"Unknowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of the ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... agency. Nothing of the kind is implied here. The word "accident" and the like is used in these pages simply to express the effect of unknown or unnoted causes, without the slightest implication that they are unknowable. In most cases their neglect has been partly due to their individual insignificance, though their combined effect may be very powerful when a multitude work in the same direction. Moreover, a trifling pressure at the right spot suffices to release ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... the birds had ceased their noises, and the moment of rest had come. But this rest seemed to come from an ineffable sweetness, and all nature seemed to meditate. Only the great expanse of heaven seemed to smile, and somewhere, high in the unknowable depths of its blue, the great and beneficent God was glad with the gladness of the fields, the woods, the ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... relations, and radically incapable of telling us the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess itself ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... she is in herself unknowable. Aristotle teaches: there is nothing in the intellect which hath not first been in the senses, and the senses cannot penetrate beyond experience. But what the mind cannot grasp directly it may come to comprehend by ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the other at rest, we say, and gives it nearly all its energy. But we have no right to call one ball at rest and we can not say (as anything absolute) which of the balls has lost and which has gained energy. If there is such a thing as absolute energy of motion it is something entirely unknowable to us. Take the solar system, supposed isolated. We may take as our origin of coordinates the center of gravity of the system. Or we may take an origin with respect to which the center of gravity of the solar system has any (constant) velocity. The kinetic ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Wallace has stated almost exactly the same thing, and that there are not a few modern preachers of the doctrine of a "universe of mind-stuff." The hypothesis is "unthinkable." But the most serious thinker will agree with the Buddhist assertion that the relation of all phenomena to the unknowable is merely that of waves to sea. "Every [219] feeling and thought being but transitory," says Mr. Spencer, "an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being but transitory,—nay, the objects amid which life is passed, though less transitory, being severally ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... we do; and calling it psionics or practical magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any human gunner ever be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring me to the very middle of my guts. Your oath, Skipper, was for the good ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... power we infer that He is almighty. It is first of all a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "unknowable" to us ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... mind of India. It is too severe and prosaic in its character. The mind of India delights in mystical elaborations and in the multiplication of fanciful incarnations and other divine manifestations. The Allah of Islam is almost as remote and as unknowable a deity as is the Brahm of the Vedantist. But in the absence of a personal god the Vedantist and Hindus in general have built up a system of numberless incarnations which "play" upon the imagination of the votaries ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the other factors of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and licensed rogues that ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... impression compared with the mystery that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... mysterious influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... over of an evening, accompanied by Roscoe, to sit in the veranda, talk, smoke, and listen, until his companions began to discuss such abstract questions as, "What is the real driving force of life?" or to argue on the philosophy of Buddhism, or Herbert Spencer's "Descriptive Sociology" and the "Unknowable." ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... untiringly down to the ultimate truth accessible, "allowing ourselves to pass over nothing without seeking its reason, and habitually following up every response with another question, until we come to the granite wall of the Unknowable." Above all we need an ardent and interested sympathy, for "we penetrate farther into the secret of things by the heart than by the reason," as Toussenel has said; and "it is only by intuition that we can ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call by the ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... he gets all mixed up and concludes that he never can know anything about it at all, and the dear old "one," that came to him at first as such a simple thing, is so tangled up with all creation that he gives it up as an entirely unknown and unknowable quantity, and begins to guess at it and when he comes to that point, look out! He has taken the first step in recklessness, and has begun his ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... We should rather think of it as a revelation and an invitation than as a mere command. For what is it but the declaration that at the centre of things is throned, not a rabble of godlings, nor a stony impersonal somewhat, nor a hypothetical unknowable entity, nor a shadowy abstraction, but a living Person, who can say 'Me,' and whom we can call on as 'Thou,' and be sure that He hears? No accumulation of finite excellences, however fair, can satisfy the imagination, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... while it lasts we wander far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and shamanistic fraud has been slow ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to