[Footnote A:  Mr. James Freeman Clarke has stated this better than I can.  “We may state the law thus:  ’Any habitual course of conduct changes voluntary actions into automatic or involuntary (i.e., reflex) actions.’  By practice man forms habits, and habitual action is automatic action, requiring no exercise of will except at the beginning of the series of acts.  The law of association does the rest.  As voluntary acts are transformed into automatic, the will is set free to devote itself to higher efforts and larger attainments.  After telling the truth a while by an effort, we tell the truth naturally, necessarily, automatically.  After giving to good objects for a while from principle, we give as a matter of course.  Honesty becomes automatic; self-control becomes automatic.  We rule over our spirit, repress ill-temper, keep down bad feelings, first by an effort, afterwards as a matter of course.

“Possibly these virtues really become incarnate in the bodily organization.  Possibly goodness is made flesh and becomes consolidate in the fibres of the brain.  Vices, beginning in the soul, seem to become at last bodily diseases; why may not virtues follow the same law?  If it were not for some such law of accumulation as this, the work of life would have to be begun forever anew.  Formation of character would be impossible.  We should be incapable of progress, our whole strength being always employed in battling with our first enemies, learning evermore anew our earliest lessons.  But by our present constitution he who has taken one step can take another, and life may become a perpetual advance from good to better.  And the highest graces of all—­Faith, Hope, and Love—­obey the same law.”  See James Freeman Clarke, Every-Day Religion, p. 122.]

There has been therefore in the successive forms and stages of animal life a clear sequence of dominant nervous actions.  The actions of all animals below the annelid are mainly reflex or automatic, unconscious and involuntary.  But in insects and lower vertebrates the highest actions at least are instinctive.  Consciousness plays a continually more important part.  Still the actions are controlled by hereditary tendency far more than by the will of the individual.  But in man instinct has been almost entirely replaced by conscious, voluntary, intelligent action.  And yet in man, as rapidly as possible, actions which at first require conscious effort become, through repetition and habit, reflex and automatic.  All our conscious effort and the energy of the will, being no longer required for these oft-repeated actions, are set free for higher attainments.  The territory which had to be conquered by hard battles has become an integral part of the realm.  It now hardly requires even a garrison, but has become a source of supplies for a new advance and march of conquest.