“The Will's nature, not Law's, is what prevents the input from passing through unchanged.”
Law never commands or compels. It presents a direction, and a Will processes that input through its own opaque, agentic nature before producing output. The result is influenced by Law, but never identical to it — and this isn't stipulated, it's derived.
The river and the swimmer
Law is a river's current; the Will is a swimmer. The current is real, and it has a direction — but the swimmer is not a leaf carried helplessly along. She can swim with the current, cut across it, or fight against it. Her trajectory is the joint product of the current and her own strokes, and it's determined by neither the river alone nor the swimmer alone.
A derived result, not a postulate
This is the detail easiest to miss: 'influential, not determinative' is not a property tacked onto Law by fiat. It falls directly out of combining what both entities already are. Law contributes only directionality — it's non-conscious, with no mechanism to compel anything, the way a gravitational field has no way to decide to grab an object. The Will contributes opacity and agentic processing — being a black box, it doesn't transmit input unchanged; it processes it internally and produces output of its own volition.
Notice where the responsibility for 'not determinative' actually sits: with the Will, not with Law. It would misdescribe the picture to list influence-not-imposition as a property of Law itself — the Will's opacity is equally, perhaps more, responsible for it. This is what keeps the framework from quietly turning Law into a puppeteer.
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