[Sidenote: This identification as a means of obtaining immortality]
This identification plays moreover a further and perhaps still more important part inasmuch as it affords a means of overcoming the finality of individual death, and insures the parent, through his children and ultimately through their descendants, the nearest approach to material immortality that can be hoped for here on earth. The love of children and interest in their welfare which springs from the altruistic and object-loving tendencies involved in the parental instincts may thus become fused with the strongly egoistic tendencies grouped together under the self-preserving and self-regarding instincts and sentiments; that dearest and most powerful wish of the individual, _qua_ individual--the desire for immortality--thus obtaining satisfaction in the same way and at the same time as the strongest and most distinctive of all altruistic impulses--those which minister to the needs of the race through the love and care which is bestowed upon children by their parents. A reconciliation of the egoistic and the altruistic, of the personal and the racial trends, is thus brought about--a reconciliation which may be of the greatest value to the individual, to the family and to the larger social organism of which they both form a part.
[Sidenote: Vicarious enjoyments of children's pleasures and successes]
Not only is a parent capable of obtaining through his children the satisfaction attendant upon a prolongation of his own existence; he may also through them enjoy vicariously benefits, privileges, successes and pleasures of which he himself has been deprived or has failed to reap advantage. What the pessimist von Hartmann has styled the third stage of humanity's illusion with regard to the possibility of happiness--the idea that the pleasures which we have ourselves failed to find may nevertheless be enjoyed by those that come after us--is nowhere more strongly rooted than in the minds of parents when they think of the future of their offspring. Whether the underlying hope be illusory or not, there can be no doubt that many parents (and these on the whole of the nobler minded sort) are willing to labour that their children may enjoy the result of their efforts, to amass riches that their children may have the power that wealth confers, or even to acquiesce in personal failure, if only their children may thereby be brought nearer to success.