On the whole, however, the dreams of youth are not to be despised. In most cases they point to an unconscious native ability and so likewise to the dreamer’s destination, which expresses itself at first in fantastic pictures of the future; that is, in so far as they really come from within and are not the products of a false education or of a mistaken belief in the inheritance of talents. For it is only quite rarely that talents are inherited and that the sons of great men are themselves great. This is, to be sure, often made difficult for them because of comparison with their fathers, and not less because of the jealousy of men, who do not willingly suffer intellectual dynasties to rule among them; in this they are all republicans. On the other hand, men of much consequence seldom have or take the time to busy themselves intently with the bringing up of their children, and in such families, much oftener than in far simpler ones, the children fall into neglect, unless a mother of sufficient intelligence steps in, and is not herself too much busied with her celebrated and often very exacting husband. It is scarcely necessary to say further that the mothers are the deciding element of the family for the education and the formation of the character of the children, especially the sons, and that the sons, as a rule, take after them more than after the fathers. It is a less familiar fact that the sons often resemble the mother’s brothers in character and natural ability, and that the best though sometimes also the most dangerous moulders of one’s youth are the grandmothers on the mother’s side. The promise of a curse upon families that have shown themselves egotistical for several succeeding generations surely comes true; and experience shows that a want of love towards one’s parents is avenged through one’s own children, and, _vice versa_, a peculiar blessing throughout life accompanies those who have shown their parents much love. There is no need to be anxious about the proper time for entering upon new steps of life, if the earlier ones have been rightly used; they will then do their own announcing through first an inner summons, and finally a definite determination, to advance farther, and without this experience it could not be well for any one to be in a higher plane. We can not stand a task that is yet too great for us; such a task we feel to be too ethereal, and we long for the coarser elements of life. On the other hand, the divinely-led man does not as a rule know very long beforehand what he has to do next or to what he will be called; he could not commonly endure it. But any one who has already really experienced many such instances of being personally guided in life will at last be sure in his faith as to the existence of such a higher guidance even in the life of individual men, while others (by their own fault, to be sure) count only in the mass, not as individuals.