Friendship and Kindness

¹⁸ Among well-disposed people, the necessity or convenience of mutual accommodation frequently produces a friendship like the friendship of those born to live in the same family.

Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another brothers. They frequently feel as brothers towards each other.

• Their good agreement is an advantage to all.
• Their disagreement is a sort of a small scandal.

The Romans expressed this sort of attachment by the word necessitudo. It denotes that it was imposed by the situation’s necessity.

19 Even the trifling circumstance of living in the same neighbourhood has a similar effect. We respect the man we see everyday, provided he has never offended us. Neighbours can be very convenient or troublesome to each other. If they are good people, they are naturally disposed to agree. Accordingly, there are certain small good offices universally due to a neighbour that is not due to non-neighbours.

20 Our natural disposition to assimilate our own feelings and principles to the people we live and converse much with is the cause of the contagious effects of good and bad company.

The man who associates chiefly with the wise and the virtuous naturally gains respect for wisdom and virtue even if he might not become wise or virtuous. The man who associates chiefly with the profligate and the dissolute naturally loses his old abhorrence of profligacy and dissolution of manners, even if he might become profligate and dissolute.

We frequently see successive generations of a family having similar characters. However, the family character, like the family’s physical features, is not all due to the moral connection, but partly to the physical connection.

21 The attachment based on the esteem of one’s conduct is the most respectable of all the attachments to an individual. This attachment is confirmed by much experience and long friendship. Only among men of virtue can such friendships exist, arising from a natural sympathy. It does not arise from a constrained sympathy made habitual for the sake of convenience.

Only men of virtue are confident in the conduct and behaviour of each other. This conduct assures them that they can never offend or be offended by one another.

• Vice is always capricious.
• Virtue only is regular and orderly.

The attachment founded on the love of virtue is the most virtuous of all attachments. It is likewise the happiest and the most permanent and secure. Such friendships need not be confined to a single person. They may safely embrace all the wise and virtuous=

• with whom we have been long and intimately acquainted, and
• upon whose wisdom and virtue we can entirely depend.

The people who confine friendship to two persons seem to confound the wise security of friendship with the jealousy and folly of love. The hasty, fond, and foolish intimacies of young people are founded commonly on=

• some slight similarity of character unconnected with good conduct,
• a taste for the same studies, amusements, diversions, or
• their agreement in some singular opinion, not commonly adopted.

Those intimacies with a freak cannot deserve the sacred and venerable name of friendship, no matter how agreeable they appear.

22 Our beneficence is naturally directed towards the people whose beneficence we have already experienced. Nature formed men for that mutual kindness so necessary for their happiness. Nature renders every man the object of kindness to the persons he has been kind to. Their gratitude do not always correspond to his beneficence. Yet the sense of his merit, the impartial spectator’s sympathetic gratitude, will always correspond to it.

Other people’s general indignation against the baseness of their ingratitude will sometimes even increase the general sense of his merit. No benevolent man ever lost the fruits of his benevolence. If he does not always gather them from the persons from whom he should have gathered them, he seldom fails to gather them from other people, with a tenfold increase. Kindness is the parent of kindness. If to be beloved by our brethren is the great object of our ambition, the surest way of obtaining it is for us to show that we really love them.

23 The first persons recommended to our beneficence are those=

• connected with ourselves,
• have personal qualities,
• have done us past services

The second persons recommended to our benevolence are not our friends, but those who are extraordinary=

• the greatly fortunate and unfortunate,
• the rich and the powerful,
• the poor and the wretched

Our respect for the rich and the powerful is the basis of=

• the distinction of ranks,
  • The relief of human misery depends on our compassion for the poor.
• the peace and order of society
  • This is more important than even the relief of the miserable.

Our respect for the great, accordingly, is most offended by excess riches just as our fellow-feeling for the miserable is offended by their poverty. Moralists exhort us to charity and compassion. They warn us against the fascination of greatness.

This fascination is so powerful, that the rich and the great are too often preferred to the wise and the virtuous. Nature has wisely judged that the distinction of ranks, the peace and order of society, would be more secure in the plain difference of birth and fortune than on the invisible and uncertain difference of wisdom and virtue. People can easily perceive birth and fortune, but not wisdom and virtue.

24 The combination of the causes of kindness, increases the kindness. When there is no envy, our natural favour to greatness is increased when it is joined with wisdom and virtue. We are even more interested with the great, virtuous man who falls into misfortunes than an humbler virtuous man who also falls.

The most interesting subjects of tragedies and romances are the misfortunes of virtuous kings. If they can extricate themselves from those misfortunes, by wise and brave exertions, and completely recover their former superiority and security, we admire them most enthusiastically and even extravagantly.

The following seem to combine to enhance our partial admiration for the station and character=

• our grief for their distress, and
• our joy for their prosperity.

25 When those different beneficent affections happen to draw different ways, it is perhaps impossible to determine by any precise rules in=

• what cases we should comply with the one, and in what with the other,
• what cases friendship should yield to gratitude, or gratitude to friendship,
• what cases the strongest of all natural affections should yield to a regard for the safety of those superiors on whose safety depends the whole society’s safety, and
• what cases natural affection may, without impropriety, prevail over that regard

These must be left to the decision of the man within the breast, the supposed impartial spectator, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. His voice will never deceive us if we=

• place ourselves completely in his situation,
• really view ourselves with his eyes, and
• listen to diligently and reverently what he suggests to us.

We shall need no casuistic rules to direct our conduct. These casuistic rules are often impossible to accommodate=

• to all the different shades and gradations of circumstance, character, and situation,
• to differences and distinctions which, though not imperceptible, are often undefinable because of their nicety and delicacy.

The Orphan of China is Voltaire’s beautiful tragedy. Zamti was willing to sacrifice his own child’s life to preserve the life of the only feeble remnant of his ancient sovereigns. While we admire his magnanimity, we pardon and love the maternal tenderness of Idame. At the risk of discovering Zamti’s important secret, she reclaims her infant from the cruel hands of the Mongols.