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....

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
forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices
to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of