It is such an alternation as this, ceaseless, rhythmic, which
constitutes the upward life of the soul: that life of which the wise
woman of Mantineia told Socrates that it might be learned through
faithful and strenuous search for ever widening kinds of beauty, the
"life above all," in the words of Diotima, "which a man should live."
The life which vibrates for ever between being better and conceiving
of something better still; between satisfaction in harmony and craving
for it. The life whose rhythm is that of happiness actual and
happiness ideal, alternating for ever, for ever pressing one another
into being, as the parts of a fugue, the dominant and the tonic.
Being, becoming; becoming, being; idealising, realising; realising,
idealising.