WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHAT I DO NOT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9325, 30 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHAT I DO NOT.

THE AGNOSTIC'S CREED. [BY professor HUXLEY.]

Professor Huxley contributes to the Nineteenth Century a remarkable article on "Agnosticism," partly controversial, but largely autobiographical, in which he draws up Ids creed and explains how he came by it. We extract the more salient passages.

HIS STARTING IN YOUTH. I was brought up in the strictest*school of Evangelical orthodoxy ; and when I was old enough to think for myself I started upon my journey of inquiry with little doubt about the general truth of what I had been taught; and with that feeling of the unpleasantness of being called an "infidel" which, we are told, is so right and proper. Near my journey's end; I find myself in a condition of something more than mere doubt about these matters. Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy whose education had been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left for seven years altogether to his own chances. At that time I was a voracious 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.

BOOKS THAT INFLUENCED ME. Among the books and essays, or all sorts of topics, from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was Guizob'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; nevertheless, 1 devoured it with avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that on oven 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 bo such questions nob merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable. HOW MY MIND GREW.

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 forphiiosophical and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to mo, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the repose of changed mental occupation, but lias 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. The reader will now see why my mind steadily f gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume ! and Kant. ' I

THE OKI GIN Of THE TERM AGNOSTIC. When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether 1 was an atheist, atheist, or 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 tho one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite suro 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. This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of the Metaphysical Society. Most of my colleagues were " ists" of one sort or another. 1, who was a man without a rag of a label to cover myself with, felt like the fox who had lost his tail. So I took thought and invented what i conceived to be the appropriate title of agnostic. It came into my head as suggestive 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 tho earliest opfwrtunity 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. Tin-: agnostic's ju:le op LIVE.

_ Agnosticism 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 tho reformation, which simply illustrated tho axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him ; it is the groat principle of Descartos ; 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 ure nofcderaonstrated ordemonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which, if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to iook the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. The only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction. If you were to lind an agnostic who never failed in carrying out his principles, and to tell him that you had discovered that two and two make live, 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.

WHAT I THINK OF MAN. I know us study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is sot forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes ; a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction ; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle, fie attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life in such favourable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia and of Egypt, and then for thousands and thousands of years struggles with varying fortuno, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on ; and when he has moved on a step, foolishly confere {>ost-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a step yet further ; and the best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

WHAT I THINK OF CHRIST. In the course of other inquiries, I have had to do with fossil remains which looked q uitc plain at a distance, and became more and more indistinct as I tried to define their outline by close inspection. There was something there—something which, if I could win assurance about it, might mark a new epoch in the history of tho earth ; but, study as long as I might, certainly eluded my grasp. So has it boon with me in my efforts to define the grand figure of Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian litorature. Is He the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in tho Catacombs ? Or is He the stern judge who frowns above the altar of SS. Cosmos and Da mi an us ? Or can He be rightly represented in the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediaeval pictures? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth gospel, as tho true Jesus? What did he really say and do ; and how much that is attributed to Him in speech and action is the embroidery of the various parties into which H>n followers tended to split themselves within twenty years of His death, when even the threefold tradition was only nascent? AND OP CHRISTIAN That one should rejoice in the good man, forgive tho bad man, and pity and help all men to the best of one's ability, is surely indisputable. It is the glory of Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. I verily believe that the great good which has been effected by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent

doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their mare or leas astonishing creeds is a moral offeiioe— indeed, a sin of the deepest dye, deserving 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. lam much disposed -to think that the encouragement, the consolation, and the peace afforded to earnest be-liever-sin even the worst f ( orms ofChristiatiity 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, the ruler, the legislator, the philosopher, and the conscientious soul, 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.

POSITIVISM WILL NOT SUCCEED CIII'.IS- , TIANITY. Whoso calls to mind what I may venture to term the bright side of Christianity ; that ideal of manhood, with its strength and its patience ; its justice and its pity for human frailty ; its helpfulness, to the extremity of self-sacrifice ; its ethical purity and nobility; which apostles have pictured, in which armies of martyrs have placed their unshakable faith, and whence obscure men and women, like Catherine of Sienna and John Knox have derived the courage to rebuke popes and kings, is not likely to underrate the importance of the Christian faith as a factor in human history, or to doubt that if that faith should prove to be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowledge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, the new anthropolatry known as positivism will not climb into the vacant shrine. But when the positivist asks me to worship "Humanity " — that is to say, to adore the generalised conception of men as they ever have been and probably ever will be—l must reply that I could just as soon bow down and worship the generalised conception of a "wilderness of apes." THE STRAIGHT PATH THAT LEADS — WHITHER ?

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 [WW 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 other side of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none attainable by me.