356 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



of tradition as a third force impinging upon the other two. 

 The innate propensities of each individual human being 

 are in contact throughout his life with the body of beliefs, 

 moral judgments, social institutions, rules of art or craft 

 that make up the tradition of the society into which he is 

 born. These enter into his character, interpenetrate his 

 hereditary impulses, not only encouraging and restraining, 

 but with more subtle power, prescribing to each impulse 

 the sphere within which it is to move, and the object on 

 which it may exercise itself. And the character so formed 

 is all the while in interaction with the results of experience 

 in the narrower sense of that which the individual finds 

 out for himself, as opposed to that of which he is told. 

 Tradition, in the broad sense in which it is here taken, 

 jests of course principally on language, and language, as 

 we have seen, is both the parent and the child of the 

 Universal. Hence it is that though there is a rudimentary 

 forrn of tradition among the higher orders of animals, it 

 cannot there fill the place which we here attribute to it. 

 The rudiments of instruction which an ape, a cat, or a 

 bird can furnish to its young, are limited to a few acts of 

 restraint and encouragement, supplementing, or, rather, 

 anticipating the lessons which individual experience would 

 teach. In human society, on the other hand, tradition 

 goes to the root-principles of action, both as shaping the 

 ends recognised as desirable, and as furnishing rules of 

 method of which but few could be found out in the course 

 of individual experience, and those only by exceptionally 

 gitted or exceptionally fortunate persons. In a word, 

 tradition as based on the Universal brings the experience 

 of the race to bear on individual conduct in a new 

 sense. If we are right in holding that instinct is due to 

 heredity, while heredity works through natural selection, 

 then, as we have already seen, there is a sense in which 

 instinct itself utilises the experience of the race to guide 

 the individual. What is performed at that stage by the 

 constant elimination of the majority of individuals born, 

 and by the stereotyping of the structure of those which 

 survive, is executed at this higher stage by the organisa- 

 tion of the experience of those who have lived, and rests 



