for the pleasure of the senses and the propagation of the race.  Plato’s theory of ideas is the philosophical victory of the male-spiritual principle over nature, matter and their warden:  woman. (Perhaps it is even the revenge of the Greek genius for man’s original enslavement.) “Love between men,” continues the seer, “forms a stronger tie, a closer friendship, than love between parents and children; it has a mutual share in children which are immortal and far more beautiful than the children of men.”  She teaches Socrates that this noble love is at the root of all the magnificent creations of the spirit, as carnal love is the origin of human life.  “Until he becomes aware that the beauty of all bodies is closely related, a man must love an individual with all his heart.  If a man will follow after beauty, he is foolish not to conceive the beauty of all bodies as one and the same.  As soon as he has learned this, he will become a lover of all beautiful forms; his fervent passion for one will diminish, he will scorn the individual and hold it cheap.”

With the Hellenic homosexuality an element foreign and even hostile to the original and natural bi-sexual sensuality crept into the erotic life of the human race; it found its classical representation in the Platonic dialogues “Symposium” and “Phaedros.”  In conscious opposition to all sexuality Platonic love (what is usually called Platonic love is based on an obstinate misunderstanding) turns to the purely spiritual, that is to say, the conceptions of truth, beauty and goodness; it is a yearning for the supernatural, and it knows itself as the path to it.  In the mutual love of all noble souls lies the germ of all higher things; it is the way to the gods of light which, in this connection, are conceived philosophically as ideas, though in the true Hellenic spirit as objective ideas, the prototypes and culminations of everything human.  To grasp the meaning of Platonic love it is essential to realise that—­unlike the spiritual woman-worship peculiar to the Middle Ages—­it is not a personal feeling of one individual for another; platonically speaking, the love for an individual is only a first stage; the path which leads to the love of beauty and the eternal ideas.  The characteristic of this metaphysical love which Plato was the first to conceive, was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an individual.  The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception of love.  Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own being.  It had an alien purpose:  the knowledge of things divine, by a later period Christianised and understood as the divine mysteries.  To Plato, the essence and climax of antique, ante-Christian culture, every individual, even the beloved mistress,