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Thoughts on Religion by George John Romanes
page 84 of 159 (52%)
proportionately greater weight of evidence _a posteriori_ is needed to
counterbalance it: so that, e.g. better evidence would be needed to
convict the Archbishop of Canterbury than a vagabond of pocket-picking.
And so it is with speculative philosophy. But in both cases our only
guide is known analogy; therefore, the further we are removed from
possible experience--i.e. the more remote from experience the sphere
contemplated--the less value attaches to antecedent presumptions[43].
_Maximum_ remoteness from possible experience is reached in the sphere
of the final mystery of things with which religion has to do; so that
here all presumption has faded away into a vanishing point, and pure
agnosticism is our only rational attitude. In other words, here we
should all alike be pure agnostics as far as reason is concerned; and,
if any of us are to attain to any information, it can only be by means
of some super-added faculty of our minds. The questions as to whether
there are any such super-added faculties; if so, whether they ever
appear to have been acted upon from without; if they have, in what
manner they have; what is their report; how far they are trustworthy in
that report, and so on--these are the questions with which this treatise
is to be mainly concerned.

My own attitude may be here stated. I do not claim any [religious]
certainty of an intuitive kind myself; but am nevertheless able to
investigate the abstract logic of the matter. And, although this may
seem but barren dialectic, it may, I hope, be of practical service if it
secures a fair hearing to the reports given by the vast majority of
mankind who unquestionably believe them to emanate from some such
super-added faculties--numerous and diverse though their religions be.
Besides, in my youth I published an essay (the _Candid Examination_)
which excited a good deal of interest at the time, and has been long out
of print. In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong
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