"Agnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... firm in his agnosticism. "Although puzzling, I cannot grant so much as even one of the phenomena. Belief in the smallest of those manifestations at my house would be uprooting to all established theories of matter—not to ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... market. And the quiet men glide away to the North. Their wares have been marketed. The sleepy, fierce, passionate, sunny lands have taken all they had to bring. And have given in exchange? Indifference, ill-health, a profound realization that the length of days are as nothing at all; a supreme agnosticism as to the ultimate value of anything that a single man can do, a sublime faith that it must be done, the power to concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt for danger, disregard of death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of the fact that mere ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... protest of Pragmatism and the voluntarists {64} generally against what they term 'Intellectualism'[18] and their distrust of the logical faculty, are virtually an avowal of despair and a resort to agnosticism, if not to scepticism. If we are to renounce the quest for objective truth, and accept 'those ideas only which we can assimilate, validate, corroborate,'[19] those ideas in short which are 'practically ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the smashed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... freedom, and that makes harmony possible between the mechanical theory of science and the teleological conception of philosophy. The scientific understanding would plunge us into determinism and agnosticism; from these, faith in the moral law alone can deliver us. In this sense Kant destroyed knowledge to make room for a rational faith in a supersensible world, to save the independence and dignity of the human self and the spiritual values of his people. In claiming ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... will answer: 'To die for His Majesty Our Emperor.' And the wish soars from the heart pure as any wish for martyrdom ever born. How much this sense of loyalty may or may not have been weakened in such great centres as Tokyo by the new agnosticism and by the rapid growth of other nineteenth-century ideas among the student class, I do not know; but in the country it remains as natural to boyhood as joy. Unreasoning it also is—unlike those loyal sentiments with us, the results of maturer knowledge and settled conviction. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... that there is no absolute right and wrong. Hence, too, the doctrine of the agnostic, that we can ascribe no attribute to God. When we read the "Synthetic Philosophy" of Spencer, we are apt to belive [tr. note: sic] that the agnosticism there set forth is the result of deep philosophic speculation. Nothing further from the truth. Man, even cultured, philosophic man, wants no restrictions placed upon pride and selfishness; hence it is necessary to rid the mind of the fear of divine ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... and women of this restless and eager generation—surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals—since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... drop one's daily agnosticism and attempt rerum cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Strauss on Feuerbach on the theistic school on Lotze on Hartmann on See also God the Unconditioned Achillini Adamson, R. Aesthetics of Home (Lord Kames) of Burke of Baumgarten of Herder of Kant of Schiller of Schelling of Hegel of J.F. Fries of Herbart of Schopenhauer Agnosticism, of Spencer Agricola, R. Agrippa of Nettesheim Ahrens, H. Alexandrists Allihn Althusius Anderson Angiulli, A. Annet, P. Antal, G. von Antinomies, the of Kant his antinomy of aesthetic judgment and of teleological judgment Apelt, E.F. A priori, the in Kant ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... excluded, so in God's world there are locked doors through which it is not lawful for any man to enter. And it is our duty to be faithful to our ignorance as well as to our knowledge. There is a Christian as well as an anti-Christian agnosticism. To pry into the secret things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to remain ignorant of what He has been pleased to make known. The idly inquisitive spirit which is never at rest save when it is poking into forbidden corners, Christ always ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... Universites du Midi, April-June 1897), seems, by way of reaction against the hypercriticism of Niebuhr and Droysen, to incline towards an analogous theory: "Historical criticism, if it is not to degenerate into agnosticism—which would be suicidal—or into individual caprice, must place a certain amount of trust in testimony which it cannot verify, as long as it is not flatly contradicted by other testimony of equal value." ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... reflect a kind of Platonic agnosticism; they offer no solution of the formless mystery; but they seem rather to indicate the hope that, in the multiplying of human relationship, in devotion to all we hold dear, in the enkindling of the soul by all that ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... would be put to. In vain we conjectured, and I hope not impertinently, the characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue that offered itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but they were such as these, not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays. I recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I wish I knew who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... to a specimen of a new variety,—one of the 'emancipated,' forsooth; a woman who has a betting-book instead of a Bible and plays cards all day Sunday. He tells me that she is wonderfully clever, and that it is all he can do to keep her from running about the kingdom delivering lectures on Agnosticism; as if one wanted one's wife to be a trapesing, atheistical Punch-and-Judy! And the fellow seemed actually pleased and flattered. He told me that she had 'an astonishing grasp of such subjects' and was 'attracting a great deal of attention.' And I told him that if I had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... find publishers and readers; but no one, except the author, cares for "polemic stories—such as set forth the wickedness of Free Trade or of Protection, the Wrongs of Labor and the Rights of Capital, the advantages of one sect over another, the beauties of Deism, Agnosticism, and other unestablished tenets.... Genius will triumph over most obstacles, and art can sugar-coat an unwelcome pill; but in nineteen cases out of twenty the story which covers an apology for one doctrine or an attack upon the other has no more chance than if ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Invisible King" is not the creator and sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring to comprehend what is beyond its range. They were the precursors of modern agnosticism. