that appellation to Dr. Wace himself. I once visited the Hazar Mosque, the
great University of Mahommedanism, in Cairo, in ignorance of the fact that
I was unprovided with {352} proper authority. A swarm of angry
undergraduates, as I suppose I ought to call them, came buzzing about me
and my guide; and if I had known Arabic, I suspect that "dog of an infidel"
would have been by no means the most "unpleasant" of the epithets showered
upon me, before I could explain and apologise for the mistake. If I had had
the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that occasion, the undiscriminative
followers of the Prophet would, I am afraid, have made no difference
between us; not even if they had known that he was the head of an orthodox
Christian seminary. And I have not the smallest doubt that even one of the
learned mollahs, if his grave courtesy would have permitted him to say
anything offensive to men of another mode of belief, would have told us
that he wondered we did not find it "very unpleasant" to disbelieve in the
Prophet of Islam.
From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that Dr. Wace's
account of the origin of the name of "Agnostic" is quite wrong. Indeed, I
am bound to add that very slight effort to discover the truth would have
convinced him that, as a matter of fact, the term arose otherwise. I am
loath to go over an old story once more; but more than one object which I
have in view will be served by telling it a little more fully than it has
yet been told.
Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education had
been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, for some years,
altogether to his own devices. At that time, I was a voracious {353} and
omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well
endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject,
which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the
books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry,
which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One
was Guizot's _History of Civilisation_, the other was Sir William
Hamilton's essay _On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned_, which I came
upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the _Edinburgh Review_. The latter was
certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have
understood a great deal of it;[89] nevertheless, I devoured it with
avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, on even
the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning
phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great
number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely
actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.
Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion,
have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in
either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading,
which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled
many {354} lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the
repose of changed mental occupation, but has not unfrequently disputed my
proper work-time with my liege lady, Natural Science. In this way, I have
found it possible to cover a good deal of ground in the territory of
philosophy; and all the more easily that I have never cared much about A's
or B's opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he had to give
to the questions I had to put to him--that of the limitation of possible
knowledge being the chief. The ordinary examiner, with his "State the views
of So-and-so," would have floored me at any time. If he had said what do
_you_ think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly well.
The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but unwilling,
egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies have led him
in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily gravitated
towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by the latter in a
sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere.
"The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason
is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for
the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its
delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest
merit of preventing error."[90]
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was
an atheist, a theist, or {355} a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a
Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected,
the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion
that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the
last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the
one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had
attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or less successfully, solved the
problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty
strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant
on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that
opinion. Like Dante,
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
but, unlike Dante, I cannot add,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.
On the contrary, I had, and have, the firmest conviction that I never left
the "verace via"--the straight road; and that this road led nowhere else
but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest. And though I have
found leopards and lions in the path; though I have made abundant
acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that "with privy paw devours apace and
nothing said," as another great poet says of the ravening beast; and though
no friendly spectre has even yet offered his guidance, I was, and am,
minded to go straight on, until I either come out on the {356} other side
of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none
attainable by me.
This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the
members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since
deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every
variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and
expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were _-ists_
of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I,
the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to
have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox
when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented
himself to his normally elongated companions. So 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; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our
Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great
satisfaction, the term took; and when the _Spectator_ had stood godfather
to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge
of its parentage might have awakened, was, of course, completely lulled.
That is the history of the origin of the terms "agnostic" and
"agnosticism"; and it will be observed that it does not quite agree with
the {357} confident assertion of the reverend Principal of King's College,
that "the adoption of the term agnostic is only an attempt to shift the
issue, and that it involves a mere evasion" in relation to the Church and
Christianity.[91]
The last objection (I rejoice, as much as my readers must do, that it is
the last) which I have to take to Dr. Wace's deliverance before the Church
Congress arises, I am sorry to say, on a question of morality.
"It is, and it ought to be," authoritatively declares this official
representative of Christian ethics, "an unpleasant thing for a man to have
to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ" (_l. c._ p. 254).
Whether it is so depends, I imagine, a good deal on whether the man was
brought up in a Christian household or not. I do not see why it should be
"unpleasant" for a Mahommedan or Buddhist to say so. But that "it ought to
be" unpleasant for any man to say anything which he sincerely, and after
due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of the most
profoundly immoral character. I verily believe that the great good which
has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely
counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have
insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is
a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving {358} and
involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we could
only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the
slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have
flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian
nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision.
A thousand times, no! It ought _not_ to be unpleasant to say that which one
honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do
so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most
valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed, without erecting a
sad concomitant of human weakness into something to be admired and
cherished. The bravest of soldiers often, and very naturally, "feel it
unpleasant" to go into action; but a court-martial which did its duty would
make short work of the officer who promulgated the doctrine that his men
_ought_ to feel their duty unpleasant.
