nic realm he can say of tradition in the field of the folkways. That
the transmission is in the one case by way of the sex organs and the
germ-plasm, and in the other through the action of the vocal cords, the
auditory nerves, etc., would seem to be of small moment in comparison
with the essential identity in the functions discharged.

Tradition is, in a sense and if such a comparison were profitable, more
conservative than heredity. There is in the content of tradition an
invariability which could not exist if it were a dual composite, as is
the constitution of the germ-plasm. Here we must recall certain
essential qualities of the mores which we have hitherto viewed from
another angle. Tradition always looks to the folkways as constituting
the matter to be transmitted. But the folkways, after the concurrence
in their practice has been established, come to include a judgment that
they conduce to societal and, indeed, individual welfare. This is where
they come to be properly called mores. They become the prosperity-policy
of the group, and the young are reared up under their sway, looking to
the older as the repositories of precedent and convention. But presently
the older die, and in conformity with the ideas of the time, they become
beings of a higher power toward whom the living owe duty, and whose will
they do not wish to cross. The sanction of ghost-fear is thus extended
to the mores, which, as the prosperity-policy of the group, have already
taken on a stereotyped character. They thus become in an even higher
degree "uniform, universal in a group, imperative, invariable. As time
goes on, they become more and more arbitrary, positive, and imperative.
If asked why they act in a certain way in certain cases, primitive
people always answer that it is because they and their ancestors always
have done so." Thus the transmission of the mores comes to be a process
embodying the greatest conservatism and the least likelihood of change.
This situation represents an adaption of society to life-conditions; it
would seem that because of the rapidity of succession of variations
there is need of an intensely conserving force (like ethnocentrism or
religion) to preserve a certain balance and poise in the evolutionary
movement.

Transmission of the mores takes place through the agency of imitation or
of inculcation; through one or the other according as the initiative is
taken by the receiving or the giving party respectively. Inc