is
well to know that such irritations are not the skirmishes of life-long
domestic war. I say "irritations of propinquity," for, excepting among
the angels, the status of propinquity cannot be permanently maintained
without at least semi-occasional irritation. Professor R. B. Perry,[F]
dealing with domestic superstitions, declares, in reference to
scolding: "The family circle provides perpetual, inescapable, intimate
and unseasonable human contacts.... Individuals of the same species
are brought together in every permutation and combination of
conflicting interests and incompatible moods.... The intimacy and
close propinquity of the domestic drama exaggerates all its values,
both positive and negative."

Not only does the unavoidable persistence of physical contacts
account, however unprofoundly, for occasional differences in the home,
but another and parallel circumstance ought never to be lost sight
of. There are two samenesses in the home, the sameness of blood and
the sameness of contacts. Putting it differently, the oneness of
environment for all the tenants of a home continues and sometimes
intensifies the strain in either sense of blood-oneness. This may
sound playful to those who have never bethought themselves touching
the enormous difficulties that arise in the home insofar as some
parents, having inflicted a certain heredity upon their offspring, are
free to burden these filial victims with an environment escape from
which might alone enable them to neutralize or palliate the evil of
their heritage. I have in an earlier passage asked the query whether
filial revolt is not the unconscious protest of children against the
authors or transmitters of hereditary defect or taint.

Let me name two types or kinds of what are held to be conflicts
between parents and children, which are not conflicts in any real
sense of the term; first, intellectual differences and, second, the
inevitable but impersonal antagonism of the two viewpoints or
attitudes which front each other in the persons of parent and child.
As for purely intellectual differences, it is well to have in mind the
world's current and suggestive use of the term "difference of
opinion"--Carlyle saying of his talk with Sterling: "Except in opinion
not disagreeing"--as if that in itself were quite naturally the
precursor of strife and conflict. If difference of opinion oft deepen
into conflict, is it not because in the home as in the world without
we have no