But even if it should be the case that the parents have no souls capable of profound feeling, but only hearts which can bleed—it is nevertheless the duty of the child towards itself, and towards past and future generations, to give to its own nature the highest possible perfection through love. Parents are only a link in the infinite chain of the race: it is the blood of hundreds of thousands that the parents have transmitted to their children, who now in their turn are to pass it on. Children have higher duties towards all these dead and unborn beings than they have towards the single couple who became their father and mother. It behooves the young to let all these dead ones live again as fully as possible through the development of their own being and in the blood of their children. A human being may owe a greater debt of gratitude for his own nature to his grandmother’s heart or to his grandfather’s imagination than to his own narrow-hearted mother or unintelligent father. So far is it from being an invariable duty to bring joy to the parents, that it may be one’s duty to bring them sorrow—in order to bring joy to one’s successors. It is a good thing to honour one’s father and mother; but the commandment which Moses forgot is more important still: to honour one’s son and daughter even before they are born. When the sense of the dead and of the unborn becomes a conscious motive of human action, through being a force in human emotion, then the claim of the parents to decide their children’s life—as well as the claim of the latter to decide that of their parents—will gradually fall to pieces before the majesty of the past and of the future. It results from the foregoing that any doctrine of morality is of little worth which does not involve the need of providing the means of marriage for healthy persons between the ages of twenty and thirty; a possibility which was possessed without exception by the Germanic ancestors whose example of abstinence is now appealed to. So long as increasingly difficult examinations, the scale of pay in government departments, the division of profits in business, and the general rate of living, stand in the way of young people’s chances of marriage, things will remain as they are, in spite of an increasing minority of men who, for their own personality’s sake or for that of their love, maintain abstinence until marriage or remain celibate. The abolition of this sacrifice to the state of society and civilisation is a matter of sufficient importance to the individual, but of infinitely greater importance to society, whose forces are now being wasted by the effects of immorality and checked by those of morality: society, whose strength depends to such a great degree upon young and healthy parents for the new generation.