442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



homely words such as the unlearned can understand, that is precisely 

 what the religion of the Agnostic comes to, " the belief that there is a 

 sort of a something about which we can know nothing." 



Now let us profess that, as a philosophical answer to the theologi- 

 cal problem, that is entirely our own position. The Positivist answer 

 is of course the same as the Agnostic answer. Why, then, do we ob- 

 ject to be called Agnostics ? Simply because Agnostic is only dog-Greek 

 for "don't know," and we have no taste to be called "don't knows." 

 The " Spectator " calls us Agnostics, but that is only by way of preju- 

 dice. Our religion does not consist in a comprehensive negation ; we 

 are not forever replying to the theological problem ; we are quite un- 

 concerned by the theological problem, and have something that we do 

 care for, and do know. Englishmen are Europeans, and many of them 

 are Christians, and they usually prefer to call themselves Englishmen, 

 Christians, or the like, rather than non-Asiatics or anti-Mahometans. 

 Some people still prefer to call themselves Protestants rather than 

 Christians, but the taste is dying out, except among Irish Orangemen, 

 and even the Nonconformist newspaper has been induced by Mr. Mat- 

 thew Arnold to drop its famous motto, " The dissidence of Dissent, 

 and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." For a man to say 

 that his religion is Agnosticism is simply the skeptical equivalent of 

 saying that his religion is Protestantism. Both mean that his religion 

 is to deny and to differ. But this is not religion. The business of reli- 

 gion is to affirm and to unite, and nothing can be religion but that 

 which at once affirms truth and unites men. 



The purpose of the present paper is to show that Agnosticism, 

 though a valid and final answer to the theological or ontological prob- 

 lem — " What is the ultimate cause of the world and of man ? " — is not 

 a religion nor the shadow of a religion. It offers none of the rudiments 

 or elements of religion, and religion is not to be found in that line at 

 all. It is the mere disembodied spirit of dead religion : as we said at 

 the outset, it is the ghost of religion. Agnosticism, perfectly legiti- 

 mate as the true answer of science to an effete question, has shown us 

 that religion is not to be found anywhere within the realm of Cause. 

 Having brought us to the answer, "no cause that we know of," it is 

 laughable to call that negation religion. Mr. Mark Pattison, one of the 

 acutest minds of modern Oxford, rather oddly says that the idea of 

 deity has now been " defecated to a pure transparency." The evolu- 

 tion philosophy goes a step further and defecates the idea of cause to a 

 pure transparency. Theology and ontology alike end in the Everlasting 

 No with which science confronts all their assertions. But how whim- 

 sical is it to tell us that religion, which can not find any resting-place 

 in theology or ontology, is to find its true home in the Everlasting No ! 

 That which is defecated to a pure transparency can never supply a re- 

 , 'Jigion to any human being but a philosopher constructing a system. It 

 < '\^ qWfte conceivable that religion is to end with theology, and both 



