Walter Bagehot

If he were taken away, it would be most difficult to make any other choice, and that difficulty keeps him where he is.

A change of the President, though legally simple, is in practice all but impossible; because all know that such a change might be a change, not only of the President, but of much more too: that very probably it might be a change of the…

A new world of inventions--of railways and of telegraphs--has grown up around us which we cannot help seeing; a new world of ideas is in the air and affects us, though we do not see it.

A full estimate of these effects would require a great book, and I am sure I could not write it; but I think I may usefully, in a few papers, show how, upon one or two great points, the new ideas are modifying two old sciences--politics…

Science tries to find in each bit of earth the record of the causes which made it precisely what it is; those forces have left their trace, she knows, as much as the tact and hand of the artist left their mark on a classical gem.

Such subsidiary sciences are to the decipherer of the present day what old languages were to the antiquary of other days; they construe for him the words which he discovers, they give a richness and a truth-like complexity to the picture…

Each nerve has a sort of memory of its past life, is trained or not trained, dulled or quickened, as the case may be; each feature is shaped and characterised, or left loose and meaningless, as may happen; each hand is marked with its…

But what physical science does is, not to discover the hereditary element, but to render it distinct,--to give us an accurate conception of what we may expect, and a good account of the evidence by which we are led to expect it.

That is to say, an action may require all our attention and all our volition for its first, or second, or third performance, but by frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part our organisation, and is performed without volition, or…

The body of the accomplished man has thus become by training different from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man; it is charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it unconsciously.

The regular transmutation of motions which are at first voluntary into secondary automatic motions, as Hartley calls them, is due to a gradually effected organisation; and we may rest assured of this, that co-ordinate activity always…

I do not think any who do not acquire--and it takes a hard effort to acquire--this notion of a transmitted nerve element will ever understand 'the connective tissue' of civilisation.

We have here the continuous force which binds age to age, which enables each to begin with some improvement on the last, if the last did itself improve; which makes each civilisation not a set of detached dots, but a line of colour, surely…

All these theories admit--indeed they are but various theories to account for--the fact that what we call matter has consequences in what we call mind, and that what we call mind produces results in what we call matter; and the doctrines I…

Our mind in some strange way acts on our nerves, and our nerves in some equally strange way store up the consequences, and somehow the result, as a rule and commonly enough, goes down to our descendants; these primitive facts all theories…

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.

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…

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.

His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood…

The families of Jacob and Esau separate and form two nations; but the families of Jacob's children hold together and become a people.

Perhaps it is the most valuable, as it is clearly the most sure result of that science, that it has dispelled the dreams of other days as to a primitive high civilisation.

The conclusive arguments against the imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone.