Men had reached that stage of lassitude and of wisdom when one understands perfectly how vain, how unworthy of occupying a thoughtful man, are the vagaries of logic-chopping. There are only two vital forces: ambition and love. Anne of France reckons four: beauty, youth, wealth, and ambition; but these four terms are reducible to the former two. A doctrine of love, therefore, was necessary, and it was discovered in Plato. Thus there were two masters in opposition, Plato and Machiavelli. Plato is as much a poet as a philosopher, as worthy of admiration for his impressions and intuitions as for his ideas. He believes in beauty. It had been said that beauty was of no account, that it had no place in the gospels, that form signified nothing except perhaps by way of symbol, that truth was metaphysical. That error had to be dismissed. Beauty has a real existence, and plays a supreme part in this world. God has not disowned it, Scripture reveals Him as bestowing life bountifully, and as taking pleasure in man as His own image. Plato in effect develops this same theory; what is more, he sings the praises of aestheticism in one of the finest languages ever lisped by human tongue. It was he then who furnished the desired formula. With him, men thought only of loving their fellows, of expelling evil passions by means of pure love. A sweet breath of spring fanned men’s hearts; it was philosophical and Christian. Did Luther conceive a reform as trenchant, as vital as that? Men went back to that blessed time when, without employing the quiddities of the Sorbonne and of German science, Heaven spoke the simple words to us: “Love one another.” They believed they had found the secret of rejuvenescence, of re-birth, and there were men so intoxicated that they went so far as to ask themselves whether Charity countenanced trade or taxes. The whole idea is summed up in a single line: power results in barbarism, civilisation is the product of beauty. This formula suits both strong and weak, everyone, indeed; it belongs neither to men nor to women, hails neither from north nor from south. The northern peoples, however, looking at Plato with a purely philosophical and technical eye, failed to discover it; at Venice, the headquarters of perfect editions of Plato, and at Paris, where he was acclaimed as a prophet, an ancestor of Christianity, where Florentine commentaries on him poured fast from the press, and where even a neglected commentary of Ficino[141] was published, no one dreamed of seeking the recipe for happiness in Plato’s philosophy. So greatly was he distrusted that the Italian Vicomercati, appointed in 1542 to the professorship of philosophy at the College of France, thought it his duty by way of returning thanks to immolate Socrates in his inaugural lecture.