Friendship by C. B. Purdom

In friendship we do not make use of one another, because the friendship is not for our own sake, but for the reciprocal relationship, the giving and receiving, in which more is brought into being than would otherwise exist. Our grand object should be to transform the relation of acquaintanceship, in which other people are things, into that of friendship, in which others exist in their own right; unless we make progress in that we waste out lives. The object of friendship is not to make life pleasurable but to provide the social environment in which life can be lived. Callousness, indifference, and the closing of the heart are not merely the fatal enemies of society, they are the individual death to which Hobbes referred.