accept it on the faith ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... for they were not Jews, but strove, as it is my custom, to be all things to all men. The Jews require a miracle, the Greeks demand reason, and therefore I asked them why they set up altars to the unknowable God. And they said: Paul, thou readest our language as badly as thou speakest it; we have inscriptions "to unknown gods" but not to the unknowable God. Didst go to school at Tarsus, yet canst not tell the plural from the singular? To which I answered: then you are so religious-minded ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... is a vague fear which springs from an unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable, unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of mind over soul, power of calm ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... entrusted by the Founder with miraculous power. He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is no necessary connection between religion and morality. The one is an attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and proved by his own experience. So far as the conduct of life goes, the morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Perhaps there exist a few scholars who can tell us how far Emerson understood or misunderstood Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we need not be disturbed for his learning. It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that there ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... might be called theology, and not legitimate theology even, but supra-theological—for all sane theology admits that man cannot know God. It is a desperate, insane suggestion that we must know the unknowable, and that if we cannot do that we can have no philosophy. Of course men who think this way know nothing of philosophy, and are beyond the reach ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... had not speculative genius. That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says. We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, and embraced it all. Nothing of that mind was lost ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... [Footnote: See chapter xxvi, Sec 123, note.] But he may feel much as men generally feel toward God, when he contemplates his "Conscious Principle," or his "Idea," or the "Substance" which he conceives as the identity of thought and extension, or, for that matter, "Mind-Stuff" or the "Unknowable." That other men may not see that he has anything in particular to be inspired about, or that he can hope for anything in particular for himself or for other men, does not rob him of his inspiration, and that may affect ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... whether, as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his conception of these supernatural personages from his prior belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Mueller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... man; but it tells us, as plainly, that, without a fiction of resemblance, the proper relation between Creator and creature, between God and man, is unattainable.[121] If one exists, for whom the fiction or fancy has been converted into fact—for whom the Unknowable has proved itself to contain the Knowable: the ball of fire to hold within it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the magnitude, not scorn for the extravagance, of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... enlisted men the exponents of the old spirit of sloth, indifference, and laxity were weeded out as fast as their terms of service expired, and their places filled from the same sources whence the company officers were drawn. Colonel Broadcastle was a diplomat as well as a disciplinarian. By some unknowable system of suggestion and example it came, little by little, to be regarded in Kenton City as "the thing" to belong to the Ninth. Before the capital was aware of the transformation, every company roster read 103, the field and staff had been reorganized and perfected, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ceremonies. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... you mean by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife. Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: "There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of a personal God. All the students were required to conduct chapel prayers in turn. Those who did not believe in a personal God explained that they were pronouncing an apostrophe to the great impersonal and unknowable force working in the universe. I had read Channing, Clark, Hale, Emerson, and other conservative Unitarians, and found much food for my soul, but I discovered that these were considered old "fogies" and back numbers by most of the ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... however, being to us nothing but either that which causes, or that which is conscious of, phenomena; and the same being true, mutatis mutandis, of attributes; no assertion can be made, at least with a meaning, concerning these unknown and unknowable entities, except in virtue of the Phenomena by which alone they manifest themselves to our faculties. When we say Socrates was contemporary with the Peloponnesian war, the foundation of this assertion, as of all assertions concerning substances, is an assertion concerning the phenomena which they ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a century still finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... pure reasoning that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death, and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact, finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and guessable—in the things he cannot explain, where certain conclusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor successfully denied, and where, by consequence, he may console himself, if he wish, with his side of the guess; and I shall feel a keen sense of sorrow at his inability to hold ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... too exhausted