The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made, now by theology and now by speculative philosophy.  It is hardly descriptive in any absolute sense.  Spencer had coined the rather fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into more extensive contact with surrounding nescience.  Even upon this illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading.  The continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of ignorance.  It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance.  The author of Ecce Coelum has declared:  ’Things die out under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see, unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our most powerful telescope.’  This sense of the circumambient unknown has become cardinal with the best spirits of the age.  Men have a more rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.

They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure and solid knowledge may be attained.  They have undisguised scepticism as to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways.  It was the working of these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which Carlyle described as an everlasting No.  This was but a preparatory stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.

In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has administered.  It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been guilty of arrant dogmatism.  It has been thus guilty upon the basis of the claim that it possessed a revelation.  It has allowed itself unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and difficult matters.  It has alleged miraculously communicated information concerning those matters.  It has clothed with a divine authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race.  In this good sense of a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age.  It is not that religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation.  They apprehended more justly the nature of revelation.  They confess that there is much ignorance which revelation