[100] Among other ethical relations based on free election, friendship is the most important. In a separate _Book of Friendship_ which I hope to publish, I intend to review the ideals of friendship as they have arisen from time to time in the history of civilized mankind—the ideal of Pythagorean friendship, the ideals presented by Aristotle, Kant, Emerson. And I shall endeavor to show in each case the connection between the friendship ideal and the general philosophy of life. I shall then set forth that ideal of friendship which is the corollary of the spiritual conceptions outlined in this volume: the friend being in my view one who assists spiritual development as a spectator. He is the faithful mirror of his friend’s progress toward personality, the benevolent yet incorruptible recorder and appraiser. By this token friendship is distinguished from the interlocking relations such as that between partners in marriage, vocational co-workers, etc. [101] In certain Ethical Societies abroad, the fear of encouraging the rise of a new clericalism led to the plan of drawing for ethical teachers on professors of universities, and others engaged in various lines of practical activity. These persons could of necessity give only the leavings of their time and thought to the complex questions which they undertook to discuss; and the experiment, as might have been foreseen, proved disastrous. [102] It has been said that the science of today lives only in superseding the science of yesterday. Whether this be true of science or not it is not true of religion. The religions of the past are not merely superseded. There is much in them that is to be reinterpreted, and thus perpetuated. CHAPTER X THE LAST OUTLOOK ON LIFE