On the other hand, in the case of a wide-reaching group bound into conscious unity by facile communication, people no longer look chiefly to their fathers for ideas; the paternal influence has to compete with many others, and is further weakened by the breaking up of family associations which goes with ease of movement. Yet men are not less dependent upon the past than before; it is only that tradition is so intricate and so spread out over the face of things that its character as tradition is hardly to be discovered. The obvious thing now is the lateral movement; influences seem to come in sidewise and fashion rules over custom. The difference is something like that between a multitude of disconnected streamlets and a single wide river, in which the general downward movement is obscured by numerous cross-currents and eddies. In truth, facile communication extends the scope of tradition as much as it does that of fashion. All the known past becomes accessible anywhere, and instead of the cult of immediate ancestors we have a long-armed, selective appropriation of whatever traditional ideas suit our tastes. For painting the whole world goes to Renaissance Italy, for sculpture to ancient Greece, and so on. Convention has not gained as against tradition, but both have been transformed. In much the same way we may distinguish between traditionalism and conventionalism; the one meaning a dominant type of thought evidently handed down from the past, the other a type formed by contemporary influence—but we should not expect the distinction to be any more fundamental than before. Traditionalism may be looked for wherever there are long-established groups somewhat shut out from lateral influence, either by external conditions or by the character of their own system of ideas—in isolated rural communities, for example, in old and close-knit organizations like the church, or in introverted nations such as China used to be. Conventionalism applies to well-knit types not evidently traditional, and describes a great part of modern life.