Agnosticism

Herbert Spencer's First Principles (1862) laid the groundwork for the hugely ambitious, multivolume Synthetic Philosophy, finally completed in 1896, which articulated Spencer's vision of how philosophy, biology, sociology, ethics, religion, and society itself needed to be reconceptualized and transformed in the light of the doctrine of evolution (see Peel). The first part of the First Principles, entitled "The Unknowable," was considered the Bible of agnosticism for the rest of the Victorian period. Spencer argued that science and religion could be reconciled if they recognized that both, ultimately, were concerned with realities whose foundations were beyond the grasp of human knowledge. However, while science could get on with measuring, analyzing, and interpreting observable phenomena, nothing was left for theologians but total silence in the face of the unknowable. There was no role for revelation in Spencer's proposed scientific and agnostic religion, and Mansel's conservative critics saw

in Spencer's system exactly the conclusions they had feared would follow from Mansel's teachings on the impotence of human reason in the theological realm.

Although Spencer was later generally considered to be the leading representative of agnosticism, the terms agnostic and agnosticism did not themselves come into use until about ten years after the publication of the First Principles. The terms gained currency through their use by Spencer but also by the theologian and journalist R. H. Hutton, the editor of the Spectator in the 1870s, and the lapsed Anglican minister Leslie Stephen, who, after leaving the Church of England, wrote An Agnostic's Apology (1876).

Although he made some use of the term in his writings from the 1870s onward, it was only in 1889 that Thomas Huxley revealed himself as the inventor of the terms agnostic and agnosticism and explained how and why he had come to coin them (Lightman, 2002). One of Huxley's earlier essays that gained him much attention (and much criticism) was entitled "On the Physical Basis of Life" (reprinted in Collected Essays, vol. 1). This essay, based on a lecture delivered in Edinburgh in 1868, just a year before he coined the term agnostic, is one of the most helpful illustrations of the essence of Huxley's agnosticism. Although the essay was criticized for espousing a materialistic view of life (the idea that all living things are made up of the same substance—"protoplasm"), in fact it defended a nescient or radically empiricist understanding of science as producing nothing more than a set of symbols with which to describe and organize observable phenomena. Huxley rejected materialism on the grounds that it was impossible for empirical science to determine anything at all about the nature of any putative substance or substances underlying the phenomena or of any supposed laws or causes. "In itself," Huxley said, "it is of little moment whether we express the phænomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phænomena of spirit in terms of matter: matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter—each statement has a certain relative truth" (1893–1894, vol. 1, p. 164). (The materialistic terminology was to be preferred, however, for the pragmatic reason that it connected with other areas of scientific investigation, which were expressed in the same terms, and for the reason that spiritualistic terminology was entirely barren.) Huxley denied that this was a "new philosophy" and especially that it was the invention of the positivist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), as some supposed. Comte, he said, lacked entirely "the vigour of thought and the exquisite clearness of style" of the true author of this philosophy, "the man whom I make bold to term the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century—even though that century produced Kant" (1893–1894, vol. 1, p. 158). The man Huxley had in mind, of course, was Hume.

The closing pages of "On the Physical Basis of Life," then, show several important things about Huxley's agnosticism. They show that Huxley felt the need for a new label—agnostic—not in order to distance himself from Christianity (everyone already knew he was an opponent of theological orthodoxy) but primarily in order to repudiate the labels materialist, atheist, and positivist. They also show that Huxley considered Hume to be at least as important as Kant, if not more important, in the historical pedigree of agnosticism. And finally, they show that agnosticism involved admitting ignorance about the fundamental nature of the physical universe as well as about the existence and attributes of the divine.