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Yet if we look somewhat further we shall see that all that is said in these chapters stands in a very close relation indeed to the main subject of the Ethics and forms the natural sequel to the discussion of the Intellectual Virtues, and especially of Prudence or Moral Insight, after which it comes in the text. In discussing Prudence, we saw that man's highest practical good is realized in the life of the citizen who not only reflects but understands the moral order of which he is a part How is this understanding to be attained? Knowledge such as can be imparted by teaching we have seen is of little or no avail. The life of contemplation or reflection, which might be supposed to lead to it, is only possible as a development of this earlier form of wisdom, which it therefore presupposes. Moral insight must spring, if it springs at all, from moral experience from faithfulness to the actual requirements of the moral life. So much we know, but we may go on to ask for some more precise account of the kind of experience by which, under the conditions of ordinary life, this moral awakening may be expected to take place. Whence_in_detail this birth into the higher knowledge, this more vivid sense of the spirit's life?

The chapters before us are really an answer to this question. So far as it is possible to fix on any one principle to which may be assigned the function of mediating between conventional obedience to law and true moral insight, that principle is Friendship. To explain how it does so is the object of Books VIII. and IX., the conclusion of which may here be summed

up in a word. (1) The interchange of social service when suffused with private affection comes home to us as a part of our real life in a way it cannot when it takes place between strangers. Here, as elsewhere, "Love lends a precious seeing to the soul."

(2) A friend is a second self, and by holding the mirror up to nature enables us to realize more fully what we ourselves truly are. In these two ways, first (to repeat) by offering a field where the virtues appear with the glow of feeling upon them, and therefore at their best); secondly, by putting us at a point of view from which we can appreciate their true beauty and value, Friendship has its place defined as the mise en scène to use Professor Stewart's happy phraseof the practical reason.

§ 2. The Natural Roots of Friendship.

[VIII. c. i. § 3.1

The reader is probably familiar, at least in outline, with the Platonic conception of Friendship, which has in fact passed into the currency of ordinary thought and proverb. Its main features are to be gathered from the popular dialogues-the Lysis, Symposium, Phædrus, Republic. It would appear at first, indeed, as though there were little connexion between the glow and mysticism of these dialogues and the chapters before us, in which, with all their beauty and underlying enthusiasm, we seem to have the essence of common sense. Yet in all its essential features Aristotle's teaching on this subject is the same as Plato's.

He commences by noting that the principle of friendship has its roots in the natural instinct of kinship, showing itself even in the Tower animals, in the attachment not only of parent to offspring, but of members of the same species to one another. The view that man is by nature the friend of man, the exact contrary, it will be noted, of that of Hobbes,* which has been the starting-point of so much of our modern political philosophy, had already been stated by Plato, who found the deepest form of it in the attachment of the opposite sexes and the family affection that flows from it. Plato, however, had gone further, and made the characteristic suggestion that this "mystery of love" has its real roots in the desire of self-perpetuation, or, as he expresses it, of immortality. "Marvel not at this," says Diotima to Socrates, "if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have already admitted; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal, and this is only to be attained by generation, because the new is always left in the place of the old. . . . And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not, then, at the love which all men have of their offspring, for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality."† Applying this principle to

Homo homini lupus.

† Symposium, 207 and 208 (Jowett's tr. is used with slight alterations in these quotations).

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friendship proper, Plato finds an illustration of it in the great historic acts of friendship. "Do you imagine," continues Diotima, "that Alcestis would have died on behalf of Admetus, or Achilles to do honour to Patroclus, or your own Codrus to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues which is still retained among us would be immortal? Nay, I am persuaded that all men do all things for the sake of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; and the better they are, the more they desire it, for they are ravished with the desire of the immortal."

§ 3. Friendship as the Basis of Political Union.

[VIII. c. i. § 4.]

It is only a further extension of the same idea in Plato when it is explained that love or friendship so understood is the principle by which States are founded and perpetuated. Thus it is pointed out in the passage from which the above quotations are taken, that while the animals, and man so far as he is animal, find immortality in the transmission of their bodily forms, the human soul finds it in the transmission of its own character and actions. Thus it is that great legislators, such as Solon and Lycurgus, have been moved by the desire to raise up a spiritual seed who shall hand on, not only their name and fame, but that form of wisdom "which is concerned with the ordering of states or families." It is, however, (in the Republic that Plato recognizes in greatest detail.

the significance of friendship as the bond of union in society. The whole system of social and political organization which is there sketched has indeed for its single object the creation of a spirit of friendship among the citizens, and the regulation of those forms of it upon which the future of the state depends.*

Aristotle is only following in the same lines when he emphasizes the importance of friendship as a bond of civic life (VIII. c. i. § 4). He even seems to go a step further. While Plato had insisted that friendship of the right sort could only develop upon a basis of law and justice, Aristotle seems to suggest that it may be a substitute for them "If citizens be friends, there is no need of justice; whereas if they are just they still need friendship as well." Students of the history of Greek philosophy have even seen in these words an anticipation of the Epicurean philosophy of the next generation, in which this step was actually taken, and "Societies of Friends" substituted for legal and political associations. (But this is very far from Aristotle's meaning, as is subsequently made clear in c. ix., which must be taken along with what is here said.

In the latter passage it is shown that friendship tends to follow the line of the various modes in which the citizens group themselves for social purposes, and that, in addition to the division of friendship into different kinds according to the "object" aimed at, we have another according to the social function it subserves. Aristotle does not propose to substitute the

*See especially Rep. V. 462 foll.

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