By degrees his thoughts and inclinations turned strongly in the direction of Oxford. Oxford seemed to satisfy every wish. The beautiful city gratified his poetic sense; there were old friends already there to welcome him, and there seemed abundance of appliances and of facilities for scientific work.
Also the ease with which he could get into the country, the opportunities for constant exercise, the freedom he would obtain from councils and committees, were tempting. A beautiful old house opposite Christ Church was to be had, and this finally determined him. He fell absolutely in love with Oxford, and brief as his connection with her was to be, the University has had few more loyal sons, nor has she ever exercised more complete influence over any who have fallen under her sway.
It is surprising, as one looks back on the Oxford years, to realise how short a time Mr. Romanes spent there, and yet it is impossible not to realise also for how much that time counted in his life.
Many influences were working in him, a ripening judgment, a growth of character, a deepening sense of the inadequacy of scientific research, philosophical speculation, and artistic pleasures to fill 'the vacuum in the soul of man which nothing can fill save faith in God.'[68] And now Oxford, with all the beauty still left to her, with all the associations which haunt her, with all the extraordinary witching spell which she knows so well how to exercise—Oxford, the home of 'lost causes' and also of forward movements, Oxford came to be for four brief years his home.
1890 opened with the death of Mr. Aubrey Moore. Only a very few weeks before his too early death, Mr. Moore had been present at the Aristotelian Society,[69] and had heard the joint papers contributed by Professor Alexander, the Rev. S. Gildea, and Mr. Romanes on the 'Evidences of Design in Nature.'
Here, again, Mr. Romanes showed how far he had receded from the materialistic point of view. In his paper he quoted passages from Aubrey Moore's essay in 'Lux Mundi' (just published), and says:
Yet once more, it may be argued, as it has been argued by a member of this Society in a recently-published essay—and this an essay of such high ability that in my opinion it must be ranked among the very few of the very greatest achievements in the department of literature to which it belongs—it may, I say, be argued, as it recently has been argued by the Rev. Aubrey Moore, that 'the counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature and the reign of law'; that 'the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view which it superseded'; that 'it is a great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, even when we cannot hazard a conjecture as to what the reason is'; that 'it seems as if in the providence of God the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to the philosophical view of nature.' But on the opposite side it may be represented—as, indeed, Mr. Aubrey Moore himself expressly allows—that all these deductions are valid only on the preformed supposition, or belief, 'that God is, and that He is the rewarder of such as diligently seek Him.' Granting, as Mr. Aubrey Moore insists, that a precisely analogous supposition, or belief, is required for the successful study of nature—viz. 'that it is, and that it is a rational (? orderly) whole which reason can interpret,' still, where the question is as to the existence of God, or the fact of design, it constitutes no final answer to show that all these deductions would logically follow if such an answer were yielded in the affirmative. All that these deductions amount to is an argument that there is nothing in the constitution of nature inimical to the hypothesis of design: beyond this they do not yield any independent verification of that hypothesis. Innumerable, indeed, are the evidences of design in nature if once a designer be supposed; but, apart from any such antecedent supposition, we are without any means of gauging the validity of such evidence as is presented. And the reason of this is, that we are without any means of ascertaining what it is that lies behind, and is itself the cause of, the uniformity of nature. In other words, we do not know, and cannot discover, what is the nature of natural causation.
Nevertheless, I think it is a distinct gain, both to the philosophy and the theology of our age, that science has reduced the great and old-standing question of Design in Nature to this comparatively narrow issue. Therefore, I have directed the purpose of this paper to showing that, in view of the issue to which science has reduced this question, it cannot be answered on the lower plane of argument which Mr. Alexander has chosen. All that has been effected by our recent discovery of a particular case of causality in the selection principle is to throw back the question of design, in all the still outstanding provinces of Nature, to the question—What is the nature of natural causation? Or, again, to quote Mr. Aubrey Moore, 'Darwinism has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives: either God is everywhere present in Nature, or He is nowhere.' This, I apprehend, puts the issue into as small a number of words as it well can be put. And whether God is everywhere or nowhere depends on what is the nature of natural causation. Is this intelligent or unintelligent? Is it the mode in which a Divine Being is everywhere simultaneously and eternally operating; or is it but the practical expression of what we understand by a mechanical necessity? In short, is it original or derived—final, and therefore inexplicable, because self-existing; or is it the effect of a higher cause in the existence of a disposing Mind?
Although I cannot wait to argue this, the ultimate question which we have met to consider, I may briefly state my own view with regard to it. This is the same view that the originator of the doctrine of natural selection himself used habitually to express to me in conversation—viz. to use his own words, 'I have long ago come to the conclusion that it is a question far beyond the reach of the human mind.' Such, of course, is the position of pure agnosticism.
At the end of this paper, Mr. Aubrey Moore remarked that he agreed with all Mr. Alexander's arguments, but disagreed with all his conclusions, and that he disagreed with all Mr. Gildea's arguments but agreed with his conclusions; and as for Mr. Romanes, he could only leave him out, after the kind and flattering terms in which he had spoken of the essay in 'Lux Mundi.' At the end of his little speech he said aside to a friend, 'What a fellow Romanes is! "Lux Mundi" has been out about three weeks, and he knows all about it.'