66 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



did Plato for the passions of men — he refined and 

 embellished them. The germ of the so-called platonic 

 love is to be found in Plato's treatise of The Banquet, 

 a series of dissertations upon love, supposed to be 

 delivered by Socrates, Aristophanes, and other dis- 

 tinguished guests at the dinner-table. Here the 

 contemplation of beauty of form leads to the contem- 

 plation of beauty of ideas ; finally the mind is invited 

 to pass to the pure conception of the beautiful, that 

 is to say, to beauty divested of all perishable attri- 

 butes, such as age, country, or sex, — beauty as an 

 ideal, possessing neither form nor substance, and 

 knowing neither growth nor decay. This sort of 

 beauty is of course a mere abstract principle, and 

 were platonic love concerned with nothing more 

 practical than that, it would never have found a place 

 in modern sociology. Plato's idea was discussed by 

 other philosophers, but it never entered into Greek 

 poetry or drama, and never influenced the course of 

 Greek life. It needed a different soil from that of 

 Greece in order to bear fruit ; and the true sphere of 

 its action proved to be Christianity and chivalry. 

 The Christian fathers were admirers of the platonic 

 philosophy, in which they discerned many of the 

 elements of Christianity, this very conception of the 



