274 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the 

 broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to 

 the mind of man, and is handed down, by speech or 

 imitation or in some permanent record, from genera- 

 tion to generation. Language, general ideas of right 

 and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling — 

 all this and much more, constituting the more im- 

 portant part of the human individual's environment 

 — is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently 

 and inevitably social. However individualistic we 

 may wish to be we cannot escape modelling by this 

 social environment. 



The general effect of man's gregarious instinct is 

 that he desires to find himself in harmony with some 

 traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes to 

 call the herd to which he belongs. The herd ideas, 

 the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a 

 stratum within the nation; of a whole class or of a 

 clique; of science or of art; of a retired monasticism, 

 or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But they 

 are always herd ideas, and through them man is al- 

 ways member of some community, even though that 

 community be tiny, or consist mainly of writers dead 

 and gone; and he always strives to put himself in 

 harmony with the traditions of that community. 



^ 3ft J^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 



A long-winded introduction enough; now for the 

 bearing of it. One of the essentials of every religion 

 is its treatment of the subconscious, is its view and its 

 practice as regards the relation between the person- 



