"Agnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Liberal. Old prejudices about "this England," old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, we might find in him a more ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Welsford, Mithridates Minor, p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his time, see Monk's Life of Bentley, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most winning personality, which his strong, gentle ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... half-educated people will doubtless be influenced for some time to come by Mah[a]tmaism and Yogism, just as they are moved by native seance-spirits and mesmerism. Blavatskyism (which represents no phase of Buddhism) will always find disciples among the ignorant classes, especially in an agnostic or atheistic environment, so that one should attribute the mental attitude of such minds to their lack of culture rather than to India; for if Mah[a]tmaism had not been discovered, they would still profess it under another name. Buddhism, too, apart from Hartmann, may be said to have some ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... joke. I merely meant that I have no right whatever to argue with anyone who has given serious attention to such things. They are altogether beyond my sphere. I was born an agnostic, and no subtlety of demonstration could incline me for a moment to theological views; my intellect refuses to admit a single preliminary of such arguments. You astonish me, and that's all I am ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the sense that it has long ceased to furnish party names. It sprang from permanent tendencies of human nature, and raised questions whose interest can never perish. As long as the Agnostic and the Evolutionist are with us, the old battlefields of Athanasius will not be left to silence. Moreover, no writer more directly joins the new world of Teutonic Christianity with the old of Greek and Roman heathenism. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... But agnostic man labors in vain. He cannot escape the mysteries which surround him on every hand, like a gulf in which reason is inevitably lost so soon as it ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... difficult to define. His note-book is filled with hesitations; materialism had its allurements, so also had pantheism; the advantages of the Pyrrhonic suspension of judgment were clear to him too; according to the frame of mind in which he wrote, you might fancy him an agnostic, again an akosmist, sometimes both, but always the ethical result ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... asked to believe that a man who could express himself in this way and show this courage was a doubter, a skeptic, an unbeliever, an agnostic, an infidel. "Christ is God." This was Lincoln's faith in 1860, found in a letter addressed to ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Sweet is a thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the tradition of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... tempted to omit altogether the next book which I wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough of ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a little ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the doctor iterated. "Doubts are generally more or less digestive in their origin. Caviar would have made a total agnostic of Saint John himself, and Saint Luke would have been the first one to tell him so, and order a blue pill." As he spoke, he gazed at Brenton critically. "You're running down, man, for a fact. Is this thing ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and denied the possibility of even the Socratic minimum of certainty: "I cannot know even whether I know or not.'' Thus from the dogmatism of the master the Academy plunged into the extremes of agnostic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the disappearance of Christianity; that a sort of enlightened epicureanism, a prudent animalism, would sway the greater part of mankind; in a word, that we should be "whited sepulchres," fair to look on without, but "inside full of dead men's bones, and all filthiness". The agnostic was no less certain that morality, which had outgrown the cumbrous garments manufactured by theology, would get on equally well in the handy raiment provided by science. The Rev. Dr. Martineau, speaking as a theistic philosopher, accurately delineated the boundaries of religion ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... certain extent. And I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he's in prison under some false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic. The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven't any good writers any more. I'm sick ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... learning of the schools behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though he had more than once suspected it when he heard him playing sacred music ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... to be our Father. Then he must know of the great unknown the negative aspects so minutely as to be sure that no Fatherhood is in the great unknown. Then he knows the great unknown much better than he is willing to admit, better than an agnostic ought. ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... School; Bentham is known as the advocate of utilitarianism; Mill, an exponent of the traditional empiricism of English thinking, develops the theory of induction and the principle of utility; Spencer combines an agnostic doctrine of the absolute and thoroughgoing evolution in the phenomenal world into a comprehensive philosophical system.[2] In recent years there has been a reaction against empirical doctrines on the basis of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian principles. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Historical Society of Southern California; author of a History of Los Angeles City, and another of Los Angeles County; and another of San Diego County, and one in MSS of Orange County; also a work on State Division (in MSS) engaged in oil and mining business; agnostic in religion; independent in ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
