The scheme which we have criticized in its application to Egypt is intended to render account of the dynamics of civilizations in their last phases. For the early phases, the classical world cannot supply ready-made notions. Here Toynbee introduces a set of formulas which may be summarized in his own words: Growth is achieved, when an individual, or a minority, or a whole society, replies to a challenge by a response, which not only answers the particular challenge that has evoked it, but also exposes the respondent to a fresh challenge which demands a fresh response on his part. And the process of growth continues, in any given case, so long as this recurrent movement of disturbance and restoration and overbalance and renewed disturbance of equilibrium is maintained.[31] But communities react differently under a common challenge; some are apt to succumb whereas others strike out a successful response through a creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, while others again, neither succeed in responding along original lines nor fail to respond altogether, but manage to survive the crisis by waiting until some creative individual or creative minority has shown the way through, and then following tamely in the footsteps of the pioneers. These plausible words do not, upon closer inspection, explain the problem which concerns us. The “creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return” is illustrated by examples which rob it not only of its obvious, but of all definite, meaning.[32] The other formula—that of “Challenge-and-Response”[33]—is not evolved from inside history either but is applied, as it were, from the outside; and its applicability, let alone its power to explain the facts, is often more than doubtful. “Challenge-and-Response” is sometimes used to describe a true conflict; sometimes it refers merely to the ordinary seesaw of historical fortune. Always, however, it has a misleading ring, since _observed facts_ are called a response, to a _hypothetical challenge_ construed to meet those facts. In Volume II, “The Range of Challenge-and-Response,” we find headings like “The Stimulus of Hard Countries,” “The Stimulus of New Ground,” “The Stimulus of Blows,” “The Stimulus of Pressure,” “The Stimulus of Penalization,” and so on. The primary data of history merely show that certain peoples achieved greatness; Toynbee thinks that the adverse conditions which he enumerates served as stimuli. That may be so. In any case, it does not explain the fact which, above all others, requires explanation, namely, that in some cases these conditions worked as stimuli and in others they did not. I do not find, therefore, that the formula is conducive to understanding; it must in each case invent a challenge to fit a historical reality which it labels response.