held the good.

[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]

No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or
should be transparent. Transparency is a virtue only in artificial
instruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic
operation is not itself a portion of human life. In looking through a
field-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows
about their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its
pigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns. The sense for colour
is a vital endowment and an ingredient in human happiness; but no
vitality is added by the intervention of further media which are not
themselves living organs.

A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the
energies he exerts. When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone
into the observer's experience, no friendship is possible. This is
always the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed
personality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived
nexus for the work he performed. In a philosopher or artist, too,
personality is merely instrumental, for, although in a sense pervasive,
a creative personality evaporates into its expression, and whatever part
of it may not have been translated into ideas is completely negligible
from the public point of view. That portion of a man's soul which he has
not alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him
otherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public
attributions. Such persons are his friends. Into their lives he has
entered not merely through an idea with which his name may be
associated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but
by awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of
emotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly
arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely
accent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal
sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous
affinity colouring a spiritual light.

[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]

If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal
loyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in
chance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with
mere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of
common ideal intere