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 the transmitted aptitude of
the next. Here physical causes do not create the moral, but moral
create the physical; here the beginning is by the higher energy, the
conservation and propagation only by the lower. But we thus perceive
how a science of history is possible, as Mr. Buckle said,--a science to
teach the laws of tendencies--created by the mind, and transmitted by
the body--which act upon and incline the will of man from age to age.

II.

But how do these principles change the philosophy of our politics? I
think in many ways; and first, in one particularly. Political economy
is the most systematised and most accurate part of political
philosophy; and yet, by the help of what has been laid down, I think we
may travel back to a sort of 'pre-economic age,' when the very
assumptions of political economy did not exist, when its precepts would
have been ruinous, and when the very contrary precepts were requisite
and wise.

For this purpose I do not need to deal with the dim ages which
ethnology just reveals to us--with the stone age, and the flint
implements, and the refuse-heaps. The time to which I would go back is
only that just before the dawn of history--coeval with the dawn,
perhaps, it would be right to say--for the first historians saw such a
state of society,