Nor have these plain principles any relation to the old difficulties
of necessity and freewill. Every Freewillist holds that the special
force of free volition is applied to the pre-existing forces of our
corporeal structure; he does not consider it as an agency acting in
vacuo, but as an agency acting upon other agencies. Every
Freewillist holds that, upon the whole, if you strengthen the motive
in a given direction, mankind tend more to act in that direction.
Better motives--better impulses, rather--come from a good body:
worse motives or worse impulses come from a bad body. A Freewillist
may admit as much as a Necessarian that such improved conditions
tend to improve human action, and that deteriorated conditions tend
to deprave human action. No Freewillist ever expects as much from
St. Giles's as he expects from Belgravia: he admits an hereditary
nervous system as a datum for the will, though he holds the will to
be an extraordinary incoming 'something.' No doubt the modern
doctrine of the 'Conservation of Force,' if applied to decision, is
inconsistent with free will; if you hold that force 'is never lost
or gained,' you cannot hold that there is a real gain--a sort of new
creation of it in free volition. But I have nothing to do here with
the universal 'Conservation of Force.' The conception of the nervous
organs as stores of will-made power does not raise or need so vast a
discussion.

Still less are these principles to be confounded with Mr. Buckle's
idea that material forces have been the main-springs of progress,
and moral causes secondary, and, in comparison, not to be thought
of. On the contrary, moral causes are the first here. It is the
action of the will that causes the unconscious habit; it is the
continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of
the end; it is the silent toil of the first generation that becomes