sufficient
evidence, is immoral; the discrowning of authority as such; the
repudiation of the confusion, beloved of sophists of all sorts,
between free assent and merely piously gagged dissent, and the
admission of the obligation to reconsider even one's own axioms
on due demand."

This was the healthy and active scepticism which took no direct
pleasure in doubting, but used doubt only as a means of making
knowledge doubly secure, and which prevented false ideas being
bolstered up by privilege or by tyranny.

"The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast
range, from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence
of the working out, in this province, of the resolution to take
nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such; to
consider all beliefs open to criticism; to regard the value of
authority as neither greater nor less than as much as it can
prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit
'which always denies,' delighting only in destruction; still less
is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not
construct; it is the spirit which works and will work 'without
haste and without rest,' gathering harvest after harvest of truth
into its barns and devouring error with unquenchable fire."

It is a special weakness of the modern human race to love inventing
descriptive names by which particular modes of thought may be
classified and labelled. In order to meet this demand, Huxley invented
the word _agnosticism_, to serve as a label for his own attitude. The
word rapidly became popular, and attempts were made to read into it
far more than its inventor implied. For him it was no definite body of
doctrine, no creed in any positive sense. It merely expressed the
attitude he assumed towards all problems on which he regarded the
evidence as insufficient. It was a habit of mind rather than a series
of opinions or beliefs; an intellectual weapon and not materials on
which to exercise the intellect.

Hume had written that "the justest and most plausible objection
against a considerable part of metaphysics was that they are not
properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of
human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible
to the human understanding, or from the craft of popular
superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair
gro