Intelligent Direction and Social Progress 147 



Yet there is progress of another kind. With intelligence 

 comes educability. Each generation is educated in the 

 acquisitions of earlier generations. There is in every 

 community a greater or less mass of so-called 'tradition' 

 which is handed down, with constant increments, from one 

 generation to another. The young creature grows up into 

 this tradition by the process of imitative absorption which 

 has been called above 'social heredity.' This directly 

 takes the place of physical heredity as a means of trans- 

 mission of many of the acquisitions which are at first the 

 result of private intelligence, and tends to free the species 

 from its dependence upon variations — except intellectual 

 variations, — just as the general growth of intelligence 

 and sentiment tends to free the organism from the law of 

 natural selection. 



These general truths cannot be expanded here ; they 

 belong to the theory of social evolution. Yet they should 

 be noted for certain reasons which are pertinent to our 

 general topic, and which I may briefly mention. 



First, it should be said that this progress in emancipation 

 from the operation of natural selection and from dependence 

 upon variations, is not limited to human life. It arises from 

 the operation of the principle which has all the while given 

 direction to organic evolution ; the principle that individual 

 accommodations set the direction of evolution, by what is 

 called organic selection. It is only a widening of the 

 sphere of accommodation in the way which is called intelli- 

 gent, with its accompanying tendency to social life, that 

 has produced the deflection of the stream which is so 

 marked in human development. And as to the existence 

 of 'tradition' with 'social transmission' among animals, 

 recent biological research and observations are emphasizing 



