Once and again we have noted how from the everyday life of action--the
Town proper of our terminology--there arises the corresponding
subjective world--the _Schools_ of thought, which may express itself
sooner or later in schools of education. The types of people, their
kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become
represented 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 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 own day, at first separately considered,
are now seen to be closely correlated with the status of woman; while
all these factors determine not only the mode of union of the parents,
but their relation to the children, the constitution of the family, with
which the mode of transmission of property is again thoroughly
interwoven.