The important and far-reaching changes in general conduct and, more particularly, in the attitude to be adopted toward the elder members of an individual's own family, on the attainment of full growth--involving as they do the overcoming of many habits and inhibitions formed during the long period of human infancy and childhood--are not of a kind to be accomplished without difficulty and conflict. With a view to diminishing this difficulty and to overcoming the conflict of motives which the accomplishment of these changes necessarily involves, there exists a well nigh universal tendency to endow the transition from childhood to maturity with something of a solemn or religious character, calculated at one and the same time to reinforce the motives proper to maturity and to impress the now full grown members of the community with the privileges and responsibilities of their new condition. This tendency has found definite and elaborate expression in the rites and ceremonies of initiation which are to be found in societies of every stage of culture and in every part of the world. These ceremonies are of very considerable interest and importance for our present purpose, for here, as so often elsewhere, the results obtained from the study of racial and social customs on the one hand and from the investigation of the unconscious mental tendencies of the individual on the other, serve very largely to amplify and corroborate one another, leading ultimately to a degree of certainty and precision which it would be difficult or impossible to attain by the pursuit of either discipline alone. [Sidenote: Initiation and re-birth]