The Notes, with the papers which precede them, will, I think, be better understood if I give some preliminary account of their antecedents, that is of Romanes’ previous publications on the subject of religion.

In 1873 an essay of George Romanes gained the Burney Prize at Cambridge, the subject being Christian Prayer considered in relation to the belief that the Almighty governs the world by general laws.  This was published in 1874, with an appendix on The Physical Efficacy of Prayer.  In this essay, written when he was twenty-five years old, Romanes shows the characteristic qualities of his mind and style already developed.  The sympathy with the scientific point of view is there, as might be expected perhaps in a Cambridge ‘Scholar in Natural Science’:  the logical acumen and love of exact distinctions is there:  there too the natural piety and spiritual appreciation of the nature of Christian prayer—­a piety and appreciation which later intellectual habits of thought could never eradicate.  The essay, as judged by the standard of prize compositions, is of remarkable ability, and strictly proceeds within the limits of the thesis.  On the one side, for the purpose of the argument, the existence of a Personal God is assumed[1], and also the reality of the Christian Revelation which assures us that we have reason to expect real answers, even though conditionally and within restricted limits, to prayers for physical goods[2].  On the other side, there is taken for granted the belief that general laws pervade the observable domain of physical nature.  Then the question is considered—­how is the physical efficacy of prayer which the Christian accepts on the authority of revelation compatible with the scientifically known fact that God governs the world by general laws?  The answer is mainly found in emphasizing the limited sphere within which scientific inquiry can be conducted and scientific knowledge can obtain.  Special divine acts of response to prayer, even in the physical sphere, may occur—­force may be even originated in response to prayer—­and still not produce any phenomenon such as science must take cognizance of and regard as miraculous or contrary to the known order.

On one occasion the Notes refer back to this essay[3], and more frequently, as we shall have occasion to notice, they reproduce thoughts which had already been expressed in the earlier work but had been obscured or repudiated in the interval.  I have no grounds for knowing whether in the main Romanes remained satisfied with the reasoning and conclusion of his earliest essay, granted the theistic hypothesis on which it rests[4].  But this hypothesis itself, very shortly after publishing this essay, he was led to repudiate.  In other words, his mind moved rapidly and sharply into a position of reasoned scepticism about the existence of God at all.  The Burney Essay was published in 1874.  Already in 1876 at least he had written