... great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... critics of the manner in which the trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Mrs. Dr. dear; he didn't know the meaning of the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... all, your physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to be literally the voice ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... 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, powers which are forever at work, and ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Actus purus who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful, with an "Eternal that makes for righteousness." In the presence of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the Begriff of Providence, our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed by the perception of a Causa Causans (a misnomer), and to that intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of distinct statement but incapable of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Orthodox and agnostic are as the poles asunder, yet they could not but both agree with Barty Josselin, who so cleverly extended a hand to each, and acted ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... tells you that woman is independent, self-sufficing. Your instincts cry feebly for passion, that savage outlaw which still lies in wait for the modern woman, to carry her whither she would not. Hence your lapse from strict agnostic morality into matrimony, bondage, subjection, and ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... 'When ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived her who ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... game—the Persian and Afghan intrigues! You see, I am awaiting some ripening affairs in the F. O. I was called back on account of my familiarity with the Pamirs, and there's a good bit of Blue Book work that my knowledge of Penj Deh, and the whole Himalayan line has helped out." The captain was a bit agnostic now. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... authority or in the Bible, as far as human knowledge could lead him. We learn this from the concluding words of his chapter on religion: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... not believe it, even from you. I had an argument with young O'Connor, half-fun and half-earnest. He was an Agnostic, while I profess to be a Christian of no denomination—just a Christian. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. They are entirely consistent, therefore, when they arrive ultimately at the agnostic position, and contend that our knowledge must necessarily be confined to the world of experience, and that nothing can be known of the world beyond. But they are fundamentally wrong in overestimating the place of the sense organs, and forgetting that while these have a part to play in ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand —they are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... but he had become a complete agnostic for some years. During the last few weeks of his life—when he had to keep his bed—Mr Dale was always going up there, and having long arguments and discussions with him; but I don't suppose it did much good: it only worried him very ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... after she had come to call him by that name, "let me give you a caution. The most fanatical belief is less evil than dogmatic denial. If you are really the agnostic you claim to be, your very confession that the truth is too great for human grasp binds you to respect ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... corner of your mind, and learn how to control it and your sense perceptions. Then you will no longer mistrust your results as possibly imperfect, but you will have attained to some closer contact with Truth." To both the Agnostic and the indifferent, the study of Theosophy will bring a consciousness of the responsibility towards others, which is the basis of our universal brotherhood. It will tend to remove the personal element which has hitherto done so much to cloud and obscure one's investigations; ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly, three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional faith-holding Christianity ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after ten thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was. On Monday Penrod was virtually an agnostic. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... that you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.' . . . And do you think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that appeal? A few of us agnostics, perhaps. But we are human souls, after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it. We should be tempted—sorely tempted—I don't ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... orthodoxy; and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... has here been given deserve a place of honor in the comments to Suetonius' "Lives of the Emperors." The exploration of underground Rome must be greeted with pleasure, not only by the pious believers in Christ and his martyrs, but also by agnostic students of classical history. A tombstone, which on one side is inscribed with the records of the victories gained by the imperial legions, on the other with the simple and humble name of a Christian who has given his life for his faith, is a monument worthy ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... I gravely doubt whether you will ever get any large, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless they are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who owe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic missionary societies or ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Infidel, The Millerites, The Agnostic, The Mormons, The Baptist, The Laurence Oliphant The Methodist, Harrisites, The Catholic, and the other The Grand Lama's people, 115 Christian sects, the The Monarchists, Presbyterian excepted, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan sects, The Democrats, The Buddhist, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to believe literally in the devil, or in devils—concerning whose existence many persons will prefer to remain agnostic—in order to find in the figure of the devil, as he appears in Biblical and other literature, a convenient personification of certain forms of evil. There is an atmosphere of evil about us, a Kingdom of Evil, over against the Kingdom ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has lost the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... I may not be misunderstood, I would say that the doctrine of Duty agrees perfectly with every form of religion—a man may be Roman Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Agnostic, or what he will; and, if a form aids him in the least to be sincerely honest, it would be a pity for him to be without it. Truly there are degrees in forms, and where I live in Italy I am sorry to see so many abuses or errors ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... maintain the thesis that fashion has a great deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic; perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly as there