FOOTNOTES: 

[38] [I.e. supernatural but not strictly Divine Persons.  Surely, however, the proposition is not maintainable.—­ED.]

[39] [This is another instance of recurrence to an earlier thought; see Burney Essay, p. 25, and cf. Mind and Motion and Monism, p. 117, note 1.—­ED.]

[40] Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, i. 308.

[41] [See further, p. 182.—­ED.]

[42] [On the whole I have thought it best to omit the names.—­ED.]

[43] [The MS. note here continues:  ’Here introduce all that I say on the subject in my Burney Prize.’  I have not, however, introduced any quotation into the text because (1) I think Romanes makes his meaning plain in the text as it stands; (2) I cannot find in the essay in question any exactly appropriate passage of reasonable length to quote.  The greater part of the essay is, however, directed to meet the scientific objection to the doctrine that prayer is answered in the physical region, by showing that this objection consists in an argument from the known to the unknown, i.e. from the known sphere of invariable physical laws to the unknown sphere of God’s relation to all such laws; and is, therefore, weak in proportion as the unknown sphere is remote from possible experience of a scientific kind, and admits of an indefinite number of possibilities, more or less conceivable to our imagination, which would or might prevent the scientific argument from having legitimate application to the question in hand.—­ED.]

[44] Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1894.

[45] [Some such phrase is necessary to complete the sentence.—­ED.]

[46] First Principles, Part I, ch. 1.

Sec. 3.  CAUSALITY.

Only because we are so familiar with the great phenomenon of causality do we take it for granted, and think that we reach an ultimate explanation of anything when we have succeeded in finding the ‘cause’ thereof:  when, in point of fact, we have only succeeded in merging it in the mystery of mysteries.  I often wish we could have come into the world, like the young of some other mammals, with all the powers of intellect that we shall ever subsequently attain already developed, but without any individual experience, and so without any of the blunting effects of custom.  Could we have done so, surely nothing in the world would more acutely excite our intelligent astonishment than the one universal fact of causation.  That everything which happens should have a cause, that this should invariably be proportioned to its effect, so that, no matter how complex the interaction of causes, the same interaction should always produce the same result; that this rigidly exact system of energizing should be found to present all the appearances of universality and of eternity, so that, e.g., the motion of the solar system in space is being determined by some causes beyond human ken, and that we are indebted to billions of cellular unions, each involving billions of separate causes, for our hereditary passage from an invertebrate ancestry,—­that such things should be, would surely strike us as the most wonderful fact in this wonderful universe.