TWO:They took me to two officers who stood near the bridge, and told them that I "pretended" to be a Netherland journalist. Having proved this by my papers, the officers gave me an escort of three men, who conducted me to the bridge-commander, on the other side of the Meuse.It is evident that what Plotinus says about beauty and love was suggested by the well-known passages on the same subject in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. His analysis of aesthetic emotion has, however, a much more abstract and metaphysical character than that of his great model. The whole fiction of an antenatal existence is quietly let drop. What the sight of sensible beauty awakens in a philosophic soul is not the memory of an ideal beauty beheld in some other world, but the consciousness of its own idealising activity, the dominion which it exercises over unformed and fluctuating matter. And, in all probability, Plato meant no more than thisin fact he hints as much elsewhere,433but he was not able or did not choose to express himself with such unmistakable clearness.
TWO:CHAPTER XXVII. COMPOUND HAMMERS.
