It is also probable that Romanes felt the difficulty arising from the cruelty of nature less, as he was led to dwell more on humanity as the most important part of nature, and perceived the function of suffering in the economy of human life (pp. 142, 154):  and also as he became more impressed with the positive evidences for Christianity as at once the religion of sorrow and the revelation of God as Love (pp. 163, ff.).  The Christian Faith supplies believers not only with an argument against pessimism from general results, but also with such an insight into the Divine character and method as enables them at least to bear hopefully the awful perplexities which arise from the spectacle of individuals suffering.

In the last year or two of his life he read very attentively a great number of books on ‘Christian Evidences,’ from Pascal’s Pensees downwards, and studied carefully the appearance of ‘plan’ in the Biblical Revelation considered as a whole.  The fact of this study appears in fragmentary remarks, indices and references, which George Romanes left behind him in note-books.  The results of it will not be unapparent in the following Notes, which, I need to remind my readers, are, in spite of their small bulk, the sole reason for the existence of this volume.

In reading these I can hardly conceive any one not being possessed with a profound regret that the author was not allowed to complete his work.  And it is only fair to ask every reader of the following pages to remember that he is reading, in the main, incomplete notes and not finished work.  This will account for a great deal that may seem sketchy and unsatisfactory in the treatment of different points, and also for repetitions and traces of inconsistency.  But I can hardly think any one can read these notes to the end without agreeing with me that if I had withheld them from publication, the world would have lost the witness of a mind, both able and profoundly sincere, feeling after God and finding Him.

C.G.

FOOTNOTES: 

[31] See below p. 142, and note.  I find also the following note of a date subsequent to 1889.  ’It is a fact that pessimism is illogical, simply because we are inadequate judges of the world, and pessimism would therefore be opposed to agnosticism.  We may know that there is something out of joint between the world and ourselves; but we cannot know how far this is the fault of the world or of ourselves.’

[32] Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Williams & Norgate), vol. i. no. 3, pp. 72, 73.

[33] I ought also to mention that Romanes on the Sunday before his death expressed to me verbally his entire agreement with the argument of Professor Knight’s Aspects of Theism (Macmillan, 1893); in which on this subject see pp. 184-186, ’A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process by which physical nature casts its weaker products aside,’ &c.