‘Of course it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin, which lead, in barbarous times, to what has been described, show themselves in civilised life as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity;’[7] which he goes on to describe as a sort of inexhaustible anxiety for perfect compliance with the minutest positive commands which may be made the condition of forgiveness for the innumerable lapses of moral obligation. I am not criticising the paper, or I should point out that Bagehot failed in it to draw out the distinction between the primitive moral instinct and the corrupt superstition into which it runs; but I believe that he recognised the weight of this moral testimony of the conscience to a divine Judge, as well as the transcendental testimony of the intellect to an eternal substance of things, to the end of his life. And certainly in the reality of human free-will as the condition of all genuine moral life, he firmly believed. In his ‘Physics and Politics’—the subtle and original essay upon which, in conjunction with the essay on the ‘English Constitution,’ Bagehot’s reputation as a European thinker chiefly rests—he repeatedly guards himself (for instance, pp. 9, 10) against being supposed to think that in accepting the principle of evolution, he has accepted anything inconsistent either with spiritual creation, or with the free will of man. On the latter point he adds, ‘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.’[8]