I am very well aware, as I suppose most thoughtful people are in these
times, that the process of breaking away from old beliefs is extremely
unpleasant; and I am much disposed to think that the encouragement, the
consolation, and the peace afforded to earnest believers in even the worst
forms of Christianity are of great practical advantage to them. What
deductions must be made from this gain on the score of the harm done to the
citizen by the ascetic otherworldliness of logical Christianity; to the
ruler, by {359} the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness of sectarian
bigotry; to the legislator, by the spirit of exclusiveness and domination
of those that count themselves pillars of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by
the restraints on the freedom of learning and teaching which every Church
exercises, when it is strong enough; to the conscientious soul, by the
introspective hunting after sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of
theological error, and the overpowering terror of possible damnation, which
have accompanied the Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider;
but they are assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one
side, they gain a good deal on the other. People who talk about the
comforts of belief appear to forget its discomforts; they ignore the fact
that the Christianity of the Churches is something more than faith in the
ideal personality of Jesus, which they create for themselves, _plus_ so
much as can be carried into practice, without disorganising civil society,
of the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. Trip in morals or in doctrine
(especially in doctrine), without due repentance or retractation, or fail
to get properly baptized before you die, and a _plebiscite_ of the
Christians of Europe, if they were true to their creeds, would affirm your
everlasting damnation by an immense majority.
Preachers, orthodox and heterodox, din into our ears that the world cannot
get on without faith of some sort. There is a sense in which that is as
eminently as obviously true; there is another, in {360} which, in my
judgment, it is as eminently as obviously false, and it seems to me that
the hortatory, or pulpit, mind is apt to oscillate between the false and
the true meanings, without being aware of the fact.
It is quite true that the ground of every one of our actions, and the
validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which
leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings
with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination it is
obvious that the axioms on which it is based cannot be demonstrated by
ratiocination. It is also a trite observation that, in the business of
life, we constantly take the most serious action upon evidence of an
utterly insufficient character. But it is surely plain that faith is not
necessarily entitled to dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination
cannot dispense with faith as a starting-point; and that because we are
often obliged, by the pressure of events, to act on very bad evidence, it
does not follow that it is proper to act on such evidence when the pressure
is absent.
The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that "faith is the
assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the
authorised version "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for
"proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek:
hupostasis] and [Greek: elenchos], affords a fine field of discussion for
the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the
mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound
psychological {361} truth that men constantly feel certain about things for
which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal or logical
sense of the word; and he calls this feeling "faith." I may have the most
absolute faith that a friend has not committed the crime of which he is
accused. In the early days of English history, if my friend could have
obtained a few more compurgators of a like robust faith, he would have been
acquitted. At the present day, if I tendered myself as a witness on that
score, the judge would tell me to stand down, and the youngest barrister
would smile at my simplicity. Miserable indeed is the man who has not such
faith in some of his fellow-men--only less miserable than the man who
allows himself to forget that such faith is not, strictly speaking,
evidence; and when his faith is disappointed, as will happen now and again,
turns Timon and blames the universe for his own blunders. And so, if a man
can find a friend, the hypostasis of all his hopes, the mirror of his
ethical ideal, in the Jesus of any, or all, of the Gospels, let him live by
faith in that ideal. Who shall or can forbid him? But let him not delude
himself with the notion that his faith is evidence of the objective reality
of that in which he trusts. Such evidence is to be obtained only by the use
of the methods of science, as applied to history and to literature, and it
amounts at present to very little.
It appears that Mr. Gladstone some time ago asked Mr. Laing if he could
draw up a short summary {362} of the negative creed; a body of negative
propositions, which have so far been adopted on the negative side as to be
what the Apostles' and other accepted creeds are on the positive; and Mr.
Laing at once kindly obliged Mr. Gladstone with the desired articles--eight
of them.
If any one had preferred this request to me I should have replied that, if
he referred to agnostics, they have no creed; and, by the nature of the
case, cannot have any. Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method,
the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single
principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates;
as old as the writer who said, "Try all things, hold fast by that which is
good;" it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated
the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that
is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental
axiom of modern science. 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 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 the future may have in store for him.
The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary
according to individual knowledge {363} and capacity, and according to the
general condition of science. That which is unproven to-day may be proven
by the help of new discoveries to-morrow. The only negative fixed points
will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our
faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open
to conviction. Agnostics who never fail in carrying out their principles
are, I am afraid, as rare as other people of whom the same consistency can
be truthfully predicated. But, if you were to meet with such a phoenix and
to tell him that you had discovered that two and two make five, he would
patiently ask you to state your reasons for that conviction, and express
his readiness to agree with you if he found them satisfactory. The
apostolic injunction to "suffer fools gladly" should be the rule of life of
a true agnostic. I am deeply conscious how far I myself fall short of this
ideal, but it is my personal conception of what agnostics ought to be.
However, as I began by stating, I speak only for myself; and I do not dream
of anathematizing and excommunicating Mr. Laing. But, when I consider his
creed and compare it with the Athanasian, I think I have on the whole a
clearer conception of the meaning of the latter. "Polarity," in Article
VIII., for example, is a word about which I heard a good deal in my youth,
when "Naturphilosophie" was in fashion, and greatly did I suffer from it.
