Agnosticism

Agnosticism, a word introduced into the English language by Professor Huxley, in 1869. The term was suggested to him by the inscription, Agnōstō Theō ('To an Unknown God'), which the apostle Paul saw on an Athenian altar, as recorded in Acts, xvii. 23. It connotes the doctrine that man does not know anything about spiritual existences, whether divine or human, or about a future life. The advocates of agnosticism employ two methods of argumentation in support of their position—viz. the sceptical and the critical. In their reasoning against spiritualism, they are careful to guard themselves against the charge of positive Atheism (q.v.) on the one hand, and of philosophical Materialism (q.v.) on the other. They frankly admit that there is more than matter and force in the universe. The phenomena of consciousness and mental activity cannot, they grant, be put in the same category with the properties of matter. With the former, they admit, physical science cannot deal. 'The passage,' says Professor Tyndall, 'from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.' Consciousness, they assert, is a function of the brain, as motion is a function of the muscles. As to how the stimulation of a sensory nerve gives rise to consciousness, or the stimulation of a motor nerve to muscular contraction, they avow blank ignorance. Perhaps, they say, consciousness inheres in a substance other than material; and perhaps the series of conscious states, at present associated with man's material organism, may continue to exist apart from it; but these things they do not profess to know. As regards the existence of a God, they say that, having regard to the universality of the law of causation, they cannot refuse to admit an eternal existence, and that, in view of the doctrine of the conservation of energy, they must also grant the possibility of an eternal energy. Further, if the existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of consciousness is admitted, an eternal series of such phenomena must be regarded as possible. Thus, an eternal existence possessed of consciousness and energy may be the First Cause of all things. Agnosticism, however, leaves it an open question whether energy is eternal a parte ante; and as to consciousness it maintains that there is no positive evidence that the first cause possesses it at all. The only thing certain, accordingly, is that an eternal existence of some sort must be postulated. Though their belief in the universality of the law of causation shuts them in to this positive conclusion, at the same time agnostics are careful to state that causation cannot be proved by any amount of experience—thus following Hume and Kant, who taught that our only knowledge is of phenomena or sequences. 'The only meaning,' says Professor Huxley, 'of the law of causation in the physical world, is that it generalises universal experience of the order of the world; and if experience shows [and he says it does] a similar order to obtain among states of consciousness, the law of causation will properly express that order' (Life of Hume, pp. 184-5). 'Universal experience' of the 'order' of phenomena is, according to this statement, all that is meant by the law of causation. Why phenomena fall into this order, the agnostic does not profess to know. This being so, it follows that, as it is only in consciousness we apprehend phenomena, agnosticism leaves it problematical whether an external world exists at all. Perhaps the Idealism of Berkeley (q.v.) is the soundest philosophy. Or, linking human consciousness to a possible eternal series of conscious states, it may be that the Pantheism of Spinoza (q.v.) is the most satisfactory solution of the mystery of existence. Owing to the reverence of agnostics for the law of causation, they repudiate free-will. Agnosticism may be regarded as Positivism without its dogmatism. See POSITIVISM, SPENCER, and Leslie Stephen's Agnostic's Apology (1893).