Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct of rebellion. In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism or anti-suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all sons against all sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality and gives its _élan_ to the passion for boundless freedom, which may even degenerate into forms of affectation and a passion for over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature herself, fathers and what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s chief opposition in the world’s history. The very words “obey” and “conform” hardly exist in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too, always denies and defies and all through the history of religions has been the typical rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and democracies. He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties and on this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree. In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief monopolized the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are told that they were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny arose. Freudians hold that the son’s rancor against the father is rooted in this inhibition of the mating instinct. This doubtless did contribute very much to intensify it as the boy grew to man’s estate but it is going too far to say that in the very intricate grammar of revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago showed the grammar of assent to be, other factors did not come in and that there no other social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early childhood--in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under and over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the meridian of life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the countless devices of those who are aging to maintain their power and influence, which perhaps never in history had such an efficient bulwark as when they became secure in the right of testamentary bequest of their property as they wished--and is only mitigated in the case of the very old because they are few and feeble and have already in many ways been superseded and relegated to inefficiency.