Socrates. Then, to spare your feelings, let us say no more of this discourse—and yet I think there were many things in it which would be useful examples to consider, though not exactly to imitate—and let us turn to the other discourses; for there was in them, I think, [265a] something which those who wish to investigate rhetoric might well examine.
Phaedrus. What do you mean?
Socrates. The two discourses were opposites; for one maintained that the lover, and the other that the non-lover, should be favored.
Phaedrus. And they did it right manfully.
Socrates. I thought you were going to speak the truth and say “madly”; however, that is just what I had in mind. We said that love was a kind of madness, did we not?
Phaedrus. Yes.
Socrates. And that there are two kinds of madness, one arising from human diseases, and the other from a divine release from the customary habits.
[265b] Phaedrus. Certainly.
Socrates. And we made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysus, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros, we said was the best. We described the passion of love in some sort of figurative manner, expressing some truth, perhaps, and perhaps being led away in another direction, and after composing a somewhat [265c] plausible discourse, we chanted a sportive and mythic hymn in meet and pious strain to the honor of your lord and mine, Phaedrus, Love, the guardian of beautiful boys.
Phaedrus. Yes, and I found it very pleasant to hear.
Socrates. Here let us take up this point and see how the discourse succeeded in passing from blame to praise.
Phaedrus. What do you mean?
Socrates. It seems to me that the discourse was, as a whole, [265d] really sportive jest; but in these chance utterances were involved two principles, the essence of which it would be gratifying to learn, if art could teach it.
Phaedrus. What principles?
Socrates. That of perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain; just as now, in speaking of Love, we said what he is and defined it, whether well or ill. Certainly by this means the discourse acquired clearness and consistency.
Phaedrus. And what is the other principle, Socrates?
[265e] Socrates. That of dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver. As our two discourses just now assumed one common principle, unreason, and then, [266a] just as the body, which is one, is naturally divisible into two, right and left, with parts called by the same names, so our two discourses conceived of madness as naturally one principle within us, and one discourse, cutting off the left-hand part, continued to divide this until it found among its parts a sort of left-handed love, which it very justly reviled, but the other discourse, leading us to the right-hand part of madness, found a love having the same name as the first, [266b] but divine, which it held up to view and praised as the author of our greatest blessings.
Phaedrus. Very true.
Socrates. Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing together, as aids to speech and thought; and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and [12]
walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.