SOCIETAL EVOLUTION 141 



tion takes place. Such variations may be short-lived and ex- 

 hibited by only a few, or there may be a concurrence of many 

 which carries them forward until, perhaps, the code of the 

 society at large has been profoundly modified. Some of the 

 variations live and some die out. Here is the fact of selection. 

 All through history, codes and institutions have appeared, 

 have persisted for a time, and have been altered or have 

 passed completely away. But the process of societal selection 

 is somewhat involved. I should prefer, for the moment, 

 merely to record its presence. 



The remaining factor is heredity. It is clear enough to 

 anyone that the mores are not inherited but learned acquired 

 anew by each generation. Language is the best example: men 

 have used it time out of mind, but no one is ever born with 

 a command of it. Mores are also passed over from one group 

 of adults to another. Hence heredity is not present in the 

 societal range. But there is something there which discharges 

 essentially the same function and is a genuine counterpart. 

 Without variation, we have seen, all would be monotony and 

 changelessness; but without heredity or some factor similarly 

 conservative, all would be chaos and discontinuity. Even 

 social life is not altogether that; and it is not that because in it 

 too there operates a conservative factor. 



Transmission of the mores is by tradition. What matter 

 if its channels are through the eye and ear, and not by way 

 of the germ-plasm? Tradition, like heredity, tends to repeat 

 the type. It is brought about through imitation, either spon- 

 taneous or induced. Spontaneous imitation is a natural ac- 

 tivity, common to animals and man, and especially marked, 

 among human beings, in the young. The receiver of the mores, 

 thus transmitted, wants to receive, and takes the initiative in 

 the transfer, as when the small boy apes his father. But such 

 acquisition is also capable of being induced, where there is no 

 likelihood that it will be spontaneous, by precept and disci- 



