no better reason. Friendship
with a miser is not only without danger, but it is profitable, because
of the great advantages it can bring. For it is doubtless those who
are nearest and dearest to the miser who on his death will reap
the fruits of the self-control which he exercised; but even in his
lifetime, too, something may be expected of him in cases of great
need. At any rate one can always hope for more from him than from the
spendthrift, who has lost his all and is himself helpless and in debt.
_Mas da el duro que el desnudo_, says a Spanish proverb; the man who
has a hard heart will give more than the man who has an empty purse.
The upshot of all this is that Avarice is not a vice.

On the other side, it may be said that Avarice is the quintessence of
all vices. When physical pleasures seduce a man from the right path,
it is his sensual nature--the animal part of him--which is at fault.
He is carried away by its attractions, and, overcome by the impression
of the moment, he acts without thinking of the consequences. When,
on the other hand, he is brought by age or bodily weakness to the
condition in which the vices that he could never abandon end by
abandoning him, and his capacity for physical pleasure dies--if he
turns to Avarice, the intellectual desire survives the sensual. Money,
which represents all the good things of this world, and is these good
things in the abstract, now becomes the dry trunk overgrown with all
the dead lusts of the flesh, which are egoism in the abstract. They
come to life again in the love of the Mammon. The transient pleasure
of the senses has become a deliberate and calculated lust of money,
which, like that to which it is directed, is symbolical in its nature,
and, like it, indestructible.

This obstinate love of the pleasures of the world--a love which, as it
were, outlives itself; this utterly incorrigible sin, this refined
and sublimated desire of the flesh, is the abstract form in which all
lusts are concentrated, and to which it stands like a general idea to
individual particulars. Accordingly, Avarice is the vice of age, just
as extravagance is the vice of youth.

This _disputatio in utramque partem_--this debate for and against--is
certainly calculated to drive us into accepting the _juste milieu_
morality of Aristotle; a conclusion that is also supported by the
following consideration.

Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens
to pass; but