A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Philosophers of the utilitarian school have begun to reëstablish the long-forgotten truth that Materialism is the indispensable root of the plant which bears its flowers in spiritual aspirations. The consequence of universal practice is the best test of a dogma, and if all men were to divest themselves of their earthly possessions and devote their lives to the hyperphysical vagaries of the Galilean messiah, there would soon be neither crops to harvest nor bread to eat, and unworldly saints would starve as surely as ungodly sinners. “Ideality” may be the crown of the brain, as the brain is of the body, but the organs of the mind cannot dispense with the aid of the alimentary organs; the pinnacle of the social fabric needs intermediate supports. Education has to secure the welfare of the body before it can successfully cultivate the faculties of the mind; and it is not less certain that a man has to be a good patriot before he can be a worthy cosmopolitan, and a good friend before he can be a good patriot.
In the progress of individual development the instinct of friendship asserts itself at a very early period. Its recollection hallows the memory of the poorest childhood. The shepherd-boys of the upper Alps travel dozens of miles over cliffs and rocks to meet their friends at a salt-spring; on the shores of the Baltic the boys of the lonely fishermen’s cabins [[173]]frequent their trysting-places in spite of wind and weather. Early friendships throw the charm of their poetry even over the dreary prosa of grammar-school life; the fellowship of school-friends forever endears the scenes of their sports and rambles, and for many a poor office-drudge the recollection of such hours “holds all the light that shone on the earth for him.” True friendship smoothens the rough path of poverty, while friendlessness, even in the gilded halls of wealth, is almost a synonyme of cheerlessness:
Ich wüsste mir keine grössre Pein,
Als wär’ ich im Paradies allein,
says Goethe. “To be alone in paradise would be the height of misery.” Friendship will assert itself athwart the barriers of social inequality, and its germs are so deeply rooted in the instincts of primitive nature that, in default of a communion of kindred souls, the bonds of sympathy have often united saints and sinners, nay, even men and brutes. The traditions of Grecian antiquity have preserved the possibly apocryphal legend of a dolphin that became attached to the company of a young fisherman, and after his death left the sea in search of its friend, and thus perished; but the story of Androcles was confirmed by the experience of Chevalier Geoffroy de la Tour, a crusader of the thirteenth century, who was charmed, but finally distressed, by the affection of a pet lion that followed him like his shadow, and at last fell a victim to his attachment by trying to swim after the ship that conveyed his master from Damascus to Genoa. The traveler Busbequius [[174]]mentions a lynx that set his heart on escorting a camp-follower of a Turkish pasha; and Sir Walter Scott vouches for the touching episode of the Grampian Highlands, where a young hunter met his death by falling from a steep cliff, and was found, months after, half covered by the body of his favorite deerhound, who had followed his friend to the happy hunting-grounds by starving to death at the feet of a corpse.
Among the ancestors of the Mediterranean nations the betrayal of a friend was deemed an act of almost inconceivable infamy; friends and friends engaged in a pledge of mutual hospitality, which was held sacred even in times of war; and among the natives of the South Sea Islands a similar brotherhood of elective affinities existed in the society of the Aroyi, or oath-friends, who held all property in common, and in times of danger unhesitatingly risked their own lives in defense of their ally’s. Professor Letourneau has collected many curious anecdotes of that devotion, which should leave no doubt that altruism in its noblest form can dispense with the hope of post-mortem compensation, and, indeed, with all theological motives whatever.