e personal influences
which are about him is just the "suggestibleness" which we have
already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves
are "suggestions"--social suggestions. These influences differ in
different communities, as we so often remark. The Turk learns to live
in a very different system of relations of "give and take" from ours,
and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is
characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family--all this sinks
into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the
capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggestible, and here are the
suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no
difference what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a learner by
imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher.

The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter
another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society
agree; _all must be born to learn the same things_. They enter, if so
be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems
like a very commonplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each
member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions;
the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the
degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before
received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the
genius.

There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of
suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a
certain social understanding about ourselves generally--a _Zeitgeist_,
an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very
peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that
you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in
which it is different. The common phrase "fish out of water" is often
heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for science. The
next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal
to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us
say that there exists in every society a general system of values,
found in social usages, conventions, institutions, and formulas, and
that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual
recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has
become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be