LOVE IS RECOGNITION OF HIDDEN AFFINITY.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Plotinus and Guthrie, Kenneth Sylvan
The real cause of love is fourfold: the desire of beauty; our soul's innate notion of beauty; our soul's affinity with beauty, and our soul's instinctive sentiment of this affinity.116 (Therefore as beauty lies at the root of love, so) ugliness is contrary to nature and divinity. In fact, when Nature wants to create, she contemplates what is beautiful, determinate, and comprehended within the (Pythagorean) "sphere" of the Good. On the contrary, the (Pythagorean) "indeterminate"115 is ugly, and belongs to the other system.117 Besides, Nature herself owes her origin to the Good, and, therefore, also to the Beautiful. Now, as soon as one is attracted by an object, because one is united to it by a secret affinity, he experiences for the images of this object a sentiment of sympathy. We could not explain its origin, or assign its cause on any other hypothesis, even were we to limit ourselves to the consideration of physical love. Even this kind of love is a desire to procreate beauty,118 for it would be absurd to insist that that Nature, which aspires to create beautiful things, should aspire to procreate that which is ugly.