religion and feeling, to bring him nearer to us and us to him. Like the
Scriptures, Plato admits of endless applications, if we allow for the
difference of times and manners; and we lose the better half of him when we
regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any ancient work
which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as well as a
literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek writer, the
local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is spiritual and
eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to withdraw from the
received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot separate the
transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the language of irony
into that of plain reflection and common sense. But we can imagine the
mind of Socrates in another age and country; and we can interpret him by
analogy with reference to the errors and prejudices which prevail among
ourselves. To return to the Phaedrus:--

Both speeches are strongly condemned by Socrates as sinful and blasphemous
towards the god Love, and as worthy only of some haunt of sailors to which
good manners were unknown. The meaning of this and other wild language to
the same effect, which is introduced by way of contrast to the formality of
the two speeches (Socrates has a sense of relief when he has escaped from
the trammels of rhetoric), seems to be that the two speeches proceed upon
the supposition that love is and ought to be interested, and that no such
thing as a real or disinterested passion, which would be at the same time
lasting, could be conceived. 'But did I call this "love"? O God, forgive
my blasphemy. This is not love. Rather it is the love of the world. But
there is another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine,
eternal. And this other love I will now show you in a mystery.'

Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other
parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. In all such