the large households so well adapted to act as
seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries
must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who
enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their
disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges,
and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the
other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's
warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more
enclosed. Beneath this, and more profoundly influential, there was a
general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of
affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home,
compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group
which characterised the previous period.

So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we
now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we
happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which
is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual
love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion
cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a
little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete
ignorance of the matter, that there could not fail to be frequently a
sexual tinge in the affection of a father for his daughter, of a mother
for her son, of a son for his mother, or a daughter for her father.
Needless to say, that does not mean that there is present any physical
desire of sex in the narrow sense; that would be a perversity, and a rare
perversity. We are here on another plane than that of crude physical
desire, and are moving within the sphere of the emotions. But such
emotions are often strong, and all the stronger because conscious of
their own absolute rectitude and often masked under the shape of Duty. Yet
when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on
development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes
such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the
parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a
child who has pa