to argue the point any more. He ran into the same stone wall with all the Pyrrans. Theirs was a logic of the moment. The past and the future unchangeable, unknowable—and uninteresting. "How is the perimeter battle going?" he asked, wanting to ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... hatred. Purcell, who was forty-five years old and a bachelor, liked his spacemen tough, yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable at every step of the way, ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... be, is blasphemy.' The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar [Greek: Agnosto Theo]—'To the unknown and unknowable God.'" A little later (p. 20) he says: "We should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he 'created in the image of God.' It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... smouldering in the hearts of us all, no matter how poor and sorrowful our beginnings. As we read, how the old memories come back to us! Old hopes, rosy with the expectation of the indefinite and unknowable. Old misgivings and fears; old rompings and holidays and precious idle hours. We know them all, and we know how true they are. We remember in our own case the very hour and day, and how it all happened and why, and what came of it,—joys and sorrows as real ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... well out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... opponent resumes. The attributes, however, of not being seen, &c., belong also to the pradhana assumed by the Sa@nkhya-sm/ri/ti, which is acknowledged to be devoid of form and other sensible qualities. For their Sm/ri/ti says, 'Undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep' (Manu I, 5). To this pradhana also the attribute of rulership belongs, as it is the cause of all effects. Therefore the internal ruler may be understood to denote the pradhana. The pradhana has, indeed, been set aside already by the Sutra I, 1, 5, but we bring it forward ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... who built the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't answer back as you would, ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... you to be the next Governor," I said quickly. "And you will be, too," I added, again using that queer place in my brain that seems to know perfectly unknowable things and that only works in matters that ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... it is given unto you. My friends and brethren, accept it as Zanoni's last work on earth—his legacy to you, and may the spirit of the All-Father-Mother, the ineffable spirit of Life, Light, and Love,—the Unknowable, whom men call God, rest upon you and be with you ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... his "First Principles of Philosophy," (page 217): "Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, {129} emotion, thought: these, in their turns, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... my course of reading and the current of my thoughts, my mind was restored to its normal condition. I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions; and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to find it utterly impossible to achieve this. Mere faith by no means fulfilled my requirements. God, then, remained inaccessible—the mind fell back from every attempt to reach Him. He was unknowable, yet not unthinkable—that is to say, He was not unthinkable as Being, but only in particularisation and in realisation. I could know Him to Be; but in that alone where was any consolation?—I found it totally inadequate. It was some form of personal Contact that was needed; ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... sentiment regarding the problem that troubles all deep thinkers. Perhaps few of us could have remained satisfied with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some chance to ask him directly, "But how do you feel in regard to the prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional question he has answered ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... to a choice between caramels or chocolates. Even then I still stood firm for the caramel, there bein' no way of makin' sure what I'd get inside the chocolate. I warn't willin' to go it blind, I told Dave. A chocolate's a sort of unknowable thing, ain't it? There's no fathomin' it at sight. After you've got it you may be pleased to death with what's inside it an' then again you may not. So we settled mostly on caramels for Katie. I said to Dave comin' home it was lucky ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... dear Mr. Holcroft," said C——, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, "you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl, about fifteen, that I met with in the Hartz forest in Germany—and who one day, as I was reading the Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable, the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, What, you read Kant? Why, I that am a German born, don't understand him!" This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out in no measured ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... as Plato says, a divine sort of experience, some strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily unknowable. