Elucidations on the Banquet of the Ten Virgins
(Convivium decem virginum)
I.
(We here behold only shadows, etc., p. 335.)
Schleiermacher, 1 in commenting on Plato's Symposium, remarks: "Even natural birth (i.e., in Plato's system) was nothing but a reproduction of the same eternal form and idea....The whole discussion displays the gradation, not only from that pleasure which arises from the contemplation of personal beauty through that which every larger object, whether single or manifold, may occasion, to that immediate pleasure of which the source is in the Eternal Beauty," etc. Our author ennobles such theorizing by mounting up to the great I Am.
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Introduction to the Dialogues, etc., Dobson's translation, Cambridge, 1836. ↩