Agnosticism, as a general term in philosophy, is frequently employed to express any conscious attitude of doubt, denial, or disbelief, towards some, or even all, of man's powers of knowing or objects of knowledge.
The word Agnostic (Greek a, privative + gnostikós "knowing") was coined by Professor Huxley in 1869 to describe the mental attitude of one who regarded as futile all attempts to know the reality corresponding to our ultimate scientific, philosophic, and religious ideas. As first employed by Huxley, the new term suggested the contrast between his own unpretentious ignorance and the vain knowledge which the Gnostics of the second and third century claimed to possess. This antithesis served to discredit the conclusions of natural theology, or theistic reasoning, by classing them with the idle vapourings of Gnosticism. The classification was unfair, the attempted antithesis overdrawn.
It is rather the Gnostic and the Agnostic who are the real extremists; the former extending the bounds of knowledge, and the latter narrowing them, unduly. Natural theology, or theism, occupies the middle ground between these extremes, and should have been disassociated both from the Gnostic position, that the mind can know everything, and from the Agnostic position, that it can know nothing concerning the truths of religion.
