210 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 
charm of speculation to swerve a hair’s breadth from 
the strict line of fact, the temptation was promptly 
slaughtered and made no sign. For intellectual in- 
tegrity, he was a spotless Sir Galahad. I believe ‘ 
there was nothing in life which he dreaded so much, 
as the sin of allowing his reason to be hoodwinked by 
personal predilections, or whatever Francis Bacon 
would have called “idols of the cave.” Closely con- 
nected with this ever present feeling was a holy hor- 
ror of a przorz convictions of logical necessity, and of 
long festoons of deductive argument suspended from 
such airy supports. The prime necessity for him was 
to appeal at every step to observation and experiment, 
and in the absence of such verification, to rest content 
with saying, “I do not know.” It is to Huxley, I 
believe, that we owe the epithet “Agnostic,” for 
which all men of scientific proclivities owe him a debt 
of gratitude, since it- happened to please the popular 
fancy and at once supplanted the label “ Positivist ” 
which used to be ruthlessly pasted upon all such men, 
in spite of their protests and struggles. No better 
word than “Agnostic” could be found to express 
Huxley’s mental temperament, but with anything like 
a formulated system of agnosticism he had little more 
to do than with other “isms.” He used to smile at 
the formidable parade which Lewes was making with 
his “ Objective Method and Verification,” in which cap- 
ital letters did duty for part of the argument; and 
as for Dean Mansel’s elaborate agnosticism, in his 
“Limits of Religious Thought,” Huxley, taking a hint 
from Hogarth, used to liken him to a (theological) inn- 
keeper who has climbed upon the sign-board of the 
rival (scientific) inn, and is busily sawing it off, quite 
