be added that they love the possession of the good?' 'Yes, that must be
added.' 'And not only the possession, but the everlasting possession of
the good?' 'That must be added too.' 'Then love,' she said, 'may be
described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?'
'That is most true.'

'Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further,' she said,
'what is the manner of the pursuit? what are they doing who show all this
eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is the object which they
have in view? Answer me.' 'Nay, Diotima,' I replied, 'if I had known, I
should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither should I have come to
learn from you about this very matter.' 'Well,' she said, 'I will teach
you:--The object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of
body or soul.' 'I do not understand you,' I said; 'the oracle requires an
explanation.' 'I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. 'I mean to
say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their
souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of
procreation--procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and
this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for
conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature,
and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always
inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then,
is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and
therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and
diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of
ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away,
and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this
is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming
nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose
approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is