The contrast between systematic, professional, procedure, deliberately taught and consciously acquired, capable of being defended at every step by appeal to intelligible rules founded upon scientific theory, and enabling the person so qualified to impart his qualification to others--and a different procedure purely impulsive and unthinking, whereby the agent, having in his mind a conception of the end aimed at, proceeds from one intermediate step to another, without knowing why he does so or how he has come to do so, and without being able to explain his practice if questioned or to impart it to others--this contrast is a favourite one with Plato. The last-mentioned procedure--the unphilosophical or irrational--he conceives under different aspects: sometimes as a blind routine or insensibly acquired habit,[19] sometimes as a stimulus applied from without by some God, superseding the reason of the individual. Such a condition Plato calls _madness_, and he considers those under it as persons out of their senses. But he recognises different varieties of madness, according to the God from whom it came: the bad madness was a disastrous visitation and distemper--the good madness was a privilege and blessing, an inspiration superior to human reason. Among these privileged madmen he reckoned prophets and poets; another variety under the same genus, is, that mental love, between a well-trained adult, and a beautiful, intelligent, youth, which he regards as the most exalted of all human emotions.[20] In the Ion, this idea of a privileged madness--inspiration from the Gods superseding reason--is applied not only to the poet, but also to the rhapsode who recites the poem, and even to the auditors whom he addresses. The poet receives the inspiration directly from the Gods: he inoculates the rhapsode with it, who again inoculates the auditors--the fervour is, at each successive communication, diminished. The auditor represents the last of the rings; held in suspension, through the intermediate agency of other rings, by the inherent force of the magnet.[21] [Footnote 19: Plato, Phædon, 82 A; Gorgias, 463 A, 486 A.] [Footnote 20: This doctrine is set forth at length by Sokrates in the Platonic Phædrus, in the second discourse of Sokrates about Eros, pp. 244-245-249 D.] [Footnote 21: Plato, Ion, 535 E. [Greek: ou(=to/s e)stin o( theatê\s tô=n daktuli/ôn o( e)/schatos . . . . o( de\ me/sos su\ o( r(apsô|do\s kai\ u(pokritê\s, o( de\ prô=tos, au)to\s o( poiêtê/s.]] [Side-note: Special inspiration from the Gods was a familiar fact in Grecian life. Privileged communications from the Gods to Sokrates--his firm belief in them.]