understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun,
so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the
supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his
activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that "beauty
is the most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity, and shedding
desire and confidence through the universe, wherever it enters; and
it enters, in some degree, into all things; but that there is another,
which is as much more beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than chaos;
namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto,
but which, could it be seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality."
He has the same regard to it as the source of excellence in works of
art. "When an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that
which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model
of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work; it must follow,
that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which
is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful."

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now
to all the poetry, and to all the sermons of the world, that the love
of the sexes is initial; and symbolizes, at a distance, the passion
of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the
limitation of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;--God only. In
the same mind, he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught;
that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods
are produced to us through mania, and are assigned to us by a divine
gift.