Speaking generally,—Man is good and happy, if he acts as Man: Virtue is human excellence. But since humanity is presented as occupying different levels in different individuals, Happiness or the Good is not the same for all. And because an individual man, if he were left to his own resources could not realize all the good things that might otherwise be obtained, it is necessary that many should live together. As a consequence of this condition, the first of duties, or the foundation of all the virtues, is a general love for humankind, without which no society is possible. It is only along with, and among other human beings that the individual man attains perfection;—so that Ethics must be Social Ethics. Friendship therefore is not, as Aristotle would have it, an expansion of Self-love, but a limitation of it, or a kind of love of one’s neighbour. And this, like virtue in general, can find a field of exercise only in society, or in citizenship, and not in the pious monk’s renunciation of the world. The hermit, who thinks he is living temperately and righteously, is deceived as to the character of his actions: they may be religious, but moral they certainly are not; and therefore the consideration of them does not belong to Ethics. Besides, in Ibn Maskawaih’s opinion, the Religious Law when rightly apprehended, pre-eminently accords with an Ethics of Benevolence. Religion is a moral training for the people. Its prescriptions, with regard to the worship of God in common and the pilgrimage to Mecca for instance, have plainly in view the cultivation of the love of one’s neighbour in the widest acceptation. In certain special points Ibn Maskawaih has not been successful in combining harmoniously the ethical doctrines of the Greeks,—which he incorporates in his Scheme,—either with one another or with the Law of Islam. That however we pass over; and in any case we ought not only to praise in general terms his attempt to give a system of Ethics which should be free from the casuistry of the Moralists and the asceticism of the Sufis, but also to recognize in the execution of his design the good sense of a man of wide culture. 4. Ibn Sina.