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subjective principle of private friendship for more "objective" bonds of union. These rest upon human needs as essential as that of friendship itself. The sentence in chapter i. is only Aristotle's way of saying that no system of law and politics, however perfect in theory, can work in practice which is not the expression of the personal good-will of the citizens to one another. Even business "contracts," although usually supposed to lie outside the sphere of sentiment, depend for their due fulfilment upon feelings of friendship and co-operation, which have their source in an underlying sense that the parties to the bargain are something more to one another than contractors in a money transaction, and have an interest in a common good which is not exhausted by it.*

§ 4. Friendship as a Means of Individual

Perfection.

[IX. c. ix. §§ 1 foll.]

But friendship is not only the bond of social union, it is also the bond of individual perfection. It is in the development of this point that the inwardness of Aristotle's doctrine, and its essential agreement with Plato's, comes most fully into view.

We have seen how, according to Plato, friendship has its roots in the love of a man for himself, and the consequent desire for immortality But there is a deeper longing still in every man, of which this desire of self-perpetuation is only a reflection. It is not really himself that he desires, but good.

* On the function of justice in the State, see Note A, fin.

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hear people say that lovers are seeking for the half of themselves; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away if they are evil, for they love them not because they are their own, but because they are good; and dislike them not because they are another's, but because they are evil. There is nothing which men love but the good.". But there is no true good but goodness and beauty and the question that is always uppermost in Plato's mind is how a man is to be trained in the love of these His answer, as is well known, is: through the love or friendship of companions whose souls are good and beautiful Attracted to them at first by some accidental or superficial quality such as physical beauty, the soul is led on from beauty of form to beauty of action, and from beauty of action to beauty of character and ideas, to understand what beauty itself means. order of going or being led to the things of love," he says, in a passage which sums up the whole of his teaching on this head, "is for a man to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms. to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is." †

\* Symposium,. 205.

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+ Ibid. 211.

Stripped of its mysticism and "flamboyancy," we have essentially the same doctrine in the sections before us. Aristotle develops what he has to say upon the ethical function of friendship in the form of an answer to the question whether the happy man needs friends (IX. c. ix.): if happiness consists in being provided with all good things, what is there which the happy man lacks that a friend can give? to say that he needs friends is to say that his happiness is incomplete. But this is to take a superficial view of the use of friends. It is true that there is a sense in which friendship witnesses to human weakness and imperfection. As Love,

according to Plato, is the child of Poros and Penia (Plenty and Want), so Aristotle tells us the gods have no need of friends. But the need to which friendship answers is not of something external to a man, such as pleasure or profit. It is a need which is bound up with his nature as man viz. the need to realize what is best and most human in himself. Friends, in fact, are not an adventitious aid to a man's life. They represent the larger and truer life that belongs to him as a social being; only they represent it in a more intimate way, in terms that make it more easily recognizable, than society in general, however developed its form, can do.

This general answer Aristotle develops in c. ix. §§ 4-7, which Grant has excellently summarized. The two most important arguments are given in §§ 5 and 6. We have already anticipated them, but may here restate them in Grant's words. (1) "Happiness consists

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in the play of life (¿vέpyɛa), and he that sees before his eyes the virtuous acts of a friend has a delightful sense of the play of life, seeing harmonious action and identifying it with himself." (2) "The sympathy and excitement of friends enables a man to prolong that vivid action and glow of mind which is the essence of happiness." Finally he returns on his starting-point, and just as Plato had traced back the love of all creatures of the same species for one another to the desire for immortality, he shows how “from a deeper point of view" friendship is rooted in the most fundamental of all instincts-the love of life.

§ 5. The Kinds of Friendship.

[VIII. c. ii. § 1; c. iii. §§ 1 foll.]

While thus in the leading features of his doctrine as to the nature and function of friendship, Aristotle closely follows Plato, his classification of the different forms of friendship is a distinct advance, It was just for want of some such classification that Plato found himself hampered with questions to which he has not the means of replying.* It is, on the other hand, just by means of it that Aristotle is able, as Grant says, to cut straight through these difficulties, and in the course of doing so to give that air of finality to his discussion, which, even when compared with all that has since been written on the subject, it has never lost.

* For examples taken directly from Plato's Lysis, see VIII. c. i. §§ 6 and 7 (p. 282 below).

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Aristotle speaks throughout of kinds of friendship, but it is clear from his manner_of_treatment that he regards them rather as elements that enter into all friendship and manifest themselves prominently according to the stage of development that the friendship has reached, than as clearly marked kinds. Thus it is clear from what has been already said that no partnership which is formed for pleasure alone or profit alone can have any permanence. There is honour, we are told, even among thieves. It is the element of character underlying such connexions that gives them whatever claim they have to the name of friendship. Similarly, Aristotle is careful to point out that the higher kind of friendship does not exclude pleasure and profit, but merely differs from the others in the genuineness of the pleasure and profit which it brings. These forms of friendship, moreover corresponding as they do* to different stages in the development of the rational life in general that of absorption in momentary states of pleasure and pain, that in which more distant objects begin to prevail over impulse and passion, imagination over sense experience, and that in which prudence in the narrower sense becomes merged in prudence in the larger, the half-truths of imagination in the whole-truth of reason-may rightly be taken for different phases of individual development.

It is, as we might expect, in the sections where Aristotle is engaged in marking off true friendship

* As Dr. Bosanquet has pointed out in his suggestive Syllabus of Lectures on Leading Conceptions in Aristotle's Ethics.

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