WHY DO LAWS OF NATURE NOT ALWAYS WORK? 381
affairs to laws of Nature; for we have found that, by comparison with
the jurisdiction of the laws of the Subconscious Psyche, the jurisdiction
of the laws of Physical Nature over human affairs has never been of
much consequence; and we have also found that, whatever this jurisdic-
tion may have amounted to originally, the human social animal has been
singularly successful in discovering how to elude its incidence, and has
been liberating himself in this way from Physical Nature's dominion at
a pace that has been increasing by geometrical progression. We have
watched human beings successfully conspiring to elude the incidence of
the astronomical law of the Year Cycle that governs the yield of their
domesticated plants and trees; we have watched them similarly eluding
the incidence of a physiological law of the Day-and-Night Cycle;1 and
we have also seen them turning to human account even Nature's in-
human device of a procession of generation cycles punctuated by the
deaths of individuals, when human beings have overlaid Nature's own
method of transmitting a racial heritage of instincts and aptitudes
through the physiological process of procreation with the artificial human
device of transmitting a social heritage of habits and knowledge through
the spiritual process of moral and intellectual education.3 On this show-
ing, an apparent play of 'Chance' in human affairs is unlikely, if it looms
at all large, to mask a reign of laws of Physical Nature; for, pace the
astrologers, it seems much less likely that human affairs in which we do
not discern the operation of laws of the Subconscious Psyche are
governed, under the label of 'Chance', by hitherto unrecognized laws of
Physical Nature than that they are governed either by hitherto un-
recognized laws of the Subconscious Psyche itself or else by the will
either of human beings or of God.
When human wills encounter one another without concurring in a
common purpose to do God's will, they are prone, as we have seen, to
frustrate one another, and their thus unintentionally concerted self-
stultification reopens the way for the compulsive laws of the Subcon-
scious Human Psyche to reassert themselves. When a human soul
encounters God, what is the outcome of a meeting between wills of such
immeasurably unequal potency ?
Theologians who have pictured God in Man's image, through a failure
to rise to a worship of God in spirit and in truth,3 have sometimes fallen
into the spiritual error of imagining that God exerts His irresistible power
to make His own will prevail over Man's—either by ruthlessly over-
riding it or by craftily bending it to conform to God's will unawares.4
This picture of an iron law of God the Tyrant lurking under the mesh
that God's guileless creatures label 'Chance' has been painted for us by
Bossuet.
*Ne parlons plus de hasard ni de fortune, ou parlons-en settlement
comme d'uri nom dont nous couvrons notre ignorance. Ce qui est hasard
a regard de nos conseils incertains est un dessein concert^ dans un conseil
plus haut, c'est-a-dire dans ce conseil 6ternel qui renferme toutes les
causes et toils les «ffets dans un m6me ordre. De cette sorte tout concourt
i See pp. 306-10, above.	* See pp. 319-26, above.
3 John !v. 24.	* See pp. 175-9. above.