Biology Reference
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limits. The positivists claimed to work on the inside of a circle that delimited
certain knowledge from all else, but so did the agnostics. If “positive” facts
filled a glass half full of knowledge, the label agnostic merely referenced its
empty half. In this regard, Huxley might have just as easily called his posi-
tion “negativism,” but this even more obvious inversion would have drawn
unwanted attention to the fundamental similarity of these two positions. The
limits of knowledge that positivism imposed and which Huxley had no desire
of abandoning were still in effect, but by expressing the same notion under
this alternative heading, he gained a sense of neutrality that enabled him
to pursue world-building aspirations like those of the positivists even as he
appealed to an abiding Baconian sense of science's epistemic modesty.
The enduring and now more familiar association between agnosticism
and religious skepticism was undoubtedly part of Huxley's plan for the term.
But in its more immediate historical context, it makes just as much sense to
interpret this neologism, as both Adrian Desmond and Bernard Lightman
have done, as a symbolic act designed to rescue necessary alliances with the
Anglican hierarchy that Huxley could ill afford to abandon.
65
If “agnosti-
cism has no creed—in the sense of a statement or conclusions either positive
or negative, which the agnostic must hold,” as Huxley would write toward
the end of his life, then science could remain, as he had privately asserted
it ought to, in league with the “radicals,” even while it seemed to be the ally
of more traditional interests.
66
Huxley was clearly striving to maintain this
dual significance even in his first volley against positivism. In “The Physical
Basis of Life,” his Edinburgh lecture, he had seemed to take hold of materi-
alism with one hand while pushing it back with the other.
Past experience leads me to be tolerably certain that, when the proposi-
tions I have just placed before you are accessible to public comment and
criticism, they will be condemned by many zealous persons, and perhaps
by some few of the wise and thoughtful. I should not wonder if “gross and
brutal materialism” were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain
quarters. And, most undoubtedly, the terms of the propositions are dis-
tinctly materialistic. Nevertheless two things are certain; the one, that I
hold the statements to be substantially true: the other, that I, individually,
am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to involve
grave philosophical error.
67
What Huxley was pronouncing here was the familiar positivist rejection
of all metaphysical claims, but it was the favor of science's more traditional
constituents that he sought by making this point. It was the apparent
