单选题 .  The great chariot of society, which for so long had run down the gentle slope of tradition, now found itself powered by an internal combustion engine. Transactions and gain     21    a new and startling     22    force.
    What forces could have been     23    powerful to smash a comfortable and     24    world and institute in its place this new society? There was no single massive     25    . It was not great events, single adventures, individual laws, or charming     26    which     27    about the economic revolution. It was a process of internal growth.
    First, there was the gradual emergence of national political     28    in Europe. A second great current of change was to be found in the slow decay of the religious spirit under the     29    of the skeptical, inquiring, humanist views of the Italian Renaissance. Still another     30    current lies in the slow social changes that eventually     31    the market system possible. In the     32    of this change, power naturally began to gravitate into the hands of those who understood money matters-the merchants.
    Perhaps most important of all in the pervasiveness of its effect was a rise in scientific curiosity.     33    the world would wait until the age of Adam Smith for its     34    burst of technology, the Industrial Revolution could net have taken place had not the ground been prepared     35    a succession of basic sub-industrial discoveries.
    No single one of these currents, acting by itself, could have turned society     36    Indeed, many of them may have been as much the     37    as the causes of a great convulsion in human organization. History turns no     38    corners, and the whole vast upheaval sprawled out over time. Evidences of the market way of life sprang up side by side with older traditional ways, and remnants of the former day     39    long after the market had for all practical purposes taken over the     40    principle of economic organization.21.