[24] This promise is only partially fulfilled in the penultimate paragraph of the essay.—­ED.

[25] Essays, vol. iii. p. 246 et seq.  The whole passage ought to be consulted, being too long to quote here.

[26] In an essay on Prof.  Flint’s Theism, appended to the Candid Examination.

[27] A Candid Examination of Theism, pp. 171-2.

[28] [I have, as Editor, resisted a temptation to intervene in the above argument.  But I think I may intervene on a matter of fact, and point out that ‘according to the theological theory of things,’ i.e. according to the Trinitarian doctrine, God’s Nature consists in what is strictly ‘analogous to social relations,’ and He not merely exhibits in His creation, but Himself is Love.  See, on the subject, especially, R.H.  Hutton’s essay on the Incarnation, in his Theological Essays (Macmillan).—­ED.]

[29] Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution, pp. 76-7.

[30] Nature, April 5, 1883.

PART II.

+Introductory Note by the Editor+.

Little more requires to be said by way of introduction to the Notes which are all that George Romanes was able to write of a work that was to have been entitled A Candid Examination of Religion.  What little does require to be said must be by way of bridging the interval of thought which exists between the Essays which have just preceded and the Notes which represent more nearly his final phase of mind.

The most anti-theistic feature in the Essays is the stress laid in them on the evidence which Nature supplies, or is supposed to supply, antagonistic to the belief in the goodness of God.

On this mysterious and perplexing subject George Romanes appears to have had more to say but did not live to say it[31].  We may notice however that in 1889, in a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, on ’the Evidence of Design in Nature[32],’ he appears to allow more weight than before to the argument that the method of physical development must be judged in the light of its result.  This paper was part of a Symposium.  Mr. S. Alexander has argued in a previous paper against the hypothesis of ‘design’ in Nature on the ground that ’the fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice.’  This argument was developed by pointing to the obvious ‘mal-adjustments,’ ’aimless destructions,’ &c., which characterize the processes of Nature.  But these, Romanes replies, necessarily belong to the process considered as one of ‘natural selection.’  The question is only:  Is such a process per se incompatible with the hypothesis of design?  And he replies in the negative.