Such being the nature and conditions of development of this important aspect of the mind, it is evident that something akin to the later affections characteristic of maturity should be found even in the earliest attachments of the child. It is only on the mistaken assumption that the sexual impulse emerges, as it were, fully grown at the time of puberty, that the existence of sexual elements in the loves of an earlier age appears surprising. In reality it is necessary, if the sexual tendencies are to play their important role in the displacements involved in the civilised adult life, that they should ripen early, even though they may not be required for purposes of reproduction for many years to come; and if they are to ripen early, it is only natural that they should be called into play in the child's relations to his parents, who are as a rule by far the most prominent persons of his environment during the first years of his existence. It would seem probable, the human mind being constituted as it is, that unless the large source of energy which is contained in, and habitually manifested through, the sexual tendencies (in the wide sense assigned to them by Freud) were made available in infancy or early childhood, the child would have too little motive at its disposal to make the vast efforts necessary to enable it to pass from the helplessness and ignorance of infancy to the relatively enormous skill and knowledge of adult life, and to acquire the manifold and complex characteristics of an age-long culture. The early awakening of the sexual tendencies in connection with the life of the family thus reveals itself as a natural--and indeed perhaps to some extent an inevitable--condition of any high degree of human civilisation or cultural achievement. [Sidenote: Necessity for the early transition from Autoerotism to object-love]