Mosque, the great University of Mahommedanism, in Cairo, in
ignorance of the fact that I was unprovided with proper authority. A
swarm of angry under-graduates, as I suppose I ought to call them, came
buzzing about me and my guide; and if I had known Arabic, I suspect that
"dog of an infidel" would have been by no means the most "unpleasant" of
the epithets showered upon me, before I could explain and apologise for
the mistake. If I had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that
occasion, the undiscriminative followers of the Prophet would, I am
afraid, have made no difference between us; not even if they had known
that he was the head of an orthodox Christian seminary. And I have not
the smallest doubt that even one of the learned mollahs, if his grave
courtesy would have permitted him to say anything offensive to men of
another mode of belief, would have told us that he wondered we did not
find it "very unpleasant" to disbelieve in the Prophet of Islam.

From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that Dr.
Wace's account of the origin of the name of "Agnostic" is quite wrong.
Indeed, I am bound to add that very slight effort to discover the truth
would have convinced him that, as a matter of fact, the term arose
otherwise. I am loath to go over an old story once more; but more than
one object which I have in view will be served by telling it a little
more fully than it has yet been told.

Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education
has been interrupted, and who intellectually was left, for some years,
altogether to his own devices. At that time I was a voracious and
omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well
endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject,
which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the
books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry,
which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind.
One was Guizot's "History of Civilisation, the other was Sir William
Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came
upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the _Edinburgh Review_. The latter
was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have
understood a great deal of it;[37] nevertheless I devoured it with
avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, on even
the most solemn and important of questions, m