he most part accepted without inquiry
and applied without reflection. It furnishes the appropriate institution
for providing for each class of social needs, for meeting common
dangers, for satisfying social wants, for regulating social relations.
It constitutes, in short, the framework of society's life which to each
new generation is a part of its hereditary outfit.

But of course in speaking of tradition as a kind of inheritance we
conceive of it as propagated by quite other than biological methods. In
a sense its propagation is psychological, it is handed on from mind to
mind, and even though social institutions may in a sense be actually
incorporated in material things, in buildings, in books, in coronation
robes, or in flags, still it need not be said that these things are
nothing but for the continuity of thought which maintains and develops
their significance. Yet the forces at work in tradition are not purely
psychological; at least they are not to be understood in terms of
individual psychology alone. What is handed on is not merely a set of
ideas but the whole social environment; not merely certain ways of
thinking or of acting but the conditions which prescribe to individuals
the necessity for thinking or acting in certain specific ways if they
are to achieve their own desires. The point is worth dwelling on,
because some writers have thought to simplify the working of tradition
by reducing it to some apparently simple psychological phenomenon like
that of imitation. In this there is more than one element of fallacy.

Now the growth of tradition will in a sense gravely modify the
individual members of the society which maintains it. To any given set
of institutions a certain assemblage of qualities, mental and physical,
will be most appropriate, and these may differ as much as the qualities
necessary for war differ from those of peaceful industry. Any tradition
will obviously call forth from human beings the qualities appropriate to
it, and it will in a sense select the individuals in which those
qualities are the best developed and will tend to bring them to the top
of the social fabric, but this is not to say that it will assert the
same modification upon the stock that would be accomplished by the
working of heredity. The hereditary qualities of the race may remain the
same, though the traditions have changed and though by them one set of
qualities are kept permanently in abeyance, while the other are
con