While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been arising.  In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than variation—­especially when, as in most places at most times, such great racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of modern cities.  In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also.  The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the inheritance—­a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term heritage, material or immaterial alike.  This necessary distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further elaboration, and with this further precision of language also.  For the present, let us leave the term heritage to the economist for the material wealth with which he is primarily concerned, and employ the term tradition for these immaterial and distinctively social elements we are here specially considering.  This in fact is no new proposal, but really little more than an acceptance of ordinary usage.  Broadly speaking, tradition is in the life of the community what memory is for its individual units.  The younger generation, then, not only inherits an organic and a psychic diathesis; not only has transmitted to it the accumulations, instruments and land of its predecessors, but grows up in their tradition also.  The importance of imitation in this process, a matter of common experience, has been given the fullest sociological prominence, by M. Tarde especially.[9] Thanks to these and other convergent lines of thought, we no longer consent to look at the acquirement of the social tradition as a matter requiring to be imposed upon reluctant youth almost entirely from without, and are learning anew as of old, with the simplest and the most developed peoples, the barbarians and the Greeks, to recognise and respect, and, if it may be, to nourish the process of self-instruction, viewed as normal accompaniment of each developing being throughout the phases of its [Page:  74] organic life, the stages of its social life.  Upon the many intermediate degrees of advance and decline, however, between these two extremes of civilisation, specific institutions for the instruction of youth arise, each in some way an artificial substitute, or at least a would-be accelerant, for the apprenticeship of imitation in the school of experience and the community’s tradition, which we term a school in the restricted and pedagogic sense.  This whole discussion, however, has been in order to explain and to justify the present use of the term “School” in that wide sense in which the historian of art or thought—­the sociologist in fact—­has ever used the term, while yet covering the specialised pedagogic schools of all kinds also.