720 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. 



ui)on the signbourd of the rival (.sfientitio) inn, and is husily sawing 

 it otf, quite oblivious of the gruesome fact that he is sitting upon the 

 unsu])i)ortcd end! But while he thus set little store by current agnostic 

 metaphysics, Huxley's intellectual climate, if I may so speak, was 

 one of perfect agnosticism. In intimate converse with him, he always 

 seemed to me a thoroughgoing and splendid representative of Hume; 

 indeed, in his writings he somewhere lets fall a remark expressing 

 a higher regard for Hume than for Kant. It was at this point that 

 we used to part company in our talks; so long as it was a question of 

 Berkeley we were sul)stantiallv agreed, V)ut when it came to Hume we 

 agreed to ditter. 



It is this complete agnosticism of temperament, added to his abiding 

 dread of intellectual dishonesty, that explains Huxley's attitude toward 

 belief in a future life. He was not a materialist; nobody saw more 

 clearly than he the philosophic Himsiness of materialism, and he looked 

 with strong disapproval upon the self-complacent negations of Lud- 

 wig Bucchnei". Nevertheless, with I'egard to the belief in an immor- 

 tal soul his position was avowedly agnostic, with perhaps just the 

 sliglit(>st possible^ tacit though reluctant homing toward the negative. 

 This slight bias was apparently tlue to two causes. First, it is practi- 

 cally beyond the power of science to adduce evidence in support of the 

 soul's survival of the body, since the whole (|uestion lies l)eyond the 

 l)ounds of our terrestrial experience. Huxley was the last man to 

 assume that the possibilities of nature are limited by our experience, 

 and 1 think he would have seen the force of the argument that, in 

 (luestions where evidence is in the nature of the case inacc(\ssil)le, our 

 inability to produce it does not afford even the slighest prima facie 

 ground for a negative verdict.' Xeverth(dess, he seems to Jiave felt 

 as if the at»sence of evidence did aH'oi'd some such prima facie ground, 

 for in a letter to Charles Kingsley, written in LS60, soon after the 

 sudden death of his tirst child, he says: •'Had I lived a couple of cen- 

 turies earlier, I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me . 

 and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes 

 and consolations of the mass of mankind; to which myoidy replv was, 

 and is, () devil! truth is ])etter than nuich profit. I have searched 

 over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and 

 fame wei-e all to l)e lost to me, one after the other, as the penalty, 

 still 1 will not lie." This striking declaration shows that the second 

 cause of the bias w^as the dread of self-deception. It was a noble exhi- 

 bition of intellectual honesty raised to a truly Puritanic fervor of self- 

 al)negation. Just because life is sweet, and the love of it well-nigh 

 irrepressible, must all such feelings be suspected as tempters, and 

 frowned out of our temple of philosoph}". Rather than run any risk 

 of accepting a belief because it is pleasant, let us incur whatever chance 



^I have explained this point at some len<i;tli in The Unseen AVorld, pp. 43-53. 



