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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: in the perfect beauty of eternal knowledge, beginning with the beauty of
earthly things, and at last reaching a beauty in which all existence is
seen to be harmonious and one. The limited affection is enlarged, and
enabled to behold the ideal of all things. And here the highest summit
which is reached in the Symposium is seen also to be the highest summit
which is attained in the Republic, but approached from another side; and
there is 'a way upwards and downwards,' which is the same and not the same
in both. The ideal beauty of the one is the ideal good of the other;
regarded not with the eye of knowledge, but of faith and desire; and they
are respectively the source of beauty and the source of good in all other
things. And by the steps of a 'ladder reaching to heaven' we pass from
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