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... consciousness: the ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist! Beautiful to the poet's vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... physiology. Herbert Spencer constructed a general system of philosophy on the basis of the theory of evolution. He holds that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, which are the manifestation in our consciousness of things which in themselves are unknown; and that behind and below all is "the Unknowable,"—an inscrutable force, out of which the universe of matter and mind is developed, and which gives ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum, the absolute maximum ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... inclined to talk loudly of its victories. Every great physician admits that a good deal of his science is psychological; and psychology deals with the unknown, or with what is only partially knowable. A mathematician may smile and answer that 'infinity' is much more than partially 'unknowable,' but that, by using it, the differential calculus gives results of most amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made to understand ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... the seventeen years since aeroplanes first took the air, seen them grow from tentative experimental structures of unknown and unknowable performance to highly scientific products, of which not only the performances (in speed, load-carrying capacity, and climb) are known, but of which the precise strength and degree of stability can be forecast with some accuracy on the drawing board. For the rest, with the future lies—apart ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... goes on his way unmoved. And why shouldn't he? He may be, and generally is, sadly in need of a woman friend, "some one to share his joys and sorrows with", but because he knows few women is no reason why he should stand afar off and adore the unknowable. "Friendly like" is what appeals to us all; and the bush-folk are only men, not monstrosities—rough, untutored men for the most part. The difficult part to understand is how any woman can choose to stand aloof and freeze, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the pathway of the winds. Charles Knollys was gone, utterly gone; no more to be met with by his girl-wife, save as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she resolved to go—to go home. Her strength now gave way; and when her aunt left she had with her but the ghost of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... 'Which is the easier, the more probable, the more reasonable theory—that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid—a mysterious Unknown and Unknowable—which is neither mind nor matter?' For my own part, I see no reason to suppose that our inability to think of anything which is neither matter nor mind but quite unlike either is a mere imperfection of human thought. It seems more reasonable to assume that our inability to think of ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "something far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... inviting, Maritza concluded that they were nearing the end of the journey. For a moment on entering the defile her heart sank within her. It was like leaving the open world and the sunlight to creep into the dark unknowable, where some horrible fate might await her. Would she ever step freely into the open light of day again? Her thoughts sped backward to the tower standing above the pass and to the man she had left there. Which road ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... can't attain to proved certainties in this life—at least, you can't at present. I don't say that there are not certainties—indeed, I think that it is all certainty, and that we mustn't confuse the unknown with the unknowable. As you go on, if you are fair-minded and sympathetic, you will get intuitions; you will discover gradually exactly what you are worth, and what you can do, and how you can do it best. But don't expect to know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful temptation ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... precious stones. This is quite in keeping with the thoroughly sane outlook upon life that constituted the strong foundation of his incomparable mind. Not but that, like every true poet, the sense of mystery, and even the vague impression of the existence of occult powers, of the "Unknowable" in Nature, was strongly developed, but this is always in a broad and earnest spirit, far removed from all ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... consisted of several ships and about three hundred men. That John and Sebastian Cabot sailed on this voyage. When it returned is not known. From the time of sailing of this expedition John Cabot vanishes into the unknowable, and from thenceforth Sebastian alone appears ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... therefore, when she came into relation with a soul such as Wingfold, a soul so much more developed than herself, so much farther advanced in the knowledge of realities as having come through difficulties unknown and indeed at present unknowable to Barbara, she met one of her own house, and her life was fed from his, and began to grow faster. For he taught her to know the eternal man who bore witness to his father in the face of his perverse children, to know that his heart was the heart of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... eyes—eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the—face—bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... here a number of ideas foreign to Aristotle, which are found first in Philo the Jew and appear later in medival philosophy. Thus God as a Being absolutely unknowable, of whom negations alone are true just because he is the acme of perfection and bears no analogy to the imperfect things of our world; matter in our world as the origin of evil, and the existence of matter in the intelligible world—all these ideas ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... beware, Lest in the strong name of "reality" You mock yourselves anew with shapes of air, Lest it be you, agnostics, who re-write The fettering creeds of night, Affirm you know your own Unknowable, And lock the winged soul in a new hell; Lest it be you, lip-worshippers of Truth, Who break the heart of youth; Lest it be you, the realists, who fight With shadows, and forget your own pure light; Lest it be you who, with a ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... rendered to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the "Unknowable," however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader's attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man's austere face, the howl of journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,—all these and much more sent messages into the man's unyielding ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... uncertain event cannot make it sufficiently definite and ascertainable. 