There is at first, as in every virulent malady, a period of incubation; the new idea passes and repasses in the vague reveries of the enfeebled consciousness; then seems for a few days to have disappeared and to leave the mind to recover from its passing trouble. But the idea has done its work below the surface; it has become strong enough to shake the body; and to provoke movements whose origin lies outside the primary consciousness. What is the surprise of a sensible man when he finds himself piteously returning beneath the windows of his charmer, whither his wandering feet have taken him without his knowledge;--or when in the midst of his daily work he hears his lips murmuring perpetually the well-known name!... Such is passion in its reality; not as idealised by fantastic description, but reduced to its essential psychological characteristics. (_L'Automatisme Psychologique_, p. 466.) On the other side I will appeal to Plato himself, giving a brief sketch merely of one of the leading passages (_Symposium_, 192-212) where the Platonic conception of love is set forth.[38] Plato begins by recognising, as fully as pessimist or cynic could do, the absolute inadequacy of what is called on earth the satisfaction of this profound desire. Lovers who love aright will feel that no physical nearness can content them, but what _will_ content them they cannot say. "Their soul," says Plato, "is manifestly desiring something else; and what it is she cannot tell, only she darkly prophesies thereof and guesses it from afar. But if Hephæstus with his forging fire were to stand beside that pair and say: 'Is this what ye desire--to be wholly one? to be together by night and day?--for I am ready to melt you together and to make you grow in one, so that from two ye shall become one only, and in this life shall be undivided, and dying shall die together, and in the underworld shall be a single soul';--there is no lover who would not eagerly accept the offer, and acknowledge it as the expression of the unknown yearning and the fulfilment of the ancient need." And through the mouth of Diotima, Plato insists that it is an unfailing sign of true love that its desires are _for ever_; nay, that love may be even defined as the desire of the _everlasting_ possession of the good. And in all love's acts he finds the impress of man's craving for immortality,--for immortality whose only visible image for us on earth is the birth of children to us as we ourselves decay,--so that when the slow self-renewal of our own everchanging bodies has worn out and ceased, we may be renewed in brighter, younger bodies which we desire to be born to us from whomsoever we find most fair. "And then," says Plato, rising, as ever, from visible to invisible things, "if active _bodies_ have so strong a yearning that an endless series of lovely images of themselves may constitute, as it were, an earthly