Thomas Henry Huxley

The exchange with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860 is the founding scene of the science-versus-religion story: Wilberforce asks whether Huxley is descended from an ape on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side, and Huxley replies that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who uses his gifts to obscure the truth.

There is no contemporary transcript, and no two accounts agree on the words. The best-known version of Huxley's reply comes from letters and reminiscences written down decades later, several of them by partisans with an interest in how it had gone; contemporary press reports are thin and do not present it as a rout. Historians of science have shown the encounter was built up retrospectively, largely by Huxley's own circle and by his son's Life and Letters, into a decisive victory it does not appear to have been on the day. Joseph Hooker, who was there, thought at the time that he himself had made the more effective reply.

This bears directly on the word Huxley coined nine years later. He meant agnostic as the name of a method rather than a creed, follow reason as far as it goes and claim no certainty beyond what can be demonstrated, and he applied it as strictly to confident unbelief as to confident belief. A myth grown from unverified recollections is exactly the sort of claim his own principle tells you to hold loosely.

Agnostic was coined, by Huxley's own account, at the Metaphysical Society, the extraordinary London dinner club founded in 1869 where bishops, Catholics, positivists and scientists read papers at each other across the century's widest gulfs. Finding every other member equipped with an ism while he alone had, as he put it, no label to hang on his back, he invented one, suggestively antithetic to the gnostic of church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which he was ignorant. The word named a method before it named a mood: Huxley's agnosticism was the principle that it is wrong to say one knows the truth of a proposition unless one can produce evidence that logically justifies the certainty, applied without exception to theology, and equally, he insisted, to dogmatic atheism, which claims a knowledge of its own. He spent years defending and refining the term in essays against critics who called it atheism in a frock coat, and its success exceeded any polemic: within a generation it named the respectable middle station of Victorian doubt, and it still does the same work.

The setting mattered. The Metaphysical Society's procedure, courteous single combat over stated propositions, was Huxley's natural element, and the coinage is best read as a rule of that game raised into a philosophy of assent: state what you can prove, confess what you cannot, and treat the confession as honesty rather than defeat.