Where there is too much sympathy, then the great voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be delicate.

Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days.

Often, for a mere infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the independence which later on is life itself.
But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond mother-love.

For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care.
It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant.

A mother may wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or spiritual love.