It may be said that if these statements are true, the ordinary reader is helpless. How can he separate the true from the false? Must he resign himself to the condition of one who either believes on mere authority or refuses to believe anything? or must he adopt the attitude of the Pyrrhonist who thinks that anything may be either true or false? But it is true, nevertheless, that common sense may suffice to deliver us from much of the pseudo-science of our time, and to enable us to understand how little reason there is for the conflicts promoted by mere speculation between science and other departments of legitimate thought and inquiry.
In illustrating this, we may in the present lecture consider that form of sceptical philosophy which in our time is the most prevalent, and which has the most specious air of dependence on science. This is the system of Agnosticism combined with evolution of which Mr. Herbert Spencer is the most conspicuous advocate in the English-speaking world. This philosophy deals with two subjects--the cause or origin of the universe and of things therein, and the method of the progress of all from the beginning until now. Spencer sees nothing in the first of these but mere force or energy, nothing in the second but a spontaneous evolution. All beyond these is not only unknown, but unknowable. The theological and philosophical shortcomings of this doctrine have been laid bare by a multitude of critics, and I do not propose to consider it in these relations so much as in relation to science, which has much to say with respect to both force and evolution.
An agnostic is literally one who does not know; and, were the word used in its true and literal sense, Agnosticism would of necessity be opposed to science, since science is knowledge and quite incompatible with the want of it. But the modern agnostic does not pretend to be ignorant of the facts and principles of science. What he professes not to know is the existence of any power above and beyond material nature. He goes a little farther, however, than mere absence of knowledge. He holds that of God nothing can be known; or he may put it a little more strongly, in the phrase of his peculiar philosophy, by saying that the existence of a God or of creation by divine power is "unthinkable." It is in this that he differs from the old-fashioned and now extinct atheist, who bluntly denied the existence of a God. The modern agnostic assumes an attitude of greater humility and disclaims the actual denial of God. Yet he practically goes farther, in asserting the impossibility of knowing the existence of a Divine Being; and in taking this farther step Agnosticism does more to degrade the human reason and to cut it off from all communion with anything beyond mere matter and force, than does any other form of philosophy, ancient or modern.
