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
covering the specialised pedagogic schools of all kinds also.

[9] Tarde, "L'imitation Sociale," and other works.

Once more, then, and in the fullest sense, every folk has its own
tradition, every town its school.

We need not here discriminate these unique and characteristic elements
to which the art-historians--say of Venice and of Florence, of Barbizon
or Glasgow--specially attend from those most widely distributed ones, in
which the traditions and schools of all towns within the same
civilisation broadly agree. Indeed, even the most widely distributed of
these--say from Roman law to modern antiseptic surgery--arose as local
schools before they became general ones.

Similarly for the general social tradition. The fundamental occupations
and their division of labour, their differentiation in detail and their
various interactions up to our