42 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
seems to me worth anything in these matters which admit of 
no absolute determination. 
The inquiry has run, of necessity, more into the nature of 
a sermon than of what is called a philosophical essay. But 
that is from the very cause just mentioned, that no reasoning 
which does not take the existence of the world, and of 
Christianity, now all over the civilised parts of it, as the 
phenomena to be accounted for can advance a step beyond 
the uncertain and shifting position in which the old philoso- 
phers were obliged to leave it in the most highly educated 
city in the world, with its “altar to the unknown God.” 
For they knew better than to believe seriously in the impos- 
sible monsters of the Pantheon. They saw the world as it is, 
and generally assumed that it had some kind of a creator, and 
could perhaps say as strongly as we can that every other way 
of accounting for it that had been suggested was a trans- 
parent absurdity or begged the whole question. ‘That was a 
great deal to say, and perhaps enough to say negatively : 
for unfortunately they had no positive information about a 
Creator which they could rationally accept. Their divine 
cosmogonies were not much better than our materialistic or 
atheistic ones. One nation alone had that positive informa- 
tion and believed it, and very likely its early revelation to 
their ancestors had somehow got diffused among others, 
though incurably corrupted by the want of a written record. 
We have abundant proof now that even civilised people have 
a tendency to run into ever-increasing superstition, or else 
into its opposite, as soon as they begin to depend on any 
pretended spiritual information beyond our original records 
of the creation of the world and its present religious 
condition, while no other rational explanation can be given 
of either of them. ‘ Development” has invariably meant 
development of error, to which there is no assignable limit. 
The Cuatrman (Sir J. Rispon Brynert, M.D., F.R.S.).—I will 
first ask you to present your thanks to Lord Grimthorpe for this 
valuable paper. 
Mr. W. Grirritx, B.A.—Lord Grimthorpe’s paper is so lucid 
and consistent that one feels regret that it is so short, and wishes 
it had extended to the length of the three papers he mentions. 
i regret that his lordship has not only not touched on the 
