THREE: Above all, he exclaims, we must not fail to notice what effect this doctrine has on the minds of those whom they have persuaded to despise the world and all that it contains. Of the two chief methods for attaining the supreme good, one has sensual pleasure for its end, the other virtue, the effort after which begins and ends with God. Epicurus, by his denial of providence, leaves us no choice but to pursue the former. But this doctrine [Gnosticism], involving as it does a still more insolent denial of divine order and human law, laughs to scorn what has always been the accepted ideal of conduct, and, in its rage against beauty, abolishes temperance and justicethe justice that is associated with natural feeling and perpetuated by discipline and reasonalong with every other ennobling virtue. So, in the absence of true morality, they are given over to pleasure and utility and selfish isolation from other menunless, indeed, their nature is better than their principles. They have an ideal that nothing here below can satisfy, and so they put off the effort for its attainment to a future life, whereas they should begin at once, and prove that they are of divine race by fulfilling the duties of their present state. For virtue is the condition of every higher aspiration, and only to those who disdain sensual enjoyment is it given to understand the divine. How far our opponents are from realising this is proved by their349 total neglect of ethical science. They neither know what virtue is, nor how many virtues there are, nor what ancient philosophy has to teach us on the subject, nor what are the methods of moral training, nor how the soul is to be tended and cleansed. They tell us to look to God; but merely saying this is useless unless they can tell us what the manner of the looking is to be. For it might be asked, what is to prevent us from looking to God, while at the same time freely indulging our sensual appetites and angry passions. Virtue perfected, enlightened, and rooted in the soul, will reveal God to us, but without it he will remain an empty name.521So far, however, we only stand on the threshold of Platonic love. The earthly passion, being itself a kind of generalisation, is our first step in the ascent to that highest stage of existence where wisdom and virtue and happiness are onethe good to which all other goods are related as means to an end. But love is not only an introduction to philosophy, it is a type of philosophy itself. Both are conditions intermediate between vacuity and fulfilment; desire being by its very nature dis218satisfied, and vanishing at the instant that its object is attained. The philosopher is a lover of wisdom, and therefore not wise; and yet not wholly ignorant, for he knows that he knows nothing. Thus we seem to be thrown back on the standpoint of Platos earliest agnosticism. Nevertheless, if the Symposium agrees nominally with the Apologia, in reality it marks a much more advanced point of speculation. The idea of what knowledge is has begun to assume a much clearer expression. We gather from various hints and suggestions that it is the perception of likeness; the very process of ascending generalisation typified by intellectual love.