Agnosticism

The term agnosticism, as it is used in common parlance, normally refers to a neutral or undecided position on the question of the existence of God. It is shorthand for a rejection of religious faith on the one hand and of outright atheism on the other. The philosophical sources and Victorian expositions of agnosticism, however, reveal it to signify a much broader set of arguments about the limits of human knowledge, whether religious or scientific.

Bernard Lightman's definitive study, The Origins of Agnosticism (1987), places particular emphasis on the concept's Kantian origins. It is true that Kantian views about the limits of speculative reason, the relativity of knowledge, and the active role of the categories of the mind in constituting that knowledge formed an important part of agnosticism. Lightman argues convincingly for the influence of two writers in particular—William Hamilton (1788–1856) and Henry Longueville Mansel (1820–1871)—on later Victorian agnostics. Hamilton was a Scottish metaphysician who, as well as seeing himself as a defender of the Scottish "common sense" philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710–1796) and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), was probably the most important expositor of Kantian philosophy in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Mansel drew heavily on Hamilton's particular version of Kantianism in his controversial 1858 Bampton Lectures, entitled The Limits of Religious Thought. In these lectures, Mansel argued that speculative reason on its own led to all sorts of contradictions if allowed free rein in the area of theology. His conclusion was that only relative knowledge was possible and that the absolute (or the unconditioned, to use Hamilton's term) was not knowable through the faculties of sense and reason. Mansel's conclusion was that in the realm of theology, final authority must rest with revelation rather than reason. While Mansel believed that he had used Kant's philosophy constructively—to demonstrate the necessity of revelation and the authority of the Bible—critics from all sides felt that his arguments constituted, in effect, a complete capitulation in the face of rationalism and modern science and a retreat into an extreme form of fideism.

The idea that Kantian philosophy was at the heart of agnosticism needs to be qualified in a couple of ways (as Lightman himself acknowledges). First, Hamilton and Mansel were far from being simply followers of Kant. They tried to make use of his ideas for their own polemical purposes and certainly did not agree with or reproduce his entire system. The attempt to use philosophy to undermine reason in the realm of theology and establish the necessity and authority of revelation is certainly not "Kantian" in the sense of being a teaching of Kant. Second, a recognition of the influence of Kant on Victorian agnostics should not obscure the very important contributions of David Hume (1711–1776), to whom Kant himself famously acknowledged an important debt, and of other philosophers in the Scottish tradition. These included Reid and Stewart, in whose footsteps Hamilton was following, as well as Hamilton's principal philosophical antagonist, the empiricist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). The agnostic philosophy of Thomas Huxley, for instance, was based on a teaching central to the Scottish school, namely that "mind" and "matter" were merely shorthand terms for unknown realities that underlie the world of experience (which is the only domain in which we can have knowledge).