Let me, in closing this section, call attention to these varieties of personal contact, all of which are desirable. We all need a multitude of acquaintances, can, indeed, hardly have too many. These are persons whose faces and names we know, with something of their occupations and history. While we know them only on the outside our impressions of them are favorable, and their nod, smile, or passing greeting brightens the moment and makes us feel at one with our species. These do not attain the rank of friends, to whom we expose sections of our lives, in whose characters we see admirable traits which are less developed in ourselves, and on whom we lean in times of doubt, trouble, and ignorance. Such steadying friends will not be a large company and should be chosen deliberately, not through juxtaposition, but on grounds of merit and adaptation to our needs. Closer than these, however, should come our intimates, one or two, those to whom we give whole-hearted love. From such an intimate we hide nothing, not even our faults. To him we express our half-thoughts, make up our minds in company with his, find excellence easy in his presence and yet, to our daily astonishment, see that he obtains as much from us as we from him. Him we love. He is another self, and all that is ours is his also. Such, then, is love and such its varieties and shadings. Parted from mutuality, altruism has little worth. Only where love is, where the conjunct self has taken the place of the separate self, is altruism completely realized. In such love morality attains its goal. Accordingly, in every age those most impassioned for the formation of character have exalted love as its central principle. The first to perceive its importance and to begin an exploitation of its labyrinths was Plato. To love he has dedicated three of his Dialogues. In the first of them, the delightful little piece called _Lysis_, he busies himself with the contradictions of love. He does not seek to establish a positive doctrine. No conclusion is reached, but the enigmatic character of love is brought out with extraordinary vividness. The greatest of his love dialogues, and one which has profoundly influenced all subsequent ages, is the _Symposium_, beautifully translated by the poet Shelley under the name of _The Banquet_. Socrates and his friends assembling one evening, it is proposed that instead of general conversation they shall talk on some specific subject, and love is selected. One speaker after another reports what he has seen in love--its dignity, its heavenly and earthly types, its universality as an underlying principle of physical nature, the supposed origin of the separate self and its subsequent desire for completion, love as the organizer of human life. Then Socrates points out how the true significance of love lies in its passion for perfection and how it continually supersedes its lower forms in the interest of what is larger.