For many years past, whenever I have met with "polarity" anywhere but in a
discussion of some purely physical topic, such as magnetism, I have shut
the book. Mr. {364} Laing must excuse me if the force of habit was too much
for me when I read his eighth article.
And now, what is to be said to Mr. Harrison's remarkable deliverance "On
the future of agnosticism"?[92] I would that it were not my business to say
anything, for I am afraid that I can say nothing which shall manifest my
great personal respect for this able writer, and for the zeal and energy
with which he ever and anon galvanises the weakly frame of Positivism until
it looks more than ever like John Bunyan's Pope and Pagan rolled into one.
There is a story often repeated, and I am afraid none the less mythical on
that account, of a valiant and loud-voiced corporal in command of two full
privates who, falling in with a regiment of the enemy in the dark, orders
it to surrender under pain of instant annihilation by his force; and the
enemy surrenders accordingly. I am always reminded of this tale when I read
the positivist commands to the forces of Christianity and of Science; only
the enemy show no more signs of intending to obey now than they have done
any time these forty years.
The allocution under consideration has the papal flavour which is wont to
hang about the utterances of the pontiffs of the Church of Comte. Mr.
Harrison speaks with authority and not as one of the common scribes of the
period. He knows not only what agnosticism is and how it has come about,
but what will become of it. The agnostic is to content {365} himself with
being the precursor of the positivist. In his place, as a sort of navvy
levelling the ground and cleansing it of such poor stuff as Christianity,
he is a useful creature who deserves patting on the back, on condition that
he does not venture beyond his last. But let not these scientific
Sanballats presume that they are good enough to take part in the building
of the Temple--they are mere Samaritans, doomed to die out in proportion as
the Religion of Humanity is accepted by mankind. Well, if that is their
fate, they have time to be cheerful. But let us hear Mr. Harrison's
pronouncement of their doom.
"Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion, an entirely negative
stage, the point reached by physicists, a purely mental conclusion, with no
relation to things social at all" (p. 154). I am quite dazed by this
declaration. Are there, then, any "conclusions" that are not "purely
mental"? Is there "no relation to things social" in "mental conclusions"
which affect men's whole conception of life? Was that prince of agnostics,
David Hume, particularly imbued with physical science? Supposing physical
science to be non-existent, would not the agnostic principle, applied by
the philologist and the historian, lead to exactly the same results? Is the
modern more or less complete suspension of judgment as to the facts of the
history of regal Rome, or the real origin of the Homeric poems, anything
but agnosticism in history and in literature? And if so, how can
agnosticism be the "mere negation of the physicist"? {366}
"Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion." No two people agree
as to what is meant by the term "religion"; but if it means, as I think it
ought to mean, simply the reverence and love for the ethical ideal, and the
desire to realise that ideal in life, which every man ought to feel--then I
say agnosticism has no more to do with it than it has to do with music or
painting. If, on the other hand, Mr. Harrison, like most people, means by
"religion" theology, then in my judgment agnosticism can be said to be a
stage in its evolution, only as death may be said to be the final stage in
the evolution of life.
When agnostic logic is simply one of the canons of thought,
agnosticism, as a distinctive faith, will have spontaneously
disappeared (p. 155).
I can but marvel that such sentences as this, and those already quoted,
should have proceeded from Mr. Harrison's pen. Does he really mean to
suggest that agnostics have a logic peculiar to themselves? Will he kindly
help me out of my bewilderment when I try to think of "logic" being
anything else than the canon (which, I believe, means rule) of thought? As
to agnosticism being a distinctive faith, I have already shown that it
cannot possibly be anything of the kind, unless perfect faith in logic is
distinctive of agnostics; which, after all, it may be.
Agnosticism as a religious philosophy _per se_ rests on an almost total
ignoring of history and social evolution (p. 152).
But neither _per se_ nor _per aliud_ has agnosticism (if I know anything
about it) the least pretension to be a religious philosophy; so far from
resting on {367} ignorance of history, and that social evolution of which
history is the account, it is and has been the inevitable result of the
strict adherence to scientific methods by historical investigators. Our
forefathers were quite confident about the existence of Romulus and Remus,
of King Arthur, and of Hengist and Horsa. Most of us have become agnostics
in regard to the reality of these worthies. It is a matter of notoriety of
which Mr. Harrison, who accuses us all so freely of ignoring history,
should not be ignorant, that the critical process which has shattered the
foundations of orthodox Christian doctrine owes its origin, not to the
devotees of physical science, but, before all, to Richard Simon, the
learned French Oratorian, just two hundred years ago. I cannot find
evidence that either Simon, or any one of the great scholars and critics of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who have continued Simon's work,
had any particular acquaintance with physical science. I have already
pointed out that Hume was independent of it. And certainly one of the most
potent influences in the same direction, upon history in the present
century, that of Grote, did not come from the physical side. Physical
science, in fact, has had nothing directly to do with the criticism of the
Gospels; it is wholly incompetent to furnish demonstrative evidence that
any statement made in these histories is untrue. Indeed, modern physiology
can find parallels in nature for events of apparently the most eminently
supernatural kind recounted in some of those histories. {368}