Before it could be turned to profitable account, platonism thus underwent a long and difficult preparation to bring it into line with the tastes of the day. The work was accomplished in Italy, whence the product was sent to us in a finished state. Good Plato, with his rather old-fashioned eyes, had seen beauty only in man; from one man he passed to the species, then from the species to the soul, that is, to intellectual beauty, which to him appeared the only true beauty. It was necessary to bring this doctrine into line with the practical doctrine of the special attraction exercised on man by the beauty of woman. Now Plato, besides giving man the beauty and woman the love, attributed to love the secondary character of a sensual and egoistic phenomenon in which no spiritual element was discoverable save perhaps the instinct of immortality. Of this very instinct, however, Plato had an imperfect appreciation, for the immortality we might hope to gain by replacing our decayed bodies with the fresh young lives of our offspring, if it serves the interests of the human race, does not much serve those of the individual; at any rate, Plato considered it at once vulgar—everyone or nearly everyone being able to aspire to it—and incomplete, for transmission and conservation of life are not the same thing, and only a person very barren of intellectual resources could content himself with so modest a glimmer of immortality. A man only survives through his thoughts. The last shreds of the thoughts of Homer or Hesiod will live long, and will long cause temples to spring from the earth; what child of flesh and blood is likely to bear his father’s glory thus on through the ages? The earliest interpreters of Plato, Ficino and Politian, had departed with no little timidity from his teaching; the one eclectic and cautious, the other adventurous, they went nevertheless not much beyond formulating a general doctrine of love. Ficino exalted love as the supreme wisdom, the creator and preserver _par excellence_; the link binding earthly things together, and the earth itself with heaven; the inspirer of great deeds and noble thoughts, a necessary element of life. He preached the love of love itself: “The man who loves, loves love above all; love is sufficient unto itself and finds its goal within itself; it is true and good and pure.” But in order to bring himself into conformity with the new spirit, Ficino admitted as derived from Plato (though as a matter of fact it is not to be found in his works)[146] a capital distinction upon which the platonism of the Renaissance was entirely to rest: there are two loves, different in degree, the one heaven-born and fixing its gaze upon heaven, the other born of Jupiter and seeking only to produce a form like him.