and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that
personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on
to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in
love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave
mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea
of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in
boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong,
and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the
science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me
your very best attention:

'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature which
in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and
waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at
one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in
another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to
others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the
bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any
other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in
any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting,
which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted
to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who
from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive
that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or
being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties
of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these
as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair