In all this reading Huxley found nothing to shake what he had learnt
long before from Hamilton--the limits set to human knowledge and
the impossibility of attaining to the ultimate reality behind the
phenomena presented to our cognition. The problems of philosophy, set
forth with unsurpassed clearness for all who will read in our great
English writers, were not solved by soaring into intellectual mists.
To those who declared they had attained this ultimate knowledge by
their own inner light or through an alleged revelation in historical
experience, the question remained to be put: How do you verify your
assertion? Is the historical evidence on which you build trustworthy?
And if in certain departments this evidence is clearly untenable,
what guarantee have you that in other departments evidence of similar
character is tenable? The fine-spun abstractions of the Platonists
and their kin, unchecked by a natural science which had not yet the
appliances necessary for its growth; the orthodoxies of the various
churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development
from the simplicity of their nominal founder--these were based upon
assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no
valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label
his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in
contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within
apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he
had already reached--the position of suspending judgment where actual
proof is not possible; the attitude of mind which regards the words
"I believe" as a momentous assertion, not to be uttered on incomplete
grounds.
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