For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me, the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses. Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, shoudl appear to us through the sense? Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus? Thus, beauty is the sensitive man’s access to the spirit — but only a road, a means simply, little Phaedrus. . . . And then this crafty suitor made the neatest remark of all; it was this, that the lover is more divine than the beloved, since the god is in the one, but not in the other — perhaps the most delicate, the most derisive thought that has ever been framed, and the one from which spring all the cunning and the profoundest pleasures of desire.