DR. FLINT ON AGNOSTICISM.

Professor Flint recently delivered in Edinburgh, the sixth and last of the present series of Croall lectures on Agnosticism. He said that the whole agnosticism of the present day flowed from Hume and Kant as its two great fountain heads. Of the two, Kant was the greater philosopher, but the lesser agnostic. He surpassed Hume in constructiveness, inventiveness, and other qualities ; but he did not equal him in critical acuteness and clearness ; and, one single feature excepted, his whole agnosticism might be found more sharply and finely delineated in the writings of his predecessor. Hume was undoubtedly one of those " dead but sceptred sovereigns who still ruled our spirits from their urns." Probably, of all the eminent Scotsmen of the 18th century he was the one who had most affected the general course and character of British and European thought. And his influence viewed as a whole had been, it seemed to him (the lecturer), decidedly for good. It was not merely the scepticism of an individual thinker; it was a scepticism which had been present and operative in the speculations of some generations of thinkers, although it had not previously shown itself in its full force and in the light of open day. Hume concluded his treatise on the Natural History of Religion with words which faithfully described his whole speculative attitude toward religion :

" The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld ; did we not enlarge our views, and, opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy."

He (the lecturer) knew no words which seemed to him to paint more truthfully the final issue of a thorough and consistent agnosticism. But what a dismal, a dreadful issue ! For the vast majority of mankind, who certainly could not escape into the regions of philosophy, no hope, no refuge ; but the doom of living and dying in the darkness of delusion, in the belief of a lie. For the few who, like Hume himself, could escape into them, no prospect beyond that of finding them as empty, as unreal, as unsatisfying, as he had repeatedly and pathetically confessed himself to have found them, and as obscure, as enigmatic, as uncertain as religion was declared to be. Such an agnosticism might, under the government of a wise and omnipotent God, serve important and beneficial purposes in the world ; but the final end to which it logically led showed that it could never be the last word as to the interpretation of the universe or the significance of human life. Its doom to ultimate failure was written on its whole nature. Truth must conquer an enemy which avowed that it had a firm hold of no truth. The real response to the universal cry of the human heart, " Who will show us any truth, any good ? " could not be its response. It must be the one which had come down to them through many ages, and already proved itself a joy and strength to countless souls—"Lord, lift Thou upon us the light of Thy countenance."

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1870 - 1907), Saturday 19 May 1888, page 9