reality in any of its manifold forms, may come through art and culture if only the heart is pure, as well as through philosophy in the technical sense, there is less difficulty in going a step further and asking why it may not also come through life itself under the same condition. In making this suggestion we may seem to have left Aristotle far behind. Yet in the sphere of practice, Aristotle has himself taught us that a man arrives at a knowledge of what is truly good through the discipline of good actions. It is only an extension of this principle to recognize that through a still fuller acceptance of the ends of life, prudence may pass into a still higher wisdom, the insight of the practical man into that of the philosopher, vision of Good in the City into vision of Good in the World.

CHAPTER XII.

FRIENDSHIP.

"Nature doth presume that how many men there are in the world, so many gods, as it were, there are, or at least ought to be, towards men." HOOKER.

"The good which a man seeks and loves, he will love with greater constancy if he sees that others love it too."

SPINOZA.

§ 1. The Place of Friendship in Aristotle's Scheme

of the Virtues.

THE place which Friendship is intended to occupy in Aristotle's scheme of the virtues is not at once obvious. We have already heard of a virtue of Friendliness, which is defined as the mean with regard to pleasantness in life generally-the man who is "sweet and pleasant in the right way" being the friendly man.* But clearly something far more than this is here intended. Moreover, although in the introductory sentences Aristotle speaks of Friendship as a virtue, or at least implying virtue, we are clearly not intended to take this seriously. We have left the discussion of the "virtues" behind us, nor is there any attempt made to bring friendship into line with the rest by treating it as a mean.

* II. vii. § 13; see p. 245.

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 lower 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).