s, bearing by-products which are rich in value for all
of life.

Many of our richest relationships, our best impulses, and our most
firmly fixed social habits spring from the family instincts of
reproduction and parental care. The social life of our young people,
so well calculated to bring young men and women together; all the
beauty of family life and, as we shall later see, all the broader
benevolent activities for society in general, are energized by the
same love-instincts which form so large a part of human nature.

LEARNING TO LOVE

=A Four-Grade School.= It is impossible to watch the growth of the
love-life of a human being, to trace its development from babyhood up
to its culmination in mating and parenthood, without a sense of wonder
at the steady purpose behind it all. We used to believe that the love
for the young girl that suddenly blooms forth in the callow youth was
an entirely new affair, something suddenly planted in him as he
developed into manhood; but now we know, thanks to the uncovering of
human nature by the painstaking investigations of the psycho-analytic
school of psychologists, that the seeds of the love-life are planted,
not in puberty, but with the beginning of life itself. Looked at in
one way, all infancy and childhood are a preparation, a training of
the love-instinct which is to be ready at the proper time to find its
mate and play its part in the perpetuation of the race. Nature begins
early. As she plants in the tiny baby all the organs that shall be
needed during its lifetime, so she plants the rudiments of all the
impulses and tendencies that shall later be developed into the
full-grown instincts. There have been found to be four periods in the
love-life of the growing child, three of them preparatory steps
leading up to maturity; periods in which the main current of love is
directed respectively toward self, parents, comrades, and finally
toward lover or mate.

=Like Narcissus.= In the first stage, the baby's interest is in his
own body. He is getting acquainted with himself, and he soon finds
that his body contains possibilities of pleasurable sensations which
may be repeated by the proper stimulation. Besides the
hunger-satisfaction that it brings, the act of sucking is pleasurable
in itself, and so the baby begins to suck his thumb or his quilts or
his rattle. Later, this impulse to stimulate the nerves about the
mouth finds its satisfaction in kissing, and still later it