was but a preliminary, a finger-post, pointing the way to the perception of perfect beauty.  True virtue is the outcome of profound knowledge; it transforms men into gods.  The purely spiritual woman-worship of the Middle Ages was only another aspect of this yearning to attain to virtue and perfection through the love of an individual.  We must not lose sight of the fact that it was already strongly emphasised and upheld in the Platonic ideal of love.

In the dark excesses of the Mysteries the beauty of the human form counted for nothing; voluptuousness and intoxication ruled.  In the Asiatic cult of the sexes there was no room for beauty, no time for selection.  The Greeks were the discoverers of the beauty of the human form.  Beauty kindled the flame of love in their souls, beauty was the gauge which determined their erotic values.  Their ideal was a kalokagathos, a youth beautiful in body and soul.

In “Phaedros” Plato contrasts with far greater force than in the “Symposium” him “who craves for sensual pleasure like the beasts in the fields” with him “who strives after beauty and perfection.”  To the latter “the face of the beloved is the reflection of the sublimely beautiful.”  He would like to sacrifice to her, as to the immortal gods.  All beautiful bodies represent to him in an increasing measure the idea of the beauty of form, which again is subordinate to the beauty of the soul.  It points the way to metaphysical beauty, the eternal and imperishable idea of mankind.  Socrates could scorn the beauty of the individual because he saw in it merely an imperfect reflection of perfect beauty.  In its truest sense Platonic love is, therefore, impersonal; it is not spiritual love for a human being, but a peculiar characteristic of the Greek cult of beauty.  We shall again meet this principle of beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable property of the human mind.  The striving to rise above all individualism was another ideal which a later period revived.  But the pivot round which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic cult of ideas.  Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose threshold stood universal sexual intercourse, tolerating nothing personal, knowing of no individuals, acknowledging only unchecked, uncontrollable instinct, and whose decline was again characterised by the extreme impersonality of ideas.  It had traversed the path of human existence in a huge cycle.  Starting from an unconscious existence in complete harmony with nature, it had passed through individualised man to the loftiest spiritual conceptions in the impersonal world of ideas.