xvi INTRODUCTION 



but, by changing "their conceptions of the universe and 

 of themselves," "their modes of thinking and their views 

 of right and wrong," it discovered "the ideas which can 

 alone still spiritual cravings." Not everyone would find 

 his spiritual cravings satisfied by so forbidding a moral 

 system as Huxley's certainly not one who had learned 

 to rest comfortably in a religious belief which guarantees 

 the ultimate triumph of good, which makes evil either a 

 hideous but fleeting nightmare or a mysterious source of 

 discipline and means to moral perfection, and which re- 

 lieves him of responsibility for and voluntary share in 

 the improvement of the world and of himself beyond 

 the acceptance of the opportunity offered him and 

 obedience of the laws laid down for his guidance. 



By applying in the field of religion the same principle 

 that he used in every other field of knowledge, Huxley 

 arrived first at negative results, the failure to find "logi- 

 cally satisfactory evidence" of the truth of religious doc- 

 trines or of such generally accepted beliefs as human 

 immortality and the existence of a God. Therefore he 

 accepted the "verdict of 'not proven' " though he re- 

 garded it as "undoubtedly unsatisfactory and essentially 

 provisional, so far forth as the subject of the trial is 

 capable of being dealt with by due process of reason." 

 He wished, however, to give himself a label among 

 "-ists of one sort or another" and to relieve himself of 

 the name of atheist, materialist, and other opprobrious 

 titles which implied that he had closed the case against 

 religion. So he invented the title "agnostic" as "sug- 

 gestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history, 

 who professed to know so much about the very things 

 of which I was ignorant," and for his principle, "ag- 

 nosticism." Agnosticism he called a method rather than 

 a creed, "except in so far as it expresses absolute faith 

 in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical 



