r friend, to that ideal
comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere
doubleness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached
beings who happen to find one another's presence agreeable. Loyalty to a
friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create
and maintain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your
friend--not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and
your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and
inclusive of your distinctions, the one life that you are to live as
friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the common life, to the union of
friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship consists only
of its routine of more or less attractive private sentiments and mere
meetings, each one of which is one more chance experience, heaped
together with other chance experiences. But with such true loyalty your
friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life--a life that neither
of you could have alone; a life that is not a mere round of separate
private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified
personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an
abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of
you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your
friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and
unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own,--a
reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the
taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two
distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with
each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness
enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker
should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is
also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united
personality present,--a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and
which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in
one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common
personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.

Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity
represents. Or you are loyal to your class, your college, your
community, your country, your church. In all these cases, with