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REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 211 
oblivious of the grewsome fact that he is sitting upon 
the unsupported end! But while he thus set little 
store by current agnostic metaphysics, Huxley’s in- 
tellectual climate, if I may so speak, was one of per- 
fect agnosticism. In intimate converse with him, he 
always seemed to me a thoroughgoing and splendid 
representation of Hume; indeed, in his writings he 
somewhere lets fall a remark expressing a higher re- 
gard 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 substantially 
agreed, but when it came to Hume we agreed to 
differ. 
It is this complete agnosticism of temperament, 
added to his abiding dread of intellectual dishonesty, 
that explains Huxley’s attitude toward belief in a fu- 
ture life. He was not a materialist; nobody saw more 
clearly than he the philosophic flimsiness of mate- 
rialism, and he looked with strong disapproval upon 
the self-complacent negations of Ludwig Buechner. 
Nevertheless, with regard to the belief in an immortal 
soul, his position was avowedly agnostic, with perhaps 
just the slightest possible tacit though reluctant lean- 
ing toward the negative. This slight bias was appar- 
ently due to two causes. First, it is practically beyond 
the power of science to adduce evidence in support of 
the soul’s survival of the body, since the whole question 
lies beyond the bounds of our terrestrial experience. 
Huxley was the last man to assume that the possibili- 
ties of nature are limited by our experience, and I think 
he would have seen the force of the argument that, in 
questions where evidence is in the nature of the case 
inaccessible, our inability to produce it does not afford 
