human
God --comes to the same thing as Atheism, since it argues that the current God-idea is a mere reflex of humanity, like those which preceded it. Bradlaugh sometimes grew impatient (and small wonder) with people who wrote to him to point out that Atheism was wrong, and Agnosticism right. They never took the trouble to try to understand what he meant by Atheism; and it must with regret be said that more competent Agnostics often make the same omission. The simple-minded Agnostic who candidly remarks,
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I do not say there is no God, but I haven't seen any evidence for one, is kept in countenance by the more learned Agnosticism which excludes from its learning the literature of modern Atheism. Bradlaugh had seen the new name readily adopted by men who not only shunned the old but helped to heap on it an ignorant odium. He had seen Atheism strangely misrepresented by Mr Spencer in
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First Principles; [83] he pointed out that a mere avowal of ignorance is not worth making, and that Agnosticism is not a philosophy at all, unless it says, not merely,
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I do not know of the thing you assert, but
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--which are just the statements of Atheism. He might have added that while
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Atheist, though a term much abused by Theists, is a good word, and a real doctrine-name,
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Agnostic is a bad word, and in itself no doctrine-name at all, since it says
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Don't know, without hinting what it is that is not known. The present writer has heard a Christian Evidence lecturer, a Master of Arts, delight a Christian audience by saying that the nearest English equivalent to
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Agnostic is
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Ignoramus.
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Atheistic theory as professing to
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an infinite and eternal universe, and thereby to
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it, when the very essence of Atheism is to insist (as does Mr Spencer) that infinity is only the negation of conceptions, and that an infinite universe cannot be