McDougall nevertheless is possessed by an idea which negatives such a conclusion, negatives his whole philosophy; but he has never let it possess him wholly. That is why he has become so subtile, so difficult to read. Among those objects “of a certain class” which his thirteen innate or inherited instincts have moved him to pay attention to, is the materialistic physical science of the nineteenth century. And the conclusions of that science emphatically forbid the conclusion which he longs to arrive at in his own particular sphere. He wants to be free; to have a soul. And this old science tells him that he can’t be free, nor have anything of the sort. The trouble, of course, comes from the “law” of the Conservation of Energy--the idea that force is incapable of being either increased or diminished; that the amount of power which enters into anything is the amount of power which eventually issues from it, no more and no less. If will be anything but the net result of a group of pushes and pulls, it obviously contravenes this law by “creating” enough force to upset the balance--that is, unless we interpret the law very liberally and take it to mean that the sum total of the force of the entire universe alone is constant. In that case, if the will can smuggle in a little energy without having to pay for it, so to speak, it could be free to that extent. The nineteenth century provided against this catastrophe by making matter indestructible. No particle of it was to be permitted to give up the ghost--a ghost which might be snatched by the will and used to wreck the materialistic machine. So even if matter had some energy locked up in it somehow, it was going to stay locked up. Those were the days of a static universe; of a world completely finished, set going and deserted by a God who had gone out of business and was never expected to return. And to prove it, scientists devised instruments, measured the energy--income and output, found that the two balanced, and boldly announced that they always “must” balance. Naturally, McDougall is not so crude as to accept either those experiments or those theories today. It takes a popular author to do that--one whose reading stopped or was curtailed many years ago. After saying that the only ground for doubting the freedom of the will is that offered by the strict determinists who contend for the universality of the Law of Causation--a dependent brother of the Law of Conservation,--after saying this, he boldly adds that this law “is not susceptible of being proved”; has “had its day”; and “is merely a clog on speculation.”