The First Agnostic.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 897, 10 May 1889, Page 4

The First Agnostic.

In a graceful and chatty paper in the last issue of the Nineteenth Century, Professor Huxley explains how the term * agnostic ’ was coined. * When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist or a panthiest, 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 the one thing in which I differed from them. They weie quite sure 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. I, who was a man without a rag of a label to cover myself with, felt like the fox who had lost his ta”. So I took thought and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of agnostic. It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the gnostic of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was so ignorant, and I took the earliest opportunity 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.’ This gives a new and non-sinister definition to a word which most people have accepted as meaning something severely heretical and infidelish. That is, Professor Huxley, instead of professing to know it all, confesses that he knows little or nothing about the great mystery of existence.