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was at first supposed to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view which it superseded'; that 'it is a great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, even when we cannot hazard a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