230 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mainly responsible for having forced the above views on the 

 world, who have unfolded to us the verities of nature and human 

 history, and have felt constrained by these to abandon their old 

 religious convictions — these men and their followers have by com- 

 mon consent agreed, in this country, to call themselves by the 

 name of agnostics. Now there has been much quarreling of late 

 among these agnostics as to what agnosticism — the thing which 

 unites them — is. It must be obvious, however, to every impartial 

 observer, that the differences between them are little more than 

 verbal, and arise from bad writing rather than from different rea- 

 soning. Substantially the meaning of one and all of them is the 

 same. Let us take, for instance, the two who are most ostenta- 

 tiously opposed to each other, and have lately been exhibiting 

 themselves, in this and other reviews, like two terriers each at 

 the other's throat. I need hardly say that I mean Prof. Huxley 

 and Mr. Harrison. 



Some writers, Prof. Huxley says, Mr. Harrison among them, 

 have been speaking of agnosticism as if it was a creed or a faith 

 or a philosophy. Prof. Huxley proclaims himself to be " dazed " 

 and " bewildered " by the statements. Agnosticism, he says, is 

 not any one of these things. It is simply — I will give his defini- 

 tion in his own words — 



a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single prin- 

 ciple. . . . Positively, the principle may be expressed : In matters of the intellect, 

 follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consid- 

 eration. And negatively : In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclu- 

 sions 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 the future may have in store 

 for him. 



Now anything worse expressed than this for the purpose of the 

 discussion he is engaged in, or, indeed, for the purpose of convey- 

 ing his own general meaning, it is hardly possible to imagine. 

 Agnosticism, as generally understood, may, from one point of 

 view, be no doubt rightly described as " a method." But is it a 

 method with no results, or with results that are of no interest ? 

 If so, there would be hardly a human being idiot enough to waste 

 a thought upon it. The interest resides in its results, and its re- 

 sults solely, and specially in those results that affect our ideas 

 about religion. Accordingly, when the word agnosticism is now 

 used in discussion, the meaning uppermost in the minds of those 

 who use it is not a method, but the results of a method, in their 

 religious bearings ; and the method is of interest only in so far as 

 it leads to these. Agnosticism means, therefore, precisely what 

 Prof. Huxley says it does not mean. It means a creed, it means 

 a faith, it means a religious or irreligious philosophy. And this 



