istent thing known to us or to any other. It is not anything nonexistent or existent; nor do things existent know it as it is; nor does it know existent things as existent. There is no speech, or name, or knowledge of it. It is neither darkness nor light; nor error, nor truth; nor is there universal positing or removal of it. Nay, when we posit and remove those things that come after it, we do not posit or remove it, since the complete and unitary cause of all things is above all positing, and beyond all reinoval the transcendence of that which is absolutely abstracted from all things and above all things.

FRIENDSHIP.

BY LEONORA B. HALSTED.

Friendship, happily, is nothing new; but, for that matter, neither is life; yet each person finds it quite interesting to live and to learn how others have lived; and so it is with the beautiful experience of friendship. Homer sings it in the early literature and Emerson analyzes it in the late; the Old Testament gives us a beautiful example of it, and the New a higher one; one of the chief works of Plato-" The Banquet "—extolled it, and one of the greatest poems of modern times-" In Memoriam ". grew from it as an exquisite plant from earth to light. Yet the subject is inexhaustible, for individuality has its freest play in this relation. Indeed, the friendships we have at the same time with different persons differ as much as they do. The relation changes and rearranges itself incessantly, for each man has various facets to his character; one friend fits to one, another to more than one, but no human being can by any possibility satisfy another at every point continuously.

"We hold our dear ones with a firm, strong clasp,

We hear their voices, look into their eyes;

And yet betwixt us in that clinging clasp

A distance lies."

This distance is the mystery of individuality; and it is curious to see how the sense of it has developed through the ages. Plato, in his famous conversation on love, gives an illustration of the way his age regarded it:

"If, where two who love are together, Vulcan were to stand over them with his tools in his hand and ask them, 'Do ye desire to be in the same place with each other, so as never by day or night to be apart from each other? for, if ye long for this, I am willing to melt you down together and to mould you into the same mass, so that you two may live as one person, and, when ye die, may remain forever in Hades, one soul instead of two.' On hearing this," proceeds Plato, "not a single person would appear to wish for anything else, but would in reality conceive he had heard that which long ago he wished for, and, being melted with his beloved, he would out of two become one."

But Montaigne does not wish an indistinguishable unity that would rob both of the chief joy of love-the joy of giving. "The friend," he says, "is sorry he is not treble or quadruple, and that he has not many souls and many wills to confer them all upon this one object." While, in our own day, individuality has developed so far that Emerson finds it necessary to say, "At times, let us bid even our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, 'Who are you? Unhand me; I will be dependent no more."" And in his poem somewhat ironically named "Give all to Love," he adjures the lover thus:

"Keep thee to-day,

To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab

Of thy beloved."

But this is the nomadic spirit defying social life and preferring isolation with caprice to freedom attained through the perfect law of liberty.

The true reason for love is the simplest one: "Because it is he; because it is I"; the spontaneous attraction of two characters for each other; the intense and abiding personal element that is as the earth to the plant, that by which it stands firm. But friendship is of the earth, earthy, unless it lifts itself into the light and grows and blossoms ever higher, bearing the fruit of XXII-26

years of noble and tender experience in common. It cannot be lasting or good while it lasts if its chief strength lies in the employment of the senses. If to see, hear, or feel our friends in the literal meaning of these words is necessary in order to keep our affection alive, it is of small value. Friendship worthy of the name is supersensuous; it is capable of penetrating distance and silence to "coincide in rest" with an absent friend. It sees, hears, and feels without the need of bodily organs, for it lives in a higher atmosphere than that of the body and can command finer forces.

A close personal affection, however, attracts many dangers, chief of which is the desire to enslave. To friendship, on the contrary, freedom is absolutely essential. It is not, like the conjugal, a relation of one to one. There should be free play of individuality not alone of friends toward each other, but of each friend toward all others. The greed of exclusive possession is fatal. Demands in affection are death blows. The friend who asks more than he can command strangles by his clinging embrace. Seek ownership of your friend and you own but yourself, for you push him away. "Violence touches not love." Seek confidence and you repel it. Await it, content whether it hastens or delays, and, unless principle or lack of sympathy prevents, it will be yours in due season. What would hasten it is inconsistent with true friendship. Why should you pry even in thought into the hidden recesses of a friend's life? Do you not trust him, or are you unwilling that he should have any unshared thought or memory? It is like asking him what he has eaten in order to make that face and form. He, as his life has made him, is your friend; "here took his station and degree, one born to love you.” Does not this result transcend details? On the other hand, where there is a reason for communicating facts, for telling what kind of food went to produce the spiritual muscle and nerve you admire in your friend, if he is honest and you are sympathetic, he will speak freely. Sympathy has an incalculable power; it is the dynamic force of the world.