'Willfully' doing something that is forbidden, when that something is not sufficiently defined according to the general conceptions of requisite certainty in our criminal law, is not rendered sufficiently definite by that unknowable having been done 'willfully.' It is true also of a statute that it cannot lift itself up by its bootstraps."[55] In Williams v. United States,[56] however, it was held by a sharply divided Court that Sec. 20 did not err for vagueness where the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... time she drew a deep, tremulous breath. As he turned, her eyes met his. In their shadowy depths, still troubled by the mystery of the unknowable, he read her very soul—the soul ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... too, they talked of—strange speculations, impossible to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe, ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... how to look for the past or future scene; while, to the ordinary observer, the scene progresses in sequence, the present being followed by something else which is at this moment "in the future," and therefore, unknowable. To the senses of the ordinary observer only the present is in existence; while, in fact, the "future" is equally truly in existence at the same time, although not evident to the senses of the observer. Think over this a little, and let the idea sink into your mind—it may help you to understand ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... world of snow, and the very solitude had a fascination. It is good sometimes for the spirit to be alone; strange vague thoughts, half memories, half imaginings, fill the brain like a full high tide; strong impressions, unfelt and unknowable in the distraction of human company, force themselves silently yet persistently upon us; the corporal and the tangible lose their hard outlines and begin to merge into the in visible—in such moments the soul grows. It is perhaps one of the disadvantages ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... to be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs the ultimate and antecedent causation the Unknowable. The philosophy of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or derided by ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... near the Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86] The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inflicts horrible cruelty is too certain, and those to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for the sake of leniency in a given case. A great enemy to indifference, a great friend to indulgence, said Turgot of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Eclectic Theosophy was that of a single Supreme Essence, Unknown and Unknowable; for "how could one know the knower?" as inquires Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Their system was characterized by three distinct features, the theory of the above-named Essence: the doctrine of the human soul; an emanation from the latter, hence of the same nature; ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... he replied. 'An angel is not above being taught even by a creature of earth. And in Fan there is one thing lacking, angel though she be, and this I shall point out to her. I can find no mysticism in her: what she knows she knows, and with the unknowable, which may yet be known, she concerns herself not. Who shall say of the seed I scatter that it will not germinate in this fair garden without weeds and tares, and strike root and blossom at last? For why should she not be ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... that perhaps it was a long time since the girl had sat in a chair like that. If she had had a chance, when things were going badly, to sit in such a chair and rest, might the river have seemed a less desirable place? She had always supposed it was big things—queer, abstract, unknowable things like forces and traits that made life and death. Did ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... men, would have been much surprised to learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable—without form or attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... recognise Billy Burr? And which was Dickie Lowe? Ah! those two must be the golden-haired twins about whom Mr. Owen had told her and Charlie three years ago, now no longer the foremost in the little procession, but as unknowable apart as ever, as they preceded the tenors. And there, behind all, was Mr. Owen's familiar face! Denys knelt with all the congregation, waiting and longing to hear his deep, strong voice in the collects which ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... dead; children had played, streams murmured over pebbles, the wayfarer had lifted up hot dust in the highroad,—but he had been dead. And now he is again among them,—touches them,—looks at them,—looks at them! and through the black discs of his pupils, as through darkened glass, stares the unknowable Yonder. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale. It is not engaged in decking out unknowable entities with arbitrary and fantastic properties. What then is it that science is doing, granting that it is effecting something of importance? My answer is that it is determining the character of things known, namely the character ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... makes feeling the basis of all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of learning and understanding facts; it consists in the slow collection of a quantity of details and their condensation into portable and incontrovertible formulae. History, which is more encumbered with details than any other science, has the choice between two alternatives: to be complete and unknowable, or to be knowable and incomplete. All the other sciences have chosen the second alternative; they abridge and they condense, preferring to take the risk of mutilating and arbitrarily combining