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... come after this life Faust makes no mention in his wager. He expressly says that all he cares about, all he can know, is this life, and that he will hear nothing about any future life. This may be agnosticism or whatever else we like to call it, but it is not formally selling one's soul, with or without one's body, for a future life and ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... "Remonstrance", for instance. It is a strong utterance against tyranny and intolerance and bigotry, hot from his soul; but the expression is not worthy of his feeling. A few lines of Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about freedom are better. The same may be said of his attack on agnosticism in "Acknowledgment". "Corn", while representing an extremely poetical situation, leaves one with the feeling of incompleteness: the ideas are not adequately or felicitously expressed. There is melody in the "Marsh Song at Sunset", but the poem is not clear. Or take what many consider ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... see the fact exemplified every day in the cases of those who, surrounded by all that a fair fortune can bestow upon them, deliberately hurl themselves out of existence by their own free will and act,—indeed, suicide is a very general accompaniment of Agnosticism. And self-slaughter, though it may be called madness, is far more often the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... bitterness in his soul, it passed away in the atmosphere of Mr. Bentley's house. The process now taking place in him was the same complication of negative and positive currents he had felt in her presence before. He was surprised to find that his old antipathy to agnosticism held over, in her case; to discover, now, that he was by no means, as yet, in view of the existence of Horace Bentley, to go the full length of unbelief! On the other hand, he saw that she had divined much of what had happened to him, and he felt radiating from her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of consciousness or unconsciousness? Is the personality perpetuated, or is the ego absorbed,—i.e. into Buddha? Such questions are differently answered by the different schools. Concerning the nature of Nirvana, Buddha himself, in his agnosticism, would seem to have been almost wholly silent. He appears to have simply taught that by the suppression and "extinction" of the natural passions and desires—anger, avarice, sorrow, and the like(13)—it was possible even ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... under the influence of Omar Khayam and the epicurean reaction to death. He feverishly entered pleasure and swung easily from religious fervor to a complete agnosticism. He became a first-nighter, knew all the chorus girls it was possible for him to become acquainted with, learned to drink but never learned to enjoy it. In fact, after each sensual indulgence his reaction against himself led him to a despair which might have terminated in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... mechanical analysis which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: to the non-mechanical theory of man—that he is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... restatement of religious belief. How will this conception help us to {16} such an end? The answer to that question may be given in the words of Dr. Horton, who says, "The intellectual background of our time is Agnosticism, and the reply which faith makes to Agnosticism is couched in terms of the immanence of God." [1] Dr. Horton's meaning will grow clearer to us if we once more glance at our imaginary diagram, letting the smaller figure a, the sphere of immanence, stand for ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... conversion. When to this full measure of lay perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father's character. Oddly ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... spent in interviewing officials that he at last found the man, Daniel McGair. A parish apothecary had him in charge. The apothecary was a coarse good-natured fellow, one of that class of ignorant men upon whose brains the dregs of a refined agnosticism have settled down in the form of arrogant assumption. He had enough knowledge of the external matters of science to know, upon receiving Skelton's card, that he was receiving a visitor of distinction. 'Yes, sir,' ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... [1889] the public has received much and varied information on the subject of Agnostics, their tenets, and even their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress at Manchester.[28] It has been furnished with a set of "articles," fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not less consistent than the thirty-nine; its nature has been analysed, and its future severely predicted by the most ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... convenience of any who may wish to find them, I append their titles and places of publication. These are as follows:—"Retrogressive Religion," in The Nineteenth Century for July 1884; "Last Words about Agnosticism and the Religion of Humanity," in The Nineteenth Century for November 1884; a note to Prof. Cairns' Critique on the Study of Sociology, in The Fortnightly Review, for February 1875; "A Short Rejoinder" [to Mr. J. F. McLennan], Fortnightly ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... forever?... If the Christian Socialists have a right to their God, and monogamists to their eternal marriage, then surely in a revolutionary movement like ours, the complete revolutionists have, to say the