elaboration, and with this further precision of language also. For the
present, let us leave the term heritage to the economist for the
material wealth with which he is primarily concerned, and employ the
term _tradition_ for these immaterial and distinctively social elements
we are here specially considering. This in fact is no new proposal, but
really little more than an acceptance of ordinary usage. Broadly
speaking, tradition is in the life of the community what memory is for
its individual units. The younger generation, then, not only inherits an
organic and a psychic diathesis; not only has transmitted to it the
accumulations, instruments and land of its predecessors, but grows up in
their tradition also. The importance of imitation in this process, a
matter of common experience, has been given the fullest sociological
prominence, by M. Tarde especially.[9] Thanks to these and other
convergent lines of thought, we no longer consent to look at the
acquirement of the social tradition as a matter requiring to be imposed
upon reluctant youth almost entirely from without, and are learning anew
as of old, with the simplest and the most developed peoples, the
barbarians and the Greeks, to recognise and respect, and, if it may be,
to nourish the process of self-instruction, viewed as normal
accompaniment of each developing being throughout the phases of its
[Page: 74] organic life, the stages of its social life. Upon the many
intermediate degrees of advance and decline, however, between these two
extremes of civilisation, specific institutions for the instruction of
youth arise, each in some way an artificial substitute, or at least a
would-be accelerant, for the apprenticeship of imitation in the school
of experience and the community's tradition, which we term a school in
the restricted and pedagogic sense. This whole discussion, however, has
been in order to explain and to justify the present use of the term
"School" in that wide sense in which the historian of art or
thought--the sociologist in fact--has ever used the term, while yet