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 knowledge of phenomena only, and that so far as what may lie behind phenomena is concerned—God, immortality, &c.—there is no evidence which entitles us either to deny or affirm anything. The attitude itself is as old as (q.v.); but the expressions “agnostic” and “agnosticism” were applied by Huxley to sum up his deductions from those contemporary developments of metaphysics with which the names of Hamilton (“the Unconditioned”) and Herbert Spencer (“the Unknowable”) were associated; and it is important, therefore, to fix precisely his own intellectual standpoint in the matter. Though Huxley only began to use the term “agnostic” in 1869, his opinions had taken shape some time before that date. In a letter to Charles Kingsley (September 23, 1860) he wrote very fully concerning his beliefs:—

And again, to the same correspondent, the 5th of May 1863:—

Of the origin of the name “agnostic” to cover this attitude, Huxley gave (Coll. Ess. v. pp. 237-239) the following account:—

This account is confirmed by R. H. Hutton, who in 1881 wrote that the word “was suggested by Huxley at a meeting held previous to the formation of the now defunct Metaphysical Society at Mr Knowles’s house on Clapham Common in 1869, in my hearing. He took it from St Paul’s mention of the altar to the Unknown God.” Hutton here gives a variant etymology for the word, which may be therefore taken as partly derived from  (the “unknown” God), and partly from an antithesis to “gnostic”; but the meaning remains the same in either case. The name, as Huxley said, “took”; it was constantly used by Hutton in the Spectator and became a fashionable label for contemporary unbelief in Christian dogma. Hutton himself frequently misrepresented the doctrine by describing it as “belief in an unknown and unknowable God”; but agnosticism as defined by Huxley meant not belief, but absence of belief, as much distinct from belief on the one hand as from disbelief on the other; it was the half-way house between the two, where all questions were “open.” All that Huxley asked for was evidence, either for or against; but this he believed it impossible to get. Occasionally he too mis-stated the meaning of the word he had invented, and described agnosticism as meaning “that a man shall not say he knows or believes what he has no scientific ground for professing to know or believe.” But as the late Rev. A. W. Momerie remarked, this would merely be “a definition of honesty; in that sense we ought all to be agnostics.”

Agnosticism really rests on the doctrine of the Unknowable, the assertion that concerning certain objects—among them the Deity—we never can have any “scientific” ground for belief. This way of solving, or passing over, the ultimate problems of thought has had many followers in cultured circles imbued with the new physical science of the day, and with disgust for the dogmatic creeds of contemporary orthodoxy; and its outspoken and even aggressive vindication by physicists of the eminence of Huxley had a potent influence upon the attitude taken towards metaphysics, and upon the form which subsequent Christian apologetics adopted. As a nickname the term “agnostic” was soon misused to cover any and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker—following Tennyson’s path of “honest doubt”—classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical evidences for Christianity.

The term is now less fashionable, though the state of mind persists. Huxley’s agnosticism was a natural consequence of the intellectual and philosophical conditions of the ’sixties, when clerical intolerance was trying to excommunicate scientific discovery because it appeared to clash with the book of Genesis. But as the theory of evolution was accepted, a new spirit was gradually introduced into Christian theology, which has turned the controversies between religion and science into other channels and removed the temptation to flaunt a disagreement. A similar effect has been produced by the philosophical reaction against Herbert, and by the perception that the canons of evidence required in physical science must not be exalted into universal rules of thought. It does not follow that justification by faith must be eliminated in spiritual matters where sight cannot follow, because the physicist’s duty and success lie in pinning belief solely on verification by physical phenomena, when they alone are in question; and for mankind generally, though possibly not for an exceptional man like Huxley, an impotent suspension of judgment on such issues as a future life or the Being of God is both unsatisfying and demoralizing.

It is impossible here to do more than indicate the path out of the difficulties raised by Huxley in the letter to Kingsley quoted above. They involve an elaborate discussion, not only of Christian evidences, but of the entire subject-matter alike of Ethics and Metaphysics, of Philosophy as a whole, and of the philosophies of individual writers who have dealt in their different ways with the problems of existence and epistemology. It is, however, permissible to point out that, as has been exhaustively argued by Professor J. Ward in his Gifford lectures for 1896–1898 (Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1899), Huxley’s challenge (“I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions”) is one which a spiritualistic philosophy need not shrink from accepting at the hands of naturalistic agnosticism. If, as Huxley admits, even putting it with unnecessary force against himself, “the immortality of man is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter,” the question then is, how far a critical analysis of our belief in the last-named doctrines will leave us in a position to regard them as the last stage in systematic thinking. It is the pitfall