WHY DO LAWS OF NATURE NOT ALWAYS WORK? 391
crucial problem with which the Industrial Revolution had thus con-
fronted them by enlisting new technical resources that the Industrial
Revolution itself had placed at their disposal. The creativity displayed in
the nineteenth-century shipwrights* response was proportionate to the
severity of the challenge that evoked it. But, as soon as the problem
of carrying capacity had been solved through the creation of a long-
distance steamship whose speed could be progressively increased pari
passu with progressive increases in its size, there was a slackening of the
pressure that had been constantly stimulating the shipwrights' inventive
faculties during the preceding fifty years ; and this relaxation of tension
would seem to explain why it was that, in shipbuilding, the rate of
innovation during the sixty years A.D. 1890 to 1950 was markedly slower
than it had been between A.D. 1840 and A.D. 1890, in spite of the fact
that, during the six decades ending in A J>. 1950, the general progress of
Western technology had been continuing to accelerate in a geometrical
progression.

The sensitiveness, speed, and vigour of the Western shipwright's
responses to two altogether different challenges within the four and a
half centuries miming from circa A.D. 1440 to circa A.D. 1890 are striking
evidences of human freedom of action in response to a technological
challenge; but Technology is, after all, the field where, if anywhere,
evidences of human freedom are to be expected, considering that Man
never comes so near to being master of a situation as when he is dealing
with Non-Human Nature. Man seldom shows anything like the same
mastery in his dealings either with the Subconscious Psyche underlying
his personality or with the other personalities who are his fellow human
beings ; and it is therefore perhaps more remarkable if we find evidences
of Challenge-and-Response giving birth to human freedom on the
spiritual as well as on the technological plane. We do, in fact, find such
evidences here too when we recall the part played by Challenge-and-
Response in generating the diversity between corresponding episodes
in the histories of different civilizations.

The diversity in the duration of the growth-phases of civilizations has
manifestly been the consequence of a recurrent freedom of choice that
brings with it, each time, both a chance of success and a risk of failure.
As we have found in a previous context,1 the process of social growth
consists in a concatenation of acts of Challenge-and-Response in which
a successful response to one challenge gives rise to another challenge
which may be met by another successful response giving rise to yet
another challenge in the series. It will be seen that, in each successive
act, the recipients of the challenge of the hour are free to choose between
a Good and an Evil that are fraught with Life and with Death ;3 and this
means that each act raises afresh the issue *to be or not to be*. In any
such series of encounters between God the deliverer of the challenge
and Man the recipient of it, there is manifestly nothing that makes it
impossible for the spinning of a golden thread of challenge-met-by-

ful-response to continue ad infinitum. It is equally manifest that, at the

1 In III. iiL 119-20. z Deut. TOOT. 15-19.