But it is not to be expected that so complex a creature as man will find another person with whom he can coalesce in "the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another." Such unity is not found among animals, nor even

plants; each part in every union maintains its identity, and it would be retrogression for man not to maintain his. Friendship does not require him to sacrifice his individuality, but to enlarge it, for it is simply the spontaneous recognition in one nature of congeniality in another. Congeniality may exist in one portion of the meeting characters and not at all in others. Discrimination, the knowledge of when to withhold no less than when to give, is as essential to friendship as to love. Only an inexperienced person expects to throw his whole weight upon any other person as a child upon its mother, or the soul upon God. It is a childish thought and shows lack of appreciation of the other personality. Nowhere are the niceties of life, the delicacy of penetration, and the tact of usage more necessary than in all forms of affection. Without these, friendship is quickly trampled in the mire, and, if it exists at all, endures only by maintaining itself at a very low level.

So jealousy should be obliterated from friendship. The more friends your friend has, the richer are you, for you share his wealth, his added experience. We can possess fully only by participation. We come more into union with each other as we become more universal. The etymology of this word signifies turning all into one. The more that is done, the more there is to share; and the less we go outside of a single friend, a single interest, the smaller is our harvest-either to keep or divide. Friendship should reach out many hands to grasp the produce of others, giving of its own in return, and draw them back to feed and beautify those dearest.

The question of supremacy also should not obtrude itself between friends. "You ought to love me more than any other because I love you more than any other " is a wretched claim. The theory of sixpence for sixpence is not suitable to friendship; it has no business to demand what it is incapable of winning. If a friend can gain and retain affection, so much the better; if not, whose fault is it so much as his own? Moreover, the nature that considers itself defrauded if its affection is unreciprocated in de gree has much to learn. In material wealth, whom do we consider the richer man? the one who can give, or the one who can only take? If you have millions to give away, are you not wealthier than the pauper who has nothing? And this holds.

good of spiritual matters far more deeply. It is more blessed to give than to receive. It is infinitely better to love than to be loved; to be active than passive; to have energy than inertia.

Of course, in friendship as elsewhere the ideal is equality. "Love without love in return is like a question without an answer." Reciprocally to give and take is the most perfect condition, but the mercantile idea of quid pro quo should be disclaimed by friends as by lovers. Only in the rarest instances can the degree be the same. The desire to be loved is just and right in its place, but it must be made to keep its place, not usurp attention. The craving for return must be divested of selfishness, must not be a centralized point, but enclose a large circumference, in order not to injure the finer elements of friendship. A man, however, should rejoice in receiving as well as giving. If he does not, he cannot be a true friend, for in receiving reluctantly he deprives his friend of the very joy he himself most appreciates.

Montaigne, who, cynic as he is on some subjects, gross and vulgar in many ways, has yet a wonderfully deep insight into friendship, tells of an example which he considers "very fully to the point."

"Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends, and, coming to die, being poor and his friends rich, made his will after this manner: 'I bequeath to Aretheus the maintenance of my mother, to support and provide for her in her old age; and to Charixenus I bequeath the care of marrying my daughter, and to give her as good a portion as he is able; and in case one of these chances to die, I hereby substitute the other in his place.' They who first saw this will made themselves very merry at the contents, but the heirs accepted the legacies with very great content, and Charixenus dying within five days after, Aretheus nourished the old woman with great care and tenderness; and of five talents he had, gave two and a half in marriage with an only daughter, and two and a half in marriage with the daughter of Eudamidas, and on the same day solemnized both their nuptials. Eudamidas," Montaigne remarks further on, "as a bounty and favor bequeaths to his friends a legacy of employing themselves in his service, and doubtless the force of friendship is more eminently apparent in this act of his than in that of Aretheus."

This is the true point of view. In friendship the receiver shows

.