242 Thomas Henry Huxley 



such ; the repudiation of the confusion, beloved of sophists of 

 all sorts, between free assent and merely piously gagged dis- 

 sent, and the admission of the obligation to reconsider even 

 one's own axioms on due demand." 



This was the healthy and active scepticism which took 

 no direct pleasure in doubting, but used doubt only as a 

 means of making knowledge doubly secure, and which 

 prevented false ideas being bolstered up by privilege 

 or by tyranny. 



"The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast 

 range, from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence 

 of the working out, in this province, of the resolution to take 

 nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such ; to 

 consider all beliefs open to criticism ; to regard the value of 

 authority as neither greater nor less than as much as it can 

 prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit 

 ' which always denies,' delighting only in destruction ; still less 

 is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not construct; 

 it is the spirit which works and will work ' without haste and 

 without rest,' gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its 

 bams and devouring error with unquenchable fire." 



It is a special weakness of the modern human race to 

 love inventing descriptive names by which particular 

 modes of thought may be classified and labelled. In 

 order to meet this demand, Huxley invented the word 

 agnosticism, to serve as a label for his own attitude. The 

 word rapidly became popular, and attempts were made 

 to read into it far more than its inventor implied. For 

 him it was no definite body of doctrine, no creed in any 

 positive sense. It merely expressed the attitude he as- 

 sumed towards all problems on which he regarded the 

 evidence as insufficient. It was a habit of mind rather 

 than a series of opinions or beliefs ; an intellectual 

 weapon and not materials on which to exercise the 

 intellect. 



