274 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in 

 danger, that the tribe should become a real biological 

 unit. But it was impossible wholly to harmonize 

 these new social instincts, even in the simplest societies, 

 with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist tendencies ; 

 and as life became more complex and choice wider, 

 conflict grew more and more frequent.^ 



Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized 

 communities is the fact that sexual maturity occurs 

 long before marriage is possible or desirable. 



In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the 

 various combinations of suppression, or repression, 

 or sublimation. 



Man's gregariousness, together with his power of 

 speech, learning, and generalization, have led to the 

 development of a new thing in the world — ^persistent 

 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 

 important 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. 



1 See Trotter, 'iq. 



