The directly Sexual feeling thus attaching to these phantasies is in many cases powerfully reinforced by the curiosity which is experienced by children in relation to the processes of conception, gestation and birth. Most children would seem to possess at an early age a very lively interest in all matters directly or indirectly connected with the reproductive function. The question "Where do babies come from?" is one of the most absorbing of all the problems of our early years; one which, in its more sublimated forms, may lay the foundation of that restless desire to know the causes and origins of things, which is the driving force of much that is best in science and philosophy; and one for which, in infancy and childhood, a solution is sought in many of the childish theories of reproduction which have recently attracted the attention of psycho-analysts[67]. [Sidenote: Children's questions] [Sidenote: The forbidden question in myth and legend] Curiosity of this kind is also found to underlie much of that desire for knowledge which manifests itself in the incessant asking of questions so characteristic of children at a certain age. Where this is the case, the actual questions asked are often only substitutes for the real problem which so insistently demands solution--the problem of the origin of men--and are shown to be of little importance in themselves by the listless and uninterested way in which the child frequently receives the answers that are given him, making them, as he does only too often, the starting point for fresh questions, the answers to which prove in their turn to be equally unsatisfying. In all such questioning the true nature of the real problem is for the most part kept below the threshold of consciousness, through the operation of repressive influences, originating perhaps to some extent in the natural course of development of the child's own mind, but probably to a greater degree due to the attitude of his adult environment, which, directly or by implication, has taught the child to regard such questions as taboo. This notion of the question which is forbidden but which nevertheless imperiously demands an answer is one that is of frequent occurrence in myth and legend, the forbidden question often disclosing itself as one which has reference to the birthplace, parentage or birth of the hero (as for instance in the Lohengrin legend) or the origin and nature of man in general (as in the case of Œdipus)[68].