are tides in the fashion of dress. There was a Weismann tide, now nearly ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... expressed her great surprise that so secret and private a matter should have been correctly stated. Mrs. Nicol then explained that she and her husband, both connected with journalism and both absolutely agnostic, had discovered that she had the power of automatic writing. That while, using this power she had received communications purporting to come from Fred Bridger whom they had known in life, and that upon ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stories about their neighbour. "He was a miser—a recluse—a misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end to Olivia's quaint surmises, but she could only be certain of two facts—that the mysterious Mr. Gaythorne was methodical by nature, and whatever might be the weather always took his exercise at the same ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... visitor] about the religious views of Mark Pattison and Dean Stanley. He knew both of them, and quite confirms what I had heard before, that they were no more believers than Renan. Pattison he describes as a conservative agnostic or pantheist, meaning by 'conservative' a man who thought it better to preserve old forms. I recollect that Appleton told me when he was here that there was not the slightest obligation on a clergyman of the Church of England to believe in the divinity of Christ, and that many clergymen in ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... never even hints a doubt as to the veracity and sincerity of Socrates. He is quite sure that Socrates was fully persuaded of the reality of his attendant genius, and favours the view that this belief may have been well founded. He takes an agnostic position,[234] confining his positive statement to an assertion of his own inability to realize the presence of any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the De Subtilitate he tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Scherzi. There is the same "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... would champion their right to be heard sooner than we would our own, on the principle that it is our duty to be just to others before we are generous to ourselves, or those of our own following. But our Agnostic friends should remember that when they charge us with being "dogmatic in science," the charge should be made good from a scientific stand-point, and not merely by the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... religion. I always felt that answer would have delighted Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist or ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of philosophy founded by Pyrrho (4th contury B.C.). He advocated "suspension of judgment," and taught the relativity of knowledge and impossibility of proof. The school is not unlike the Agnostic school. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... reformer—and were I with my present knowledge still an ingenuous youth in the fulness of strength with my life before me I do not know that I would not be a Social reformer—I would profess myself a Social agnostic, and prosecute my mission by the methods of the opportunist. I would endeavor to direct the Social ax to the most obvious and obtrusive roots of the Social evil, and having removed them and watched the result, would ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... They think, but they do not know," rejoined this Hyperborean agnostic, as positively and as ignorantly as if he had ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... possible? And I so filled with tenderness and interest! Can it be, dear Somerset, that you are under the empire of these outworn scruples? or that you judge a patriot by the morality of the religious tract? I thought you were a good agnostic." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... far as my philosophy went our separation was eternal, I nevertheless hoped that her spirit was with us at that moment, I did not know it—I desired it. In the sense which would have made belief a solace and relief, I was agnostic. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... glory, the culmination of everything that is great and supreme in manhood. In France, man now knows himself to be the only God; England—good, slow-pacing England—is approaching France in intelligence by degrees, and I rejoice to see that it is possible for a newspaper like the Agnostic to exist in London. Only the other day that excellent journal was discussing the possibility of teaching monkeys to read, and a witty writer, who adopts the nom de plume of 'Saladin,' very cleverly remarked 'that supposing monkeys were able to read the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... writes:] "Do you remember me well?... I had a sad life in many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what real happiness was until I came here.... I was an unbeliever, in fact almost an agnostic when I left my body, but when I awoke and found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is, my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no struggling to hold on to the material body, I found it had all been a dream...." R.H.: "That was your first ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... have met him several times at Benares, and also at Buddh Gaya, to interrogate him on releegious points and devil-worship. He is pure agnostic—same as me.' ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of a dressmaker fresh from ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... talk and in soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue; chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... no; the author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand him, almost as greatly ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... was good in its way or according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule Christianity because the tale of Balaam's ass was incredible. Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such preaching against "infidels" seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the track. I remember ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... opposition to science, for it assumed its position in an age of dense ignorance, and claimed too much infallibility to admit of enlightenment. Nevertheless, the Church feels the spirit of the age and slowly moves. At the present time it is being slowly permeated by the modern spirit of agnostic scepticism, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... after its defeat at the polls. Churchill roused the Conservatives and gave them a fighting issue, by putting himself at the head of the resistance to Mr Bradlaugh, the member for Northampton, who, though an avowed atheist or agnostic, was prepared to take the parliamentary oath. Sir Stafford Northcote, the Conservative leader in the Lower House, was forced to take a strong line on this difficult question by the energy of the fourth party, who in this case clearly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... a copy of Illustrated England on my table. I am sufficiently broad-minded to believe that it is better to be a good Protestant than a bad Catholic; but Mr. Walter Poole is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but an agnostic, which is only a polite word for an atheist. Week in and week out you will hear every argument that may be used against our holy religion. It is true that you have the advantage of being born a Catholic, and were well instructed in your religion; and no doubt you will ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... wrote to him once in great perplexity about the following problem: as to whether, taking as he did, a purely agnostic view of life, he should continue to receive the Communion with his parents when at home; as to whether it was not a base concession to his own weakness; as to whether he should not stand ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come to self-consciousness. But it is so coming, and this present book is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic cults ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... to his room, and sat there and waited and watched. His thoughts were far from enviable. He was in the mood of a man who, from being an utter sceptic, or at least Agnostic, is suddenly shaken up into a recognition of something supernatural, and does not as yet know how to make the other fashions of his life fit in with this new revelation. Selfish as he was, he would not have put off taking action on the warning he had received from the Foreign ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... my father's life," the soft voice went on, speaking as if I had not interrupted him, "but nobody knows the tragedy. Love for my mother came upon him like an arrow shot out of ambush, and he married into a worldly, pleasure-loving, agnostic circle of people who all adored and flattered him until he—he became confused and doubting. He had transgressed the law: 'yoke not yourselves with unbelievers,' and he suffered. She never understood. It killed him, and when he had been dead nearly twenty years I found ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... that it is forty or fifty double- column pages of pirated English fiction. Readers of the "New York Ledger" suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic analysis of human character and motives, with an agnostic bias on the analyst's part. Schoolboys are under the impression that it is a tale of Western chivalry and Indian outrage—price, ten cents. Most of us agree in the belief that it should contain a brace or two of lovers, a suspense, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling—then in his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... to say about Mr. Booth personally, for I know nothing. On that subject, as on several others, I profess myself an agnostic. But, if he is, as he may be, a saint actuated by the purest of motives, he is not the first saint who, as you have said, has shown himself "in the ardour of prosecuting a well-meant object" to be capable of overlooking "the plain maxims of every-day morality." ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... know bourgeois, but who has done justice to the artist who gets on a platform to talk about the bourgeois?—in religion, the poseur is more likely to make agnostics than all the Rationalist Press; and the agnostic poseur in turn is very funny. Now all these are an affliction, a collection of absurdities of which we must cure the nation. If we cannot cure the nation of absurdity we cannot set her free. Let it be our rule to combine gaiety with gravity and we will acquire a saving sense of proportion. ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... taken into consideration. When he was ushered in, Cowperwood turned to him his keen, analytical eyes and saw at once a personality he liked. McKibben was just remote and artistic enough to suit him. He liked his clothes, his agnostic unreadableness, his social air. McKibben, on his part, caught the significance of the superior financial atmosphere at once. He noted Cowperwood's light-brown suit picked out with strands of red, his maroon tie, and small cameo cuff-links. His ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... expressed by these speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... myself,—which it is possible I may do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness of my nature. It may be that I am tired "—and he passed his hand across ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and highest contribution that they can make to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a brewery or a bank. A whole-hearted Christian life which has in ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the Newton of biology, was an Agnostic—which is only a respectable synonym for an Atheist. The more he looked for God the less he could find him. Yet the corpse of this great "infidel" lies in Westminster Abbey, We need not wonder, therefore, that Christians and even parsons are on the Shelley Centenary committee, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... science must necessarily precede the period of unanimity.—TORRENS, Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, p. xiii. Even the spread of an error is part of the wide-world process by which we stumble into mere approximations to truth.—L. STEPHEN, Apology of an Agnostic, 81. Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.