PROFESSOR HARRIS ON AGNOSTICISM.* Ws cannot be expected to give
within the limits at our com- mand any full account of the contents of this very remarkable volume, consisting, as it does, of well-nigh six hundred closely- printed pages. And such an attempt would be all the more hopeless and more barren from the fact that the length of the book is by no means the result of any undue diffuseness of style, but represents an amount of solid thought quite com- mensurate with the number of its pages. Starting, then, with the assurance that the whole volume will be found by all who are interested in its subject full of suggestive thought and of real assistance in unfolding to the mind the true account and justification of its religious knowledge, we shall confine our- selves, so far as we enter into detail, to one or two of the questions discussed which seem of the most practical import- ance at the present moment.
It is needless to say that "Agnosticism " is fast becoming a more and more popular watchword, and that the denial of any rational basis for religious belief, on the ground that the First Cause of the Universe is not only a Being of whose existence there is no evidence, but one whose existence is (if real at all) radically inaccessible to our faculties, is the root-principle of modern un- belief. Professor Harris has some very pregnant sentences on this subject which cannot fail to assist many who, in their inability to satisfy themselves with their own account of their convictions, are led to fear that such indeed may be the case, and that they have been guiding their lives by reference to beliefs which, when fully developed and carefully analysed, will turn out to be not only as unproved, but as unmeaning, as Mr. Mill's proposition,—" Every
• The Philosophical Basis of Theism. By Samuel Harris, D.D., LL.D., Pro- fessor of Systematic Theology in the Theological Department of Yale College. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1883.
Ileimpty-dnmpty is an Abracadabra." But before we cite Mr. Harris's criticism of Agnosticism, we must, for the sake of clearness, premise one word of explanation. There is one species of Agnosticism which, as taking the form of a state- ment of purely personal experience, is outside the sphere of discussion. When Mr. Huxley tells us that he finds the problem of the ultimate cause of existence outside the range of his "poor faculties," if this be taken to mean simply, as it seems to mean, that he has been unable to arrive- at any conclusion on the subject, it is a statement which we accept, and do not care to disprove. It may amount to little more than a confession of perplexity of mind, with no hope of succeeding better hereafter than he has done in the past, in the attempt to draw a certain con- clusion on such subjects. But when the farther step is taken by Mr. Herbert Spencer of dogmatising about the " unknow- able "—of saying not only "I do not know," or even "I fear I shall never know," but "no one can know," and "the human faculties are not competent to deal with the matter at all "- then we have, as Mr. Harris says, a theory of knowledge, and not a mere confession of personal ignorance. No doubt the former species of Agnosticism—negative Agnosticism, we may call it—readily passes into the latter ; but it is important to keep them distinct. To mention only one difference in their practical effect, the purely negative Agnosticism may, and often does, gee place to some hope of religious conviction, whereas the other announces as its first principle that such a hope is absard. A man may say, "I am bewildered by the difficulty of the question, and I shall never solve it," and yet a new ligh'imay dawn upon him later on. He may see or hear something which revives his religious instincts, and makes him recognise their promptings as a veritable warning from above. But where there is a deeply-rooted first principle to the effect that our faculties cannot deal with the matter, Agnosticism a3sumes a fanatical colour which is far more dangerous. I t such a case, one who even began serious religions consideration would, by the very fact, consider himself to be violating a first principle of rational thought. Such a creed is liable, indeed, to the charge of identifying the highest reason with the blindest prejudice, as shutting out (where it is firmly held) every one of those processes of mind which might expose
its error ; but it is not necessary here to insist on this aspect of it. Let us, without further preamble, hear Professor Harris's words on the subject, bearing in mind, by the way, that he uses- the word " agnosticism " as synonymous with "scepticism," and denotes the theory of the nnknowableness of the nomnnenat world, including its unknown and unknowable cause, by the- phrase, " partial Agnosticism " :- " The affirmation of Agnosticism is self-contradictory ; it is the affirmation of knowledge, and implies its reality. Agnosticism is a theory of knowledge. Hegel says :—' No one is aware that anything is a limit or a defect, until at the same time he is above and beyond it.' An ox cannot know that it is ignorant of the multiplication-table, and incompetent to learn it. If man were incompetent to know, he would be equally unconscious of his deficiency. If I say that my be- liefs are delusive, and not knowledge, I assume that I know what true knowledge is, and by comparing my own beliefs with it, I know that they are illusive. If I say that my intellectual faculties are untrustworthy, I assume that I am conscious of a higher faculty by which I know the norm, or standard of truth, and judge my other faculties untrustworthy. Hegel's maxim is applicable also to partial agnosticism. If I affirm that I have a knowledge only of phenomena, not of the true reality, which exists as a 'thing in itself' out of all relation to my faculties, I assume a knowledge of the thing in itself,' and of phenomena as distinguished from it. When Mr. Tyndall says he has no faculty and no rudiment of a faculty' by which he- can know God, he already reveals the faculty of knowing him. If the existence of an object involves no contradiction, and I can form a conception of it, then I am competent to know it if evidence of its existence comes within the range of my experience and my thought. When Hamilton and Manse] affirm that we have only a negative know- ledge of the Absolute (which is no knowledge), and Spencer affirms that the Absolute exists, but is the unknowable, they are already looking over the limits of the finite, and know the Absolute as existent being. If they had no power to know the Absolute, they would be as uncon- scious of their ignorance as the ox is of its ignorance of geometry. Accordingly, Hamilton teaches that we cannot know the Absolute, yet that by an entirely unexplained act of faith we believe in its existence, and accept it as the supreme object of worship, love, and obedience. When Mr. Spencer speaks of 'the Unknowable,' he un- wittingly reveals knowledge of it by describing it as the Absolute,' as Cause, Power, or Force, of which every phenomenon is a mani- festation,' as some power by which we are acted on,' as omni- present' and persistent.' So others, who deny that man can know God, refer to sin and suffering in the universe as incompatible with his existence, and thus assume knowledge of God and of how he would have constituted and governed the universe if he had existed." We hold that this extract, understood with certain limitations, contains a very important truth. Hegel's saying is, of course, not literally and universally true. A boy may have enough wits to know that the differential calculus is beyond his mathe- matical powers, and may be so far aware of the limit of his faculties, and yet not be "above and beyond it." But this con- sideration only serves to bring out more forcibly what we take to be the true meaning of the saying. The boy's perception of his own incapacity arises from his sense of his own capacity. He can understand the simpler mathematical truths, and can thence rise to a sufficient conception of what is more complex, to be pretty sure that it is beyond him. He has the "rudiment of a faculty," but it is undeveloped, and in his particular case, perhaps, incapable of immediate development. Thus, so far as his case serves as a parallel, it is rather that of the negative than of the dogmatic Agnostic. He does not pronounce that the " calculus " is out of relation to his faculties, but that the whole thing puzzles him, and that his head gets so confused with it that he has no hope of ever mastering it. The ox, on the contrary, in which there is no rudiment of the mathematical faculty, from its very inability to conceive the notions with which mathematics are concerned, cannot know its own ignorance. That is to say, ignorance arising not from the imperfection of the faculty, but from its absence, has no means of making itself known t8 the person who is ignorant. To give an illustration from rational beings (for the consciousness of an ox might be considered an unfamiliar object of scrutiny), a man with an indifferent musical ear might be quite conscious that he had no true appreciation of the difference between Beethoven's and Mendelssohn's styles ; but one who had never possessed the sense of sound could have no knowledge of this especial in- capacity, as the very notions of which such knowledge is com- posed would be inaccessible to him. " Sound," " style," " harmony," " melody," " instrumentation," " timbre," and the like, the terms in which the whole thing must be explained, are to him words without meaning. His consciousness does not contain the true equivalent for any of them. One who had any, even the smallest, sense of musical tones, could be made to see that differences of a subtler kind, parallel to those very palpable differences of sound which he himself could detect, might constitute a very interesting stud ; but that it re- quired a more highly sensitive faculty than he possessed to appreciate them. But a man who had no sense of hearing, although it might be conveyed to him that there was a sensation