days no one thought of building ships of iron because iron does not float;
yet now ships are seldom built of anything else, though the relative
specific gravities of iron and water remain unchanged. What has changed is
the Personal Factor. It has expanded to a more intelligent perception of
the law of flotation, and we now see that wood floats and iron sinks, both
of them by the same principle working under opposite conditions, the law,
namely, that anything will float which bulk for bulk is lighter than the
volume of water displaced by it, so that by including in our calculations
the displacement of the vessel as well as the specific gravity of the
material, we now make iron float by the very same law by which it sinks.
This example shows that the function of the Personal Factor is to analyze
the manifestations of Law which are spontaneously afforded by Nature and to
discover the Universal Affirmative Principle which lies hidden within them,
and then by the exercise of our powers of Initiative and Selection to
provide such specialized conditions as will enable the Universal Principle
to work in perfectly new ways transcending anything in our past experience.
This is how all progress has been achieved up to the present; and is the
way in which all progress must be achieved in the future, only for the
purpose of evolution, or growth from within, we must transfer the method to
the spiritual plane.

The function, then, of the Personal Factor in the Creative Order is to
provide specialized conditions by the use of the powers of Selection and
Initiative, a truth indicated by the maxim "Nature unaided fails"; but the
difficulty is that if enhanced powers were attained by the whole population
of the world without any common basis for their use, their promiscuous
exercise could only result in chaotic confusion and the destruction of the
entire race. To introduce the creative power of the Individual and at the
same time avoid converting it into a devastating flood is the great problem
of the transition from the Fourth Kingdom into the Fifth. For this purpose