This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a
place among the members of that remarkable confraternity
of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and
pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of
philosophical and theological opinion was represented
there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my
colleagues were _-ists_ of one sort or another; and, however
kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of
a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of
the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox
when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he
presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the
appropriate title of "Agnostic." It came into my head as
suggestively antithetic to the "Gnostic" of Church history,
who professed to know so much about the very things of which I
was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading
it at our Society to show that I, too, had a tail like the
other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when
the _Spectator_ had stood godfather to it, any suspicion
in the minds of respectable people that a knowledge of its
parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely
lulled.

Of his share in the debates the late Prof. Henry Sidgwick gives the
following account:--

There were several members of the Society with whose
philosophical views I had, on the whole, more sympathy; but