I have not really lost him, because I never really possessed him. And on making this discovery I shall have a new light shed on what friendship might mean. I may never be so fortunate as to find the actual friend, but I shall know what he ought to be, and what it is in me to be to him. And when I say, “what it is in me to be to him,” I think of resources of my inner being which have never been called out; I think of the worth that belongs to me as a spiritual being capable of giving forth and receiving highest spiritual influence, and I am thereby immeasurably aggrandized in my own esteem, the self in me is lifted nearer as it were to its infinite counterpart in the eternal life. I walk henceforth on a higher level, I dwell amid serener presences. And this aggrandizement of the self, not on the ground of what I am but what I may be, and of others too, not on the ground of what they are, but what they may be, is the compensation derived from the bitter experience of broken relations. And what has been said of friendship by way of example is true of frustration in marriage as well, and of frustrations of every kind. NOTE TO BOOK III I may mention a certain test case for trying out the proposed rule, namely, to idealize the fair quality in others, and thereby achieve the concomitant transformation of the self. I mean the case of the victims of a cruel race prejudice, such as is entertained against the colored people of the South by the more brutal whites. I remember a long evening which I once spent in the company of a leader among the colored people, and one of the best men I have ever known. I looked that night deep into a suffering, sensitive human soul, and I tried to put myself in his place. I realized the hardships of his lot, the anguish that I myself should suffer if I were in his position. But would there be the spiritual equivalent? Would the way I had found in trials less poignant be the way of release? To make the situation clear, I selected two points in which the white man, my supposed oppressor, has the advantage, two fair qualities of which he can boast. His family life is purer on the average than that of a large number of the colored people. And he has also learned in the case of white men to distinguish between the criminal and the innocent. He will protect the latter, and give up the former to justice. Now my own people, putting myself in the place of the colored man, are backward in both these respects. In consequence of the long centuries of slavery their family relations are often unstable, while they are apt to shield the colored criminal from the arm of the law. In both respects I want to represent to myself the white man as he ought to act. He ought to help me lift up my race, first, by making their family life purer and more stable. But instead, many of the whites debauch the women of my race, while perhaps respecting those of their