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 subAristotle does not propose to substitute the * See especially Rep. V. 462 foll.

serves.

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. §§ I 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. "You On the function of justice in the State, see Note A, fin.

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, and finally to understand what beauty itself means. "The true 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." †

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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