called " sound," offering varieties of great interest, of which he was ignorant, could not in any intelligent sense know of what he was ignorant. The very word " sensation "- the only term in which it could be conveyed to him—is so different in meaning as applied to sound from the same word as used of sight or touch, that it would convey no real know- ledge. All he could intelligently say would be, " There is some way in which my mind could be affected which I have no faculty for apprehending." But here we come to the most im- portant part of the whole matter, as containing the essence of the argument, if the illustration be looked at in its bearing on Agnosticism. Our deaf man has it conveyed to him by other human beings that there is a thing called " sound," of which he is ignorant. This is a revelation made to him by those who can hear, by beings superior to himself who, being above him in. this respect, perceive the limit of his faculty. But if there were no such superior beings—if all the world were born deaf—he would gain no knowledge whatever of his ignorance. The most he could say, if without such external information, would be, "There may be mental affections possible to other beings of which I am not susceptible," a very safe and very vague state- ment, but the only legitimate counterpart to Mr. Spencer's theory of the "Unknowable." It would be breaking a butterfly on the wheel; were we to contrast this reasonable Agnosticism with the full and interesting creed of the high priests of the Unknow- able, and they would no doubt deny the parallel, which we must nevertheless maintain to be, mutatis mutandis, strictly accurate.
But we have space only to indicate the lines on which we should apply what we have said to the recognised Agnosticism. We maintain that Hegel's dictum, understood in the sense in which we have taken it, places in very impressive contrast the limited and reasonable Agnosticism of Christian Theism, and the self. contradictory Agnosticism which commonly usurps the title. The old ontological argument which professed to prove God's existence from the sole fact that mankind has conceived the idea of God, was, no doubt, very insufficient; but it seems to us to
contain just a sufficient germ of truth in it to show the force of Hegel's dictum, and to disprove the doctrine of the Unknowable. The idea of an infinitely good and powerful personal being as First Cause of the phenomenal universe, could no more have entered the mind of beings which had no " rudiment " of a faculty for the apprehension of such a being, than could the idea of the multiplication-table or of music have been generated by the unassisted faculties of the ox and the man born deaf respectively. The fact that our conception of " infinite " must be in part negative does not make it the less definite; nor is the idea indis- tinct or inaccurate, if we gauge these qualities, as Dr. Martinean has expressed it, not by the idea of a limit, but by the limit of an idea,—by its sitting clearly apart from other ideas. The idea of " person " is not anthropomorphic, because it is derived from our conception of human personality, any more than that idea which we form of another's personality from our own, of which alone we have immediate knowledge, involves the confounding of one individual with another. In both cases we infer the existence of an external personality from effects produced by it upon ourselves, and in both cases we abstract from our conception those accompanying qualities which we have reason to believe are not shared in common. We do not introduce into our conception of another's personality our own individuality of character, neither do we introduce into our con- ception of God's personality those limits of knowledge and power of which we are conscious in ourselves. The principle is in both cases the same, and results, no doubt, in some imper- fection of conception, as we are unable to supply fully what is outside our own experience, but it is an imperfection parallel to that which does not distinguish musical sounds in their com- ponent parts, and not to that which cannot hear them at all. The limits, then, which we observe in our faculties, are such as would justify the Agnosticism of the Theist who admits that we can- not know God as he is in himself, although we can know suffi- cient of his nature for our own practical relations with him, but give the lie, in disclosing themselves, to a theory which denies that we have a faculty fitted for rudimentary knowledge of him which is true as far as it goes. And it cannot be too often said, that so far as it is only in God's relation to ourselves, and not in himself, that he is immediately known to ne, our knowledge of God only presents the same limitations as does our knowledge of any other person existent, although our constant intercourse with others of our own speciesleads us to think so immediately of their personality, that we forget the intermediate signs whereby it is borne in on our consciousness.
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