AGNOSTICISM. 763 



epithets showered upon me, before I could explain and apologize 

 for the mistake. If I had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's com- 

 pany on that occasion, the undiscriminative followers of the 

 Prophet would, I am afraid, have made no difference between us ; 

 not even if they had known that he was the head of an orthodox 

 Christian seminary. And I have not the smallest doubt that 

 even one of the learned mollahs, if his grave courtesy would have 

 permitted him to say anything offensive to men of another mode 

 of belief, would have told us that he wondered we did not find it 

 " very impleasant " to disbelieve in the Prophet of Islam. 



From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that 

 Dr. Wace's account of the origin of the name of " Agnostic " is 

 quite wrong. Indeed, I am bound to add that very slight effort 

 to discover the truth would have convinced him that, as a matter 

 of fact, the term arose otherwise. I am loath to go over an old 

 story once more ; but more than one object which I have in view 

 will be served by telling it a little more fully than it has yet been 

 told. 



Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose 

 education had been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, 

 for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time, I 

 was a voracious and omnivorous reader ; a dreamer and specu- 

 lator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage 

 in attacking any and every subject, which is the blessed compensa- 

 tion of youth and inexperience. Among the books and essays, on 

 all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at 

 this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was 

 Guizot's "History of Civilization," the other was Sir William 

 Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," 

 which I came upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the " Edin- 

 burgh Review." The latter was certainly strange reading for a 

 boy, and I could not possibly have understood a great deal of it ; * 

 nevertheless, I devoured it with avidity, and it stamped upon my 

 mind the strong conviction that, on even the most solemn and 

 important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for 

 answers ; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great num- 

 ber of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely 

 actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable. 



Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccen- 

 tric fashion, have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension 

 to be an expert in either subject ; but the turn for philosophical 

 and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot at- 

 tractive to me, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and 



* Yet I must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years after- 

 ward, when Dean Mansell's Bampton lectures wore published, it seemed to me I already 

 knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to tell me. 



