TRADITION AND HEREDITY 463 



usually have favourable results, there is no sufficient foundation 

 for attributing favourable results to all such intermingling as has 

 been done by some authors — von Luschan, for instance. The 

 conclusion would seem to be that germinal change is never more 

 than a contributory cause of advance, and that traditional change 

 is the whole explanation of some of such periods. 



Periods of decline are, as we have seen, sometimes associated 

 with unfavourable traditional changes. Tradition may be of such 

 a nature as to sap rather than to encourage vigour. But directly 

 unfavourable turnings of tradition, such as the belief that the 

 world would come to an end at a certain date, are only occasional 

 causes of decline. There is in the course which the development 

 of tradition takes an almost inevitable tendency for periods of 

 advance to be succeeded by periods of repletion and apathy. 

 What appears to happen so often in the history of art after a time 

 of advance may lead to an understanding of the tendency of events 

 in general. If we watch the flowering of any school of art we 

 reach a period, exemplified in the work of the followers of Raphael 

 for instance, and perhaps, as some would say, in the work of 

 Raphael himself, when the artists appear to be lost in the practice 

 of the technical side of artistic production. The ideal, in order 

 to express which the technique has been called into existence, has 

 been lost. The original stimulus has in fact lost its power, and 

 the means to the expression of the ideal have been mistaken for 

 ends in themselves. The technique becomes a plaything, and, 

 there being nothing to express, art takes the form of variations 

 in technique, and becomes, in a word, conventional. This is 

 what would appear to happen as regards progress in general- 

 due allowance being made in the case of skilled processes for the 

 fact that, since they are designed to achieve practical ends, there 

 is less chance of decadence. But in general we see the fading 

 of the power of the stimulus, the coming of a time of repletion, 

 when men are lost in the mass of what has under the influence of 

 the stimulus been accumulated, and in the case of the arts tend 

 to use the skill achieved as an end in itself. We may trace such 

 a course of events in the history of Greek thought. The course 

 of events may be profoundly modified in a multitude of ways by 

 the appearance of a new stimulus and so on. But we may say 

 that such is the inevitable working of the factors upon the forma- 

 tion of tradition, that periods of stagnation, of repletion, and 



