Allusion has been made to the fact that Romanes in his latter days was
led to abandon the negative attitude which he had taken in his earlier
life. The story of the change is to be found as told by himself in the
volume of _Life and Letters_ edited by his widow, and in the _Notes_
which he left behind him. These he had written in preparation for a
book which was to have been entitled: _A Candid Examination of
Religion_.[4] It is evident that no consideration weighed more with
him than this witness of the deeper needs of the soul. We have seen
with what sorrow he had accepted as a young man the conclusions to
which he had found himself driven when Theism seemed no longer a
possible belief. After his change he admitted that he had failed to
recognise an important element in his treatment of the problem. "When
I wrote the preceding treatise I {51} did not sufficiently appreciate
the immense importance of _human_ nature in any enquiry touching
Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology
(including the science of comparative religions), psychology, and
metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the
most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the
theory of Theism."[5]

The outcome of his study was to convince him of two things. The first
was that, "if the religious instincts of the human race point to no
reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other
instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet
with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly."[6] And this
first conviction was only the preparation for a second. Speaking again
of his _Candid Examination of Theism_, he says: "In that treatise I
have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the
basal argument for my negative conclusion ... Reason is not the only
attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he habitually
employs for the ascertainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties
are of no less importance in their respective spheres, even of everyday
life; faith, trust, taste, etc., are {52} as needful in ascertaining
truth as to character, beauty, etc., as is reason."[7]

He put the same thing with even more of the note of personal experience
when he wrote to Dean Paget of Christ Church within three months of his
death: "Strangely enough for my time of life, I have begun to discover
the truth of what you once wrote about