The Right Hon. T. H Huxley, D.C.L., F.B.S. 453 



the finite. The finite he saw and understood, but not the 

 Infinite unseen that lay beyond ; and being thus short- 

 sighted, he was too honest to pretend to more distinct 

 vision, and too independent to be indebted to the vision 

 of others ; so he called himself an agnostic — one who 

 does not know — a most gross misnomer in so far as all 

 natural knowledge is concerned. But he wished to dis- 

 tinguish himself from those who thought they had attained 

 to a certain " gnosis " which enabled them to " solve the 

 problem of existence." To him this problem was utter 

 darkness, as it must be to all who limit their views to the 

 material alone. So he says, "I took thought and invented 

 what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'Agnostic ;' 

 it came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the 

 ' Gnostic ' of Church history, who professed to know so 

 much about the very things of which I was ignorant." 

 Yet his position was really of the same character with 

 that of the original Gnostics, who professed to reduce all 

 mysteries of faith to things merely of sight. 



There is something heroic and pathetic in the attitude 

 of such a man, holding that there is no alleviation of the. 

 sufferings of mankind except by taking them as inevitable 

 and inexplicable, and resolutely facing the world without 

 any of the garments " furnished by pious hands to cover 

 its deformities." It was as if, rejecting the hopes of 

 Christianity, he had sought to combine the two hardest 

 features of ancient philosophy — the unbelief of Epicurus 

 with the stoicism of Zeno ; yet so great was the fascina- 

 tion of the man that he could make this pessimistic attitude 

 even attractive to multitudes of minds. From what I 

 knew personally of Huxley, I fear that his position in 

 this respect was not so much a result of unbiassed inquiry 

 as of a moral repulsion from what he called " the garment 

 of make-believe," woven in the interest of clericalism, and 

 that "ecclesiastical spirit" which he regarded as the worst 



