SOCIAL HEREDITY 201 



knowledge, belief, and custom to be acquired or as- 

 similated. Whereas animal species have advanced from 

 lower to higher levels of mental life by the improve- 

 ment of the innate mental constitution of the species, 

 man, since he became man, has progressed in the main 

 by means of the increase in volume and improve- 

 ment in quality of the sum of knowledge, belief, and cus- 

 tom, which constitutes the tradition of any society. And 

 it is to the superiority of the moral and intellectual 

 tradition of his society that the superiority of civilized 

 man over existing savages and over his savage fore- 

 fathers is chiefly, if not wholly, due. This increase and 

 improvement of tradition has been effected by countless 

 steps, each relatively small and unimportant, initiated 

 by the few original minds of the successive generations 

 and incorporated in the social tradition through the ac- 

 ceptance or imitation of them by the mass of men. All 

 that constitutes culture and civilization, all, or nearly all, 

 that distinguishes the highly cultured European intel- 

 lectually and morally from the men of the stone age of 

 Europe, is then summed up in the word 'tradition/ and 

 all tradition exists only in virtue of imitation; for it is 

 only by imitation that each generation takes up and 

 makes its own the tradition of the preceding generation ; 

 and it is only by imitation that any improvement, con- 

 ceived by any mind endowed with that rarest of all things, 

 a spark of originality, can become embodied within the 

 tradition of his society." B5 



SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS. 



BOAS, F. The Mind of Primitive Man. 

 COOLEY, C. H. Social Organization. 



ss McDougall, op. cit., pp. 327-328. 