least, an equal right to their agnosticism and ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... certain doctrines and no other; that if tests were abolished, there would be no security against the most extreme opinions; men eating the bread of a Reformed Church might inculcate Romanism instead of Protestantism; the pulpits might give forth Deism or Agnosticism. No sect could hope to maintain its principles, if the clergy might preach any doctrine that pleased themselves. More especially would it be monstrous and unjust, to allow the rich benefices of our highly endowed Church of England to be enjoyed by men whose hearts are in ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... have previously remarked, buildings such as these are something more than mere material constructions; they are the embodiment in material form of a living faith which the designers and builders attempted to set forth in their work. An age of disbelief, of indifference, of agnosticism, is not conducive to the construction of such edifices. We need not go to Japan for evidence of that obvious fact. The hideous monstrosities in the shape of cathedrals, churches, and chapels that have been built in this country during the past century or two ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... question I did not know, and he did not know, and in fact none of us but didn't know what the word meant. (I have adopted the phraseology of the little boy when the magistrate asked him if he knew where he would go to if he gave false evidence.) But Townsend had no sympathy with agnosticism of this kind. In spite of the vastness of his view, he loved placing things ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... requests in connection with wireless telegraphy were seriously considered, gave an address at the Royal Society which, under other circumstances, would have seemed unduly dogmatic and emotional and deficient in scientific agnosticism. This address (which he delivered without any attempt to stand on his head) included a fierce and even ferocious declaration that it is generally easier to see the stars by night than ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... though Brent often paraded his agnosticism merely to draw forth the professor's scornful comments, he really had a humble and hopeless consciousness that if truth be visible to any human mind it was hidden from his. The possession of an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... But because of that pernicious loyalty, she has reason to complain that the working man is too rational to imbibe her teachings on the blessedness of slavery and starvation. Meanwhile, as no magnanimous sinner can live down to the pseudo-Christian standard, unprogressive Agnosticism takes the place of demoralised belief, and the Kingdom of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... stages of advance towards the truth: firstly, Disbelief; secondly, Doubt, which is, in fact, only a fond advance towards Disbelief; thirdly, Agnosticism, which is Doubt mingled with Inquiry; and, finally, pure and simple Inquiry or Search, without any preconceived opinion or feeling whatever. It is, I trust, only in the spirit of the latter, that I have written; therefore I say to the reader, Neither, believe nor ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... question of morals; but when they were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," the "Reader's Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... themselves to believe in revelation, but the moment that a man seriously tackled the subject, his religion was bound to go, just as that of Ernest Pontifex did at the end of five minutes' conversation with an atheistic shoemaker.[21] Agnosticism and materialism were in the air, and remained the dominant features for quite a number of years. There were those who deplored the loss of their faith such as it had been. Huxley obviously did; and Romanes, who afterwards returned to the Church of England, confessedly did. Such persons, and there ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... heart,—a theory that will satisfy himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,—he is welcome to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism: if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a moral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautiful lives ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... profound. Its cry comes back without an echo. Where is the Environment to complete this rational soul? Men either find one—One—or spend the rest of their days in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must be forever incomplete. Still more grave becomes man's case when he begins further to explore his moral and social nature. The problems of the heart and ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... these ghosts, my mind being in a just balance of agnosticism. If ghosts at all, they were ghosts with a purpose. The ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... the doctrine that art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the bridegroom came! The character of the Christ was illuminated by the midnight torches of Spirit. My heart knew its Redeemer. He whom my affections had diligently sought was as the One "altogether lovely," as "the chiefest," the only, "among ten thousand." Soulless famine had fled. Agnosticism, pantheism, and theosophy were void. Being was beautiful, its substance, cause, and currents were God and His idea. I had touched the hem of ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... Whatever could not justify itself before the bar of the human intellect should be discarded as outworn conceptions of a less enlightened age. The movement, however, comprised all shades of opinions from pure agnosticism to an idealistic belief in God, virtue ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... mean her unbelief, agnosticism, or whatever she chooses to call it. I thought at least women were safe from that style of thing. It is all fashion and bad ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unified science. Earnest objections have, however, been made to the tendency to regard nature as a mechanism. To one of the most curious of them we have been treated lately by Dr. Ward in his book on "Naturalism and Agnosticism." ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton |
