This extension of the egoistic-social interest under the dominance of the erotic is more and more, in modern times, beginning to take on a phase of spiritual growth in distinction to merely material aggrandizement. It is not the best, in any respect, for a man to acquire, for the sake of his wife and children, wealth and social or political or artistic distinction. Indeed, many children are overburdened with the illustrious traditions of their forebears and are even hindered thereby in their own self-development. A man married and had three children, two daughters and then one son. By the time his son was old enough to desire luxuries the father was wealthy enough to provide them without stint. In doing so, however, he made it plain that the son was expected to follow in his footsteps in the business. The story is common enough where the son becomes simply a wastrel without positive character of any kind. Not so, however, in this case. The father’s extremely positive and aggressive character produced a different reaction in the son, who had a positiveness of his own. Remaining absolutely unspoiled by the luxuries by which he was surrounded, he continued to disappoint his father by becoming what the elder man thought the most ignominious of all—a teacher, and soon reached the summit of his profession as head of a department in a great university. To this career, however, the father’s great egoistic-social success in amassing money did not in the least contribute; rather it hindered it. The son’s progress would have been infinitely easier without the rigid egoistic-social atmosphere in which he was brought up. The ill-concealed sneers of the father prevented the son even in his youth from developing a genial open-hearted sociability with which he was by nature endowed, and made his contacts with men and women unnecessarily difficult. § 52 The parents’ happy married life, irrespective of wealth and distinction, is the best possible heritage for their children. The father just mentioned could not in any sense have been called happily married. He considered his wife an abject idiot and acted accordingly, domineering over her to the utter extinction of any personality she might have originally possessed and thereby deprived the son of even as fine a mother ideal as he might have had. If to a happy married life showing itself to the children in every incident of the home and its management is added the best type of sex instruction, both physiological and psychological, the parents have done their duty, and have succeeded, as far as any parents could, in transmitting an environment in which the superiority of the erotic over the egoistic-social impulses is daily recognized. An exceedingly common environment is the opposite one where any erotic impulses of the children are not only frowned upon but are practically declared by the parents to be either non-existent or impossible of any form of expression.