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Thought . 55 Drawing from the Kantian epistemology that had made its way
into England via the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, Mansel
concluded that knowledge of God was impossible through natural means
and could only come through the direct revelation of sacred Scripture.
Huxley, who had also himself been under Hamilton's spell since his youth,
instantly recognized a form of philosophical skepticism similar to his own,
one that promised to forever bar clergymen from speculating about nature.
He joked in a letter to Charles Lyell that the churchman's position reminded
him of the drunken character in William Hogarth's painting, “Canvassing
for Votes,” “who is sawing through the signpost at the other party's public-
house, forgetting he is sitting at the other end of it.” 56 But the fact that this
rendering of Huxley's own position appealed to a conservative Anglican
like Mansel signaled the rhetorical potential that agnosticism might have
as a demarcating strategy. Despite Huxley's belief that Mansel had sawed
off the very branch that supported the weight of Christian truth, the fact
that the churchman had so successfully aligned his philosophical skepticism
with orthodoxy suggested how scientific naturalism might appeal to the
same flock. As Lightman puts this, agnosticism was not the opposite, but
rather the “mirror image” of the theological rationale that had formerly sus-
tained science. 57 The Baconian scientific ideology had already established
the scrupulous reading of nature's text as a form of Christian obedience.
Interpreted now in this Kantian framework, the reading of nature's text
was no longer capable of producing theological insights, but cultural habit
ensured that its scientific interpretation would continue to resonate with
traditional notions of epistemic morality.
Shortly after the death of his firstborn son Noel in 1860, Huxley offered
up one of his most poignant representations of this Protestant ethic in a let-
ter to Charles Kingsley. The grieving father rejected his clergyman friend's
hope of an afterlife reunion with this lost child on the grounds that such
prospects lay beyond the reach of knowledge, but he advanced this point by
invoking another premise of Christian faith.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the
great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire sur-
render to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be pre-
pared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and
to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only
begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks
to do this. 58
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