"The true order of going or being led by another to the things of love is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. "What if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life--thither looking and holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringing into being and educating true creations of virtue, and not idols only? Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality,--and will be enabled, bringing forth and educating true virtue, to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may." [1] It is largely to Plato that we owe the idea of immortality as it exists in the mind of the civilized world to-day. The belief in a continued existence beyond death is much older; it is seen in the Iliad, where the appearance of the dead Patroclus to Achilles in a dream is accepted as the assurance of a shadowy and forlorn hereafter; and in the Odyssey the visit of the hero to the land of shades is portrayed with a free and gloomy imagination. It was a belief which among the earlier Greeks had little power either to console or to guide. In the age of Socrates, it seems to have signified little in the minds of the orthodox and pious. The great tragedians, who sublimate the popular mythology, for the most part regard the after-life as only a sad inevitable sequel; and to be snatched back from it for even a brief reprieve, like Alkestis, is miraculous good fortune. The greatest of the tragedians in his highest reach, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, invests the departure of the hero, who has been purified by suffering, with a mystic radiance, a "light that never was on sea or land," the promise as it were of some future too sublime for mortal words. But the philosophy of Socrates was directed rather to the clear penetration of the method and secret of earthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter. It is noticeable that Xenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of the best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the charge of irreligion,--Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life and death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed the idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle, superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its servant or master--a principle which manifests itself in thought,