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[206c] “‘Let me put it more clearly,’ she said. ‘All men are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and in soul: on reaching a certain age our nature yearns to beget. This it cannot do upon an ugly person, but only on the beautiful: the conjunction of man and woman is a begetting for both.1 It is a divine affair, this engendering and bringing to birth, an immortal element in the creature that is mortal; and it cannot occur in the discordant.


1 The argument requires the application of “begetting” and other such terms indifferently to either sex.

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