[Footnote 8: Plato, Sympos. p. 206 A. [Greek: ô(s ou)de/n ge a)/llo e)sti\n ou)= e)rô=sin a)/nthrôpoi ê)\ tou= a)gathou=.]] [Footnote 9: Plato, Sympos. p. 207 C.] [Footnote 10: Plato, Sympos. pp. 207-208.] [Side-note: Desire of mental copulation and procreation, as the only attainable likeness of immortality, requires the sight of personal beauty as an originating stimulus.] The love of immortality thus manifests itself in living beings through the copulative and procreative impulse, which so powerfully instigates living man in mind as well as in body. Beauty in another person exercises an attractive force which enables this impulse to be gratified: ugliness on the contrary repels and stifles it. Hence springs the love of beauty--or rather, of procreation in the beautiful--whereby satisfaction is obtained for this restless and impatient agitation.[11] With some, this erotic impulse stimulates the body, attracting them towards women, and inducing them to immortalise themselves by begetting children: with others, it acts far more powerfully on the mind, and determines them to conjunction with another mind for the purpose of generating appropriate mental offspring and products. In this case as well as in the preceding, the first stroke of attraction arises from the charm of physical, visible, and youthful beauty: but when, along with this beauty of person, there is found the additional charm of a susceptible, generous, intelligent mind, the effect produced by the two together is overwhelming; the bodily sympathy becoming spiritualised and absorbed by the mental. With the inventive and aspiring intelligences--poets like Homer and Hesiod, or legislators like Lykurgus and Solon--the erotic impulse takes this turn. They look about for some youth, at once handsome and improvable, in conversation with whom they may procreate new reasonings respecting virtue and goodness--new excellences of disposition--and new force of intellectual combination, in both the communicants. The attachment between the two becomes so strong that they can hardly live apart: so anxious are both of them to foster and confirm the newly acquired mental force of which each is respectively conscious in himself.[12] [Footnote 11: Plato, Sympos. p. 206 E. [Greek: o(/then dê\ tô=| kuou=nti/ te kai\ ê)/dê spargô=nti pollê\ ê( pto/êsis ge/gone peri\ to\ kalo\n dia\ to\ mega/lês ô)di=nos a)polu/ein to\n e)/chonta. E)sti\ ga\r ou) tou= kalou= o( e)/rôs, a)lla\--tê=s gennê/seôs kai\ tou= to/kou e)n tô=| kalô=|.]] [Footnote 12: Plato, Sympos. p. 209.] [Side-note: Highest exaltation of the erotic impulse in a few privileged minds, when it ascends gradually to the love of Beauty _in genere_. This is the most absorbing sentiment of all.]