epresented in the mind of the community, and these react upon the
individuals, their activities, their place itself. Thus (the more
plainly the more the community is a simple and an isolated one, but in
appreciable measure everywhere and continually) there have obviously
arisen local turns of thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades
of accept and idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there
is a characteristic variety of occupational activity, a style of
workmanship, a way of doing business. There are distinctive [Page: 73]
manners and customs--there is, in short, a certain recognisable
likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and
general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and
literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in
street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral.
Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town
its own school.

While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its
characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been
arising. In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than
variation--especially when, as in most places at most times, such great
racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of
modern cities. In other words, the young folk present not only an
individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity
proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic
continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of
course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the
_inheritance_--a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of
its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the
term _heritage_, material or immaterial alike. This necessary
distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the
heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further
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