In this company, where are assembled the most cultivated of the Athenian citizens, they discuss love and jealousy of a kind that the moral instinct of modern society can with difficulty comprehend.  But these dissertations are of no aid in the solution which I seek.

And yet the spirit of Socrates at times attained to great heights.  He puts into the mouth of a woman of Mantinea the theory which saps the old doctrine and presents monotheism.  It is but one step thence to Christianity, and it was Apollonius of Tyana, disciple of Pythagoras, who established a connection between the idealism of the later Greek philosophy and the spirituality of the new religion taught by Jesus of Nazareth.

Socrates, after a discussion upon those intermediate deities, whom he called daimons, and among whom he places love, assigns to love an origin and strange attributes which, to a certain extent, explain the remarkable workings of this passion at that time.  He at once exalts and seeks to make comprehended the new god—­“Beauty eternal, uncreated and imperishable, a beauty having nothing sensuous, nothing corporeal,—­which exists absolutely and eternally.”  This is all.

Perhaps this ideal of love, as that of philosophy, may have been expressed in the foundation of the religious ideal of Delsarte, but this encounter in the ethereal regions of theology and psychology—­where the human consciousness perceives nothing tangible, and whence it derives only vague aspirations—­implies no knowledge, of anything like a law, a science or a method, such as our artist-innovator of the nineteenth century conceived and taught.

Aristotle, disciple of the founder of the Academy of Athens, divided the sciences into three classes—­logic, philosophy and morals.  Within this classification art is closely bound, but this philosopher made no scientific demonstration of it.  His workings are not those of application and execution.  More than his predecessors, it is true, he considered the human organism and, in this, his conception bears a certain analogy to the system of Delsarte.  Aristotle, as well as Plato, advised the study of nature, and seeking there the elements of the Beautiful; but they had specially in view literature and eloquence.  Further than this, their precepts are counsels and have reference to no definite law.  They have not shown the links of connection between the human faculties and the mechanism which manifests them; they have not taught man the manner of using his organs to express artistically his sensations, emotions and thoughts.

The Greeks had every advantage of models and philosophical schools, in which art was taught.  But they had no school of aesthetics.  Artists of genius taught the schools more than they learned of them; and these artists, so far as I can learn, have left no trace of theoretical works, but, as before written, genius precedes and exemplifies law.  While Plato and Aristotle placed a beacon light upon the road leading to a law, they never touched the goal.  Delsarte proceeded otherwise.  He starts with a principle clearly defined and everything harmonizes with it.