' 'I do not understand you,' I said; 'the oracle requires an
explanation.' 'I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. 'I mean to
say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their
souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of
procreation--procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and
this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for
conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature,
and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always
inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then,
is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and
therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and
diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of
ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away,
and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this
is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming
nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose
approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail.
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