that of love, and it is this divine inspiration that leads him and his beloved towards the good—but only when tempered with self-control. Writing, examined separately but ultimately equated with philosophy and rhetoric, is somewhat deprecated; it is stated that writing can do little but remind those who already know. Unlike dialectic and rhetoric, writing cannot be tailored to specific situations or students; the writer does not have the luxury of examining his reader's soul in order to determine the proper way to persuade. When attacked it cannot defend itself, and is unable to answer questions or refute criticism. As such, the philosopher uses writing "for the sake of amusing himself" and other similar things rather than for teaching others. A writer, then, is only a philosopher when he can himself argue that his writing is of little worth, among other requirements. This final critique of writing with which the dialogue concludes seems to be one of the more interesting facets of the conversation for those who seek to interpret Plato in general; Plato, of course, comes down to us through his numerous written works, and philosophy today is concerned almost purely with the reading and writing of written texts. It seems proper to recall that Plato's ever-present protagonist and ideal man, Socrates, fits Plato's description of the dialectician perfectly, and never wrote a thing. There is an echo of this point of view in the Seventh Letter, wherein Plato (or the pseudo-Platonic author) says not to write down things of importance. Soul: soul-leading; life as self-motion; self-motion and intelligence Jessica Moss has argued that the entire unity of the Phaedrus is assured by the motif of soul-leading. The discussion of rhetoric, for instance, features the orator leading the soul to some decision or course of action. Socrates' great myth illustrates this motif most clearly when the soul is depicted as a charioteer and its horses, being led around a heavenly circuit. This is the occasion for the first appearance in Plato's dialogues of the prominent Platonic doctrine that life is motion: the soul, being the principle (or source) of life, is that which moves itself, as opposed to inanimate objects that require an external source of motion to move them. The view that life is self-motion and that the soul is a self-mover is used by Plato to guarantee the immortality of the soul, making this a novel argument