Friday, March 11, 2005
``When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether
I was an atheist, a theist 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. The one thing on which most of
these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from
them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain `gnosis'--had
more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was
quite sure that I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the
problem was insoluble.... 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 ignorant. To my
great satisfaction the term took.''
- Thomas Henry Huxley, (Coll. Ess. v. pp. 237-239)
I was an atheist, a theist 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. The one thing on which most of
these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from
them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain `gnosis'--had
more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was
quite sure that I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the
problem was insoluble.... 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 ignorant. To my
great satisfaction the term took.''
- Thomas Henry Huxley, (Coll. Ess. v. pp. 237-239)
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