the facts to the certainty of being unable either to understand or communicate them. Scholars ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... the sole refuge of the three worlds. Incapable of being vanquished, he is the protector of the universe, and abode (the necessity of) birth, decay, and death. The Soul of knowledge, incapable of being compassed by knowledge, and the highest of all knowledge he is unknowable. Through grace, he giveth unto his worshippers the boons they desire. That Lord hath for his companions celestial beings of diverse forms, some of whom are dwarfs, some having matted locks, some with bald heads, some with short necks, some with large stomachs, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... then at a flash, the doom, the quake, the breaking down of outline, the caving in of walls, followed by the sickening collapse in which life, wealth, and innumerable beating human hearts went down into the unseen and unknowable. He saw and he heard, but his eyes clung to but one point, his ears listened for but one cry. There at the extremity of a cornice, clinging to a bending beam, was the figure again—the woman of the ice-floe and the desert. She seemed nearer now. He could see the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Twiggs had come riding like the devil's imps with some new warning from Cynthia. How could such planning fail? And failed it had not but for the honour of this gentleman, or perhaps some design of the Unknowable behind the machinery of ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!' What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... No More Gently Lead Me, Star Divine Dying Hymn In Mortem Meditare Deprive This Strange and Complex World The Legend of St. Regimund As the Indian The Fragrant Perfume of the Flowers An Answer Fame The First Storm Thoughts From a Saxon Legend Christmas Chimes The Unknowable The Suicide I Think When I Stand in the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... knew the nature of the Knowable and the Unknowable, the Possible and the Impossible, the cause of Merit and Demerit; he could read the thoughts of all beings; he knew the laws of Nature, the illusions of the senses and the means to suppress desires; ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... is only the Unknowable, the rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in "Abred," passing into the different kingdoms; "Amwn" is the state through which beings pass only once, which means that the "I," when once gained, continues for ever. "Gwynvyd" is the world of perfect and ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... technical words, etc., and the worst punishment should any link in the composite chain give way. And then—taking success for granted—on the top of all this—comes the Turk; "unspeakable" he used to be, "unknowable" now. But we shall give him a startler too. If only our plans come off the Turk won't have time to turn; much less to bring into play all the clever moves foreseen for him by some whose stomachs for the fight have been satisfied by ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the "Positivists", ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... by Love and emptied by Logic. "The external world," says the Materialist—"Does not exist," says the Idealist. "'Tis immaterial if it does or not," says the Hermit. And what if the three are wrong? The Universe, knowable and unknowable, will it be affected a whit by it? If the German Professor's Chair of Logic and Philosophy were set up in the Hermitage, would anything be gained or lost? Let the I deny the stars, and they will nevertheless roll in silence ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to isolate the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly pledged ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Periodicity is necessary to the measurement of Time. It is by means, and only by means, of periodic pulsative movements that we ever do or can measure Time. Now, apart from some sort of measurement Time would be unknowable. A time which was neither long nor short would be meaningless. The idea of unquantified Time cannot be conceived or apprehended. Time to ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply this now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually is such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so much as is God. Which thought? Which God?—are questions that have to be answered by bringing in again ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of the Devil to forswear the study of history altogether as the pursuit of the Unknowable. 'How is it possible,' he whispers in our ear, as we stand gloomily regarding the portly calf-bound volumes without which no gentleman's library is complete, 'how is it possible to suppose that you have there, on your shelves— the actual facts of history—a true record of what men, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... details and of apparently dogmatic formulae, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on evolution in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... destiny marked out before it. Concentrated thought, deep emotion and lofty purpose, in view of these objects, is supremely profitable. But what is there left worthy of thought for the Vedantist Yogi when the Divine Being is the unknowable and the Yogi himself the deluded child of (Maya) illusion and (avidya) ignorance—those twin enemies to all true and worthy knowledge? It cannot be elevating to detach the mind from things worldly ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie between us and it hide their secret well, and few or no stray beams ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... learned world followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... eccentric creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... sighed in sympathy with the unknown, and, judging by his niece's expression, the unknowable. He rearranged the teacups, and, going to the kitchen, returned in a few minutes ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs |
