What did Huxley mean by the following statement, "follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration."?
To my understanding, Huxley wanted agnostics to stand out as people who did not deviate from the use of reason and science when establishing a fact or view of something. This of course would mean that he noticed many others, religionists and non-religionists alike, that deviated from reason and science so I'll answer the question in that context.
I've identified at least 3 ways that people can deviate from reason:
1. There are those who don't rely on reason at all
2. There are those who use reason selectively up to a point and perhaps they don't even care about if it can be used further
3. Those that try to apply reason and science beyond their limits or becoming overconfident and/or dogmatic.
The first instance is easy to identify, especially among religionists. Religionists tend to accept the truth of their religions based on faith or often vague experiences of the divine. This is not to say that the religionists claims are false, since even faith or unscientific claims can turn out to be true, but rather it's to highlight the fact that many of them tend to accept claims without KNOWING or verifying that they are indeed true.
The second instance involves those who use reason selectively or only when it benefits their view. One common group that people accuse of doing this are creationists, but to that I'll also add politicians, and anyone else that aren't truly committed to placing logic and evidence over their opinions. People who usually resort to using science and reason selectively are those that
want their view to be true no matter what. They are probably well aware that their views can't be proven or that some of it is even disproven, but yet they still want to hang on to it perhaps because they don't like the truth, or they don't want to be shown wrong, or for whatever personal reason.
The last scenario is very relevant to Huxley because he talked about it the most when it came to the reason he developed agnosticism. His goal was for it to be a standard against dogmatism. In the case of atheists, dogmatism may come about when there is overconfidence in science or a set of scientific findings and that gets some thinking that it can be applied everywhere, like towards history, towards metaphysical matters, etc. It's of course would be nice if we were able to have scientific certainty of everything, but trying to use science in areas where it can't be used is an abuse of it. When it comes to scientific findings, some may assign unwarranted weight to materialism, thinking that science has been able to explain so much within that paradigm, that everything else can and will be explained as such. Now of course, religionists can be very dogmatic, but their dogmatism tends to differ from atheists when it comes to the type of beliefs that they try to pass off as knowledge. Religionists are willing to put full confidence (I consider that unwarranted confidence) in faith (their religious doctrine) and anecdotal experiences, whereas atheists at least put confidence in ideas that are closer to science.