—S. SMITH, Moral Philosophy, 7. The admission of the few errors of Newton himself ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... them, but sought to explain it as having emanated from one great being who is sometimes described as one with the universe and surpassing it, and at other times as being separate from it; the agnostic spirit which is the mother of philosophic thought is seen at times to be so bold as to express doubts even on the most fundamental questions of creation—"Who knows whether this world was ever created or not?" Secondly the growth of sacrifices has helped to establish the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Mr. Chesterton's use of paradox is more relevant to our present subject than it may seem. For, curiously enough, the habit of paradox has been his way of entrance into faith. At the age of sixteen he was a complete agnostic, and it was the reading of Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh which brought him back to orthodox theology. For, as he read, he found that Christianity was attacked on all sides, and for all manner of contradictory reasons; and this ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... now normal in health and physical condition, though not fond of athletics. His mental ability is much above the average, especially in scientific directions; he was brought up in narrow and strict religious views, but at an early age developed agnostic views of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look upon the knifing as merely a means of removing objectionable officials—it ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... no fear of lion or of tiger (in imprisonment) And in an awful storm at sea she asked the mate what mizzen meant; It was a plucky act; if I'd neglected to report it you'd Never have known the depth and true dimensions of her fortitude. If you remain agnostic, if you hold it still not proven, I'll Give fifty more examples of her courage when a juvenile; They lie in my portfolio, all printed, filed and docketed, Including one in which a stick ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism. Let me read you ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or rather what we in England would call the conventional thing. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls? They are so taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... performed on April fifteenth, at the residence of Mrs. Gerald, a Roman Catholic priest officiating. Lester was a poor example of the faith he occasionally professed. He was an agnostic, but because he had been reared in the church he felt that he might as well be married in it. Some fifty guests, intimate friends, had been invited. The ceremony went off with perfect smoothness. There were jubilant congratulations and showers ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... generous, but his habits were eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment of her Rossetti ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... seeker, a sympathetic friend. Why not? That is possible with us; for the very bond of our union is sympathetic regard for one another's freedom. It is also specially possible with us because our teachings do not, at all events, outrage the reason and shock the moral sense. Even an agnostic might listen to us and hope that ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... us!" as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... their language I visited and preached at his village; but the moment he discovered that the teaching about Jehovah was opposed to their Heathen customs, he sternly forbade us. One day, during my address, he blossomed out into a full-fledged and pronounced Agnostic (with as much reason at his back as the European ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the place ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... "Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape, get rid of your eternal subjunctive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... pontificated dogma which has graced the scroll of medical science, whole libraries have been written—and ably written, too—by skillful pens for the sole purpose of covering the simple nudity of the agnostic position of science—the dreaded, confidence-shattering ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... prowess, or monstrosities. How can we serve spiritual beings while we do not know how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... me to the land of spirits, and that he was deputed to carry me to the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. I am no Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere exist, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... of settled gloom, I then became acutely anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic, atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely discussed the new ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... Stephen A. Douglas said Lincoln was the most honest man he ever knew. Well, if Lincoln was an honest man in his character, he must have been honest in talking about his religion and his faith in God. Was Abraham Lincoln an agnostic in that hour when he spoke his farewell words to his neighbours in Springfield, about starting on the memorable journey to his inauguration? He said: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same divine aid that sustained Washington, and on the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is a thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... to Chancery Lane, and was for nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop of Mr. James Westell, whose career as a bookseller embraces a period of over half a century, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... respectable member of a civilized society, who proclaimed the prostitute the high priestess of humanity—the protectress of the purity of a thousand homes[A]—I am prepared to say that to have "no morals at all" is better than to accept such infamy and call it "morals"; as it is better to be an agnostic or an atheist than to worship a devil—to have no standard than to say: ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... appointed savior. He offered no reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his place, and ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things—modesty in the biographer and ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... embarrassments and difficulties. First, he said, it was afflicted with cholera, next with trichinae, and then with Andy Johnson, all in the same year, and that was more than any country could stand. Ebon C. Ingersoll was a brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, the world's greatest agnostic. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then—a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to glance at the Bar Senestro. Despite the triumph he was apprehensive of the princes's keen genius. An agnostic is seldom converted by what could be explained away as mere coincidence. Moreover, as it ultimately appeared, the Bar now had more than one reason for antagonising the man who claimed to be ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... who have studied in England, Chunerbutty professed to be completely Anglicised. In the presence of Europeans he sneered at the customs, beliefs, and religions of his fellow-countrymen and posed as an agnostic. It galled him that Englishmen in India thought none the more of him for foreswearing his native land, and he contrasted bitterly their manner to him with the reception that he had met with in the circles in ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly |
