The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (review)

3z6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 Bernard Lightman. The Origin~of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbeliefand theLimits ofKnowledge . Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Pp. x + 949- $99.50Most readers familiar with the career of Thomas Henry Huxley will regard him as Darwin's tenacious bulldog. Others will see him as a gentler champion of an evolutionary light against the ill-used rhetoric of Soapy Sam Wilberforce. Bernard Lightman presents Huxley as a more complex character whose concern with claims of Christian orthodoxy was formed less from a Darwinian mortar than from the metaphysical and philosophical flourishes of High-Church Tories like Henry Longueville Mansel. According to Lightman, Mansel's Bampton Lectures in 1858 argued that man's limited capacities meant that God and the transcendental world are ultimately unknowable (7). Huxley happily accepted the logical conclusion that Christian claims to certainty were worthless. Thus, the fideist notion of the limits of human knowledge, extolled by a proponent of orthodoxy and revelation, ironically transformed Mansel into the "missing link" in the emergence of agnosticism (3o-31). The imputation of responsibility to Mansel for the foundation of the school of Victorian agnostics has much to recommend it. Certainly, Lightman is convincing that Herbert Spencer was directly influenced by Mansel's sense of limits when completing his agnostic manifesto, FirstPrinciples, in 1869. These very limits were the ones Spencer adopted as precisely the reason why man was unable to possess any knowledge of God. This does not mean, however, that the agnostics were a monolithic group of followers of either Huxley or of Spencer in their indebtedness to Mansel. Huxley's coining of the label 'agnosticism' was also an effort to distance himself from the large number of positivists, empiricists, and materialists who took solace in the rise of Darwinism. As Huxley put it, he was neither prophet nor pope of the cult of agnosticism that had evolved out of the atmosphere of the X-Club, the Metaphysical Society, and the Congress of Liberal Thinkers (14o). But there was a cult of scientific naturalism of which Huxley was a prophet. The evangelical appeal of naturalism turned agnosticism into a powerful and attractive tool for attacking the pretensions and hypocrisy of institutional religion. John Stuart Mill acknowledged the profound intellectual and social consequences of these struggles over nature. Yet the agnostics preferred Spencer to Mill's attack on intuition and institution, because Mill had subverted Mansel's idea of the relativity of knowledge (104). This suggests a serious difficulty with this short book. While Lightman suggests that social consequences were of some importance to both Mill and to the agnostic movement, he repeatedly fails to explore them. The debate between the agnostics and the High Church was full of venom: in light of it Huxley's encounter with Wilberforce in 186o pales into insignificance. Leslie Stephen vilified the contradictions and absurdity of a Christian metaphysics that postulated the unknowable. Similarly, William Clifford's disgust with doctrinal obsessions led to some finely considered prose. Clifford exclaimed in his essay on the Ethics of Religion that "the gospel indeed came out of Judea, but the Church and her dogmas came out of Egypt" (199). What is intriguing about these highly charged exchanges, which have been overshadowed by the evolutionist debate, was the extent to which BOOK REVIEWS 327 there was an effort to transform naturalism and rationality into a new and independent creed. Lightman's work contains welcome insights into the controversy over scientific epistemology in the nineteenth century. But it is also an aggravating work. This book is an important elaboration of the dispute over the context of scientific naturalism. But it is not enough to claim (118) that England's stability in a period of rapid social dislocation was partly the result of the evangelical delight in science, seriousness, and duty of the kind we might associate with Samuel Smiles. As Huxley himself stated, the critical question was whether the general public would rather place their confidence in men of science or in "theological special pleaders" (15~). The agnostic response to the lectures of Mansei, Huxley well understood, had far wider implications. It is therefore very frustrating to find Lightman...