 'To which may be added that they love the possession of the good?' 'Yes, that may be added.' 'And not only the possession, but the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That may be added too.' 'Then love,' she said, 'may be described

In her transcendentalism she somewhat refines away, as too intellectual a woman would be apt to do, the definite though confused legend of Aristophanes, refusing to regard the unifying instinct as a law antecedent to the ambition after that precarious immortality which is gained by baving founded a family or dynasty, or as a light on the way towards a true creativeness and immortality of soul:"Men whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and beget children-this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But creative souls-for there are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies-conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or retain. And what are these conceptions ?-wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are all poets and other artists who may be said to have invention." We cite these passages as specimens of that favourite kind of transcendentalism that tries to reach heaven through some other way than the real gate of practical life entrusted to us. She would climb towards the absolute, and in the grand passion of ideality discard the slow processes of completion, such as old revelations told of. But the following, especially in the reference to the beauties of earth as steps leading upwards, has much of noble conception.

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of

wondrous beauty ... absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution, and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who under the influence of true love rising upward from these begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end. (Consummation, fulness, completion.) And the true order of going or being led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates,' said the stranger of Mantineia, 'is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once behold, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty— the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colours and vanities of human life-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringing into being and educating true creations of virtue and not idols only. Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality, and bringing forth and educating true virtue to become the friend of God

and be immortal, if mortal man may. may. Would that be an ignoble life?'"

Aristophanes was about beginning a reply, probably more rudely philosophical and suggestive than smoothly transcendental, for the account of Socrates of Diotima's conversation had included a reference to the very legend of the other half which the poet had himself introduced. But as, instead of merely joining in with the praises of the others, he was endeavouring to speak, there burst into the room, so Plato represents, a crowd of revellers, and though a speech follows from Alcibiades, who entered, somewhat the worse for wine, yet Aristophanes loses his opportunity.

From the Phædrus may be taken a passage to complete the train of thought suggested by Aristophanes.

It is of the soul, pre-existent to incarnation, or the fall, and Plato speaks (through the mouth of Socrates) in a parable, as the most fitting medium :-"Her form is a theme of divine and large discourse; human language may, however, speak of this briefly, and in a figure. Let our figure be of a composite nature-a pair of winged horses and a charioteer." One of these horses is well

conditioned, " erect and well formed; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose, and his colour is white, and he has dark eyes and is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs not the touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. Whereas the other is a large misshapen animal, put together anyhow; he has a strong, short neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, grey-eyed and bloodshot, the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared, deaf, hardly yielding

to blow or spur." Jowett, in his introduction to Phædrus, very fairly submits that "the charioteer represents the reason, or that the black horse is the symbol of the sensual or concupiscent element of human nature. The white horse also represents rational impulse the two steeds really correspond in a figure more nearly to the appetitive and moral or semirational soul of Aristotle."

This soul, then, according to our text, is sometimes unable to follow the vision of absolute truth and beauty of which she is in quest; and, through some ill-hap, sinks beneath the load of forgetfulness and vice. She then falls to earth with draggled wings, and mingling therewith passes into man.

Dif

ferent is her earthly condition according to her degree in the vision of truth. Philosopher, trader, prophet, poet, artisan, sophist, tyrant, and others, "all these are states of probation, in which he who lives righteously improves, and he who lives unrighteously deteriorates his lot." There is a period, foolishly made definite by our philosophic friends and reckoned in mundane time, before the soul can grow again the wonder of her wings; she may cling in recollection to those things in which God abides, desirous to fly upwards, but yet unable. "Every soul of man has beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all men do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate when they fell to earth, and may have lost the memory of the holy things which which they saw there through some evil and corrupting association. Few there are who retain the remembrance of them sufficiently; and they, when they behold any image of that other

world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this means, because they have no clear perceptions." Socrates might have instanced sleep here as an equal instance of such forgetfulness; into the physically expressible comes no whisper from the memories of the soul in the openings of the deepest sleep. At last the return comes to that state of divine beauty whence have stolen such stray "misgivings": "At last they pass out .... for those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth, but they live in light always; happy companions in their pilgrimage, and when the time comes at which they receive their wings they have the same plumage because of their love."

An exquisite picture, not realised as Diotima would have it, by an intellectual agony after the beautiful, but by living on till "the time comes." A Frenchman (Gustave Droz) has wisely observed, "In trying to fabricate angels one runs a great risk of crippling people, and of only producing monsters, madmen, or victims." Like all else of life we know of, angels are not manufactured, they grow. But the logical mind might naturally rejoin, We have but just been told that we were angels once, and have fallen to be but separate, incomplete halves. Can these conflictions be reconciled? As that reconcilement involves the appreciation of the whole secret of creation, which we do not pretend to be in possession of, we can only in reverent speculation contribute towards it. The new born unfallen angel, fresh from God's hand and living from His heart, is one by love, but that love is baby love, trusting but untried. As the child of earth leaving its mother gains knowledge and