True love, according to Plato, takes its beginning in the astonishment or pain at the presentment of the Ideas through remembrance, and the starting-point of Love in an individual is the principle fundamental in pre-existence. The philosophic impulse for the Ideas takes the form of Love, because visible beauty has a special brightness and makes a strong impression on the mind. Love belongs only to mortal natures; for they, since they do not possess the divine unchangeableness, have to propagate themselves continually. Love may be described therefore as the propagative impulse. On the one side it may be viewed as an inspiration from above, springing from the higher, divinely-related nature in man; on the other hand it may be viewed as an aspiration from below of the sensuous and human in man. On this side it is a yearning and not a possession; and it presupposes a want. Analyzed in this way, Love is the middle term between having and not having. It is the union of the higher and lower natures in man, and throughout the universe there stirs this longing for the eternal and imperishable. What is the object of this Love,――of this desire of the finite to fill itself with the eternal and to generate something enduring? That object is the possession of the Good, which is happiness. The possession of the Good is immortality. What is the external condition of Love’s existence? The presence of Beauty; for this alone, by its harmonious form, corresponds to our desire and awakens it. Does this Love appear first in its complete realization? No; there are many kinds of beauty, and Love is as various in degree and kind as beautiful objects. Love rises step by step, and is realized in a graduated series of forms. There is Love for beautiful shapes, sexual love; Love for beautiful souls, and this appears in works of art, education, and legislation; Love for beautiful sciences, the seeking of beauty wherever found; and finally Love for the pure, shapeless, eternal, and unchangeable――the Idea, which is immortality. All else is preliminary to the dialectical knowledge of the Ideas. In all this, man is reaching out from his sense of want for satisfaction, from his poverty to the completed riches of life. Love bears him on from height to height until, in religion and Love of the Good, man gains his immortality. In Platonic Love all kinds of Love have place in pointing the soul onward to the divinely perfect. Yet this Love for the divinely perfect is the soul’s aspiration from the beginning, and all the preliminary stages are only the uncertain attempts to seize the Idea in the copies. Love, therefore, is this universal struggle of the finite to inform itself with the Idea; and delight in any one object of beauty is a stage in the development of this impulse.[32]