rs become fatal as beings grow
complex and mutually dependent, a great step in moral progress has at
any rate been taken.

In itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just as
irrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child also
desires his own happiness, the child's will sanctions and supports the
father's. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make one
rational life. The father's instinct and sense of duty are now
vindicated experimentally in the child's progress, while the son,
besides the joy of living, has the pious function of satisfying his
parent's hopes. Even if life could achieve nothing more than this, it
would have reached something profoundly natural and perfectly ideal. In
patriarchal ages men feel it is enough to have inherited their human
patrimony, to have enjoyed it, and to hand it down unimpaired. He who is
not childless goes down to his grave in peace. Reason may afterward come
to larger vistas and more spiritual aims, but the principle of love and
responsibility will not be altered. It will demand that wills be made
harmonious and satisfactions compatible.

[Sidenote: Adventitious functions assumed by the family.]

Life is experimental, and whatever performs some necessary function, and
cannot be discarded, is a safe nucleus for many a parasite, a
starting-point for many new experiments. So the family, in serving to
keep the race alive, becomes a point of departure for many institutions.
It assumes offices which might have been allotted to some other agency,
had not the family pre-empted them, profiting by its established
authority and annexing them to its domain. In no civilised community,
for instance, has the union of man and wife been limited to its barely
necessary period. It has continued after the family was reared and has
remained life-long; it has commonly involved a common dwelling and
religion and often common friends and property. Again, the children's
emancipation has been put off indefinitely. The Roman father had a
perpetual jurisdiction and such absolute authority that, in the palmy
days of the Roman family, no other subsisted over it. He alone was a
citizen and responsible to the state, while his household were subject
to him in law, as well as in property and religion. In simple rural
communities the family has often been also the chief industrial unit,
almost all necessaries being produced under domestic economy.

[Sidenote: Inertia in human natu