the "gnostic" of Church history who knew all about
things of which Huxley felt himself in ignorance. To all of which one
may say that Huxley appears to have given himself a lot of needless
trouble. In philosophy there was the term "Sceptic," and in relation to
religion the term "Atheist" was ready to hand. The latter term certainly
covered all that Huxley meant by Agnosticism as applied to the god-idea.
The plain, and perhaps brutal truth, is that Huxley was just
illustrating the fatal tendency of English public men to seek for a
label that will mark them off from an unfashionable heresy even more
clearly than it separates them from a crumbling orthodoxy. It is
certainly suggestive to find, in this connection, a French writer of
distinction, M. Emile Boutmy, pointing out that in France, Spencer,
Mill, and Huxley would all have been professed atheists. (_The English
People_, p. 44.) But France is France, and has always possessed the
courage to follow ideas to their logical conclusion.

When it comes to a definition of Agnosticism Professor Huxley's position
becomes still more difficult of understanding. Agnosticism, he says, is
a method the essence of which may be expressed in a single principle.
"Positively the principle may be expressed; in matters of the intellect
follow your reason so 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." So far as this goes we have here perfectly sound advice.
But why call it Agnosticism? It is no more than the perfectly sound
advice that we must be honest in our investigations, and make no claim
to certainty where the conditions of certainty do not exist. But we have
no more right to call this Agnosticism than we have to give the
multiplication table a sectarian or party label.

Nor do we believe for a moment that what Huxley had in view, or what
other agnostics have in view, is no more than a counsel of intellectual
perfection. What is really at issue here is one's attitude of mind in
relation to the belief in God. It is in pretending to know about God
that the theist finds himself at issue with the Agnostic, and it is to
mark himself off from the theist that the Agnostic gives himself a
special label. And the trouble of the Agnostic is that so soon as he
begins to justify his position, either he states the atheistic case or
he fails al