Annual Report of the Council. 133 



his capacity be great or small. And there is one guiding 

 rule by which a man may always find this path 

 and keep himself from straying when he has found 

 it. This golden rule is : Give unqualified assent to 

 no propositions but those the truth of which is so 

 clear and distinct that they cannot be doubted." To 

 describe his position he adopted the name "Agnostic," 

 and defined his position in these words: "In matters 

 of the intellect follow your reason as far as it will take 

 you, without regard to any other consideration. And, 

 negatively, in matters of the intellect do not pretend 

 that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated 

 or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, 

 which if a man keep whole and undefiled he shall not be 

 ashamed to look the universe in the face whatever x the 

 future may have in store for him." Nothing was more 

 trying to his honest, outspoken nature than the suggestion 

 that inability to give an intellectual assent to theological 

 propositions implied or even tended to produce moral 

 obliquity, and it was in ^the main because his clerical 

 opponents so frequently indulged in insinuations of this 

 kind regarding himself and other sceptics that he was so 

 particularly unsparing in his criticisms of their position, 

 and that, as was said with some truth, a white necktie 

 became to him as a red rag to a bull. He was as far 

 removed from blatant atheism on the one hand as from 

 orthodoxy on the other. Indeed he says, " The cant of 

 heterodoxy is more distasteful to me than the cant of 

 orthodoxy, for the former professes to be guided solely 

 by reason, which the latter does not." 



Huxley was a zealous educational reformer, and was 

 elected a member of the first London School Board, on which 

 he did hard and useful work in the cause of undenomina- 

 tional education. The following published writings dealing 

 with these and kindred topics will repay careful perusal : 



