while there is hope of
restoring his character. Again, if one develops a great superiority,
friendship proper cannot persist--at least, in its first form. Our
relations with a friend are much like those with our own selves; the
true friend is a sort of _alter ego_. Friendship is not to be identified
with goodwill, though the latter is a condition precedent; we may feel
goodwill, but not friendship, towards a person we have never seen or
spoken to. Unanimity of feeling--not as to facts, but as to ends and
means--is a sort of equivalent to friendship in the body politic. The
reason why conferring a benefit creates more affection than receiving it
seems to be that the benefactor feels himself the maker of the other; we
all incline to love what we produced--as parents their children, or the
artist his own creations.

Self-love is wrong in a sense--the usual sense in which the term is
used, of giving priority to oneself in the acquisition of material
pleasures. But the seeking of the noblest things for oneself is really
self-love, and may involve giving others, especially friends, the
priority in respect of desirable things--even to resigning to another
the opportunity of doing a noble deed. In this higher sense, self-love
is praiseworthy.

The good man is self-sufficing, but friends are desirable, if not
actually necessary to him, as giving scope for the exercise of
beneficent activities, not as conferring benefits upon him. Besides,
man's highest activities must be exercised not in isolation, but as a
member of society, and such life lacks completeness if without friends.
Finally, friendship attains its completest realisation where comradeship
is complete; that is to say, in a common life.

_VI.--CONCLUSION_

We must revert once more to the question of Pleasure and Pain. To say
that pleasure is not good is absurd; he who does so stultifies himself
by his own acts. Eudoxus thought it was _the_ good, his opinion being
the weightier because of his temperateness.

It is desired for its own sake; its opposite is admittedly undesirable.
But since it may be added to other good things, it cannot be _the_ good:
though to say that what every one desires is not good at all is folly.
That it is not "a quality," or that it is "indeterminate," are
irrelevant arguments, both statements applying to what are admittedly
among "goods." The doctrine that it is a process, again, will not hold
water. Pleasure is a thing complete; whe