750 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the best authorities on spectrum analysis. I had intended, in this 

 connection, to discuss these last points, to which I can here only 

 allude, and which are every day acquiring greater and greater 

 importance ; but my paper is already too long, and there is abun- 

 dant material for another essay on the same general subject. I 

 have accomplished the immediate object at which I aimed, if I 

 have made evident that the foundations of our science are still 

 hidden in obscurity, and that the conception of a chemical ele- 

 ment is to-day just as indefinite and just as metaphysical as 

 it was at the time of Aristotle. 



AGNOSTICISM. 



By Peof. THOMAS H. HUXLEY. 



WITHIN the last few months the public has received much 

 and varied information on the subject of agnostics, their 

 tenets, and even their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators 

 of the Church Congress at Manchester.* It has been furnished 

 with a set of " articles " fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not 

 less consistent than the thirty-nine ; its nature has been analyzed, 

 and its future severely predicted by the most eloquent of that 

 prophetical school whose Samuel is Auguste Comte. It may still 

 be a question, however, whether the public is as much the wiser 

 as might be expected, considering all the trouble that has been 

 taken to enlighten it. Not only are the three accounts of the 

 agnostic position sadly out of harmony with one another, but I 

 propose to show cause for my belief that all three must be seri- 

 ously questioned by any one who employs the term " agnostic " in 

 the sense in which it was originally used. The learned principal 

 of King's College, who brought the topic of agnosticism before 

 the Church Congress, took a short and easy way of settling the 

 business : 



But if this be so, for a man to urge, as an escape from this article of belief, 

 that he has no means of a scientific knowledge of the unseen world, or of the 

 future, is irrelevant. His difference from Christians lies not in the fact that he 

 has no knowledge of these things, but that he does not believe the authority on 

 which they are stated. He may prefer to call himself an agnostic ; but his real 

 name is an older one — he is an infidel ; that is to say, an unbeliever. The word 

 infidel, perhajjs, carries an unpleasant significance. Perhaps it is right that it 

 should. It is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say 

 plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ. 



And in the course of the discussion which followed, the Bishop of 



* See the " Official Report of the Church Congress held at Manchester," October, 1888, 

 pp. 253, 254. 



