"Agnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do right. "It is impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by the "Thirty-nine Articles." With them God is "a Being without Parts (personality) or Passions." He professes a vague Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor fecit Deos; "every religion being, without exception, the child of fear and ignorance" (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the "Drawer of the Wine," the "Ancient ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ample fortune ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... 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 ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... present the history of Buddhism in China,[31] suffice it to say that the Buddhism which entered Japan from Korea in the sixth century, was not the simple atheism touched with morality, the bald skepticism or benevolent agnosticism of Gautama, but a religion already over a thousand years old. It was the system of the Northern Buddhists. These, dissatisfied, or unsatisfied, with absorption into a passionless state through self-sacrifice and moral discipline, had evolved a philosophy of religion in which were gods, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 here to enter upon a state of tranquillity, rest, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... in the old theology and the silent acceptance of new ideas by the church people of America, the rapid spread of infidelity and aggressive agnosticism, and the hold which Modern Spiritualism under various disguises now has upon the people, premise tremendous changes, and indicate a new era of spiritual thought—an era of better and sweeter life for mankind ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... and Turgenef was devoid of faith. Turgenef, like another great master of fiction, George Eliot, was a veritable child of the immature age, not of science, of knowledge, but of nescience, of ignorance, of agnosticism; for it is only ignorance that doubts, and it is true science ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... reach aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools are often terribly "advanced," and when they are not at work or play, they are vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, and all that kind of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking and sacrifice on the altar ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... West are always ready to cringe in presence of those who are not of our belief and to apologize for their faith. To react against this abiding danger we need all through the country well instructed and thoroughly educated Catholic leaders who will be in our world of agnosticism and irreligion, the protagonists and apologists of Catholicism. The fearless proclamation of the truth combined with a good moral public life is in itself a tremendous power. Indeed, we need in all the avenues of life men whose university training will give them influence in public life. But let ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... poem "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 his ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the Eternal Rule of Right and Wrong: above the State is the Supreme Moral Governor of the Universe; yes, above the State is God. Let us proclaim this august verity though in France Atheism has been triumphant; in England Agnosticism is fashionable; in Lutheran Germany—worst of all—evil has been enthroned in the place of good, and "devils to adore for deities" is the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... mature result of that 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 in contact with a moral order on a different plane from ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and His Blessed Mother, and her profound conviction that one day her physical shame and torment would intensify her glory in Heaven—all this struck him as a revelation, before which the antics of spiritualists, and the foreknowledge of Brahmins, and the blank agnosticism of science paled into ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... sudden conversion and lasting in its effects. There was no more agnosticism in the little group that gathered around The Pilot ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... writing this letter have experienced to cause him to declare, "I am in the garden of Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing!" Only a superlatively good man, only a man of genuine piety, could use honestly such language as this. These words do not indicate unbelief or agnosticism. If ever a man in public life in these United States was removed the distance of the antipodes from the coldness and bleakness of agnosticism, that man was Abraham Lincoln. This confession of faith, incidentally made in a brief letter to a dear friend, is not only orthodox according ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... into a London west-end curacy. There he attempted to demonstrate the principle of reconciliation from the pulpit, but his vicar and his bishop soon recognised that excellent as were his intentions, he was doing better service to agnosticism than to his own religion. As a result of this clerical intrigue he was vilely marooned on the savage island of Stoke-Underhill, where he might preach as much science as he would to the natives, for there was no fear of their comprehending ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... as in the old legend, of any term of years—the compact is for life. Of what may 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 ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... mere time or size count as anything towards increasing our wonder when we tell ourselves what supernatural things unseen powers superior to ourselves may have done. This amounts to the same thing as saying that dogmatic belief, personal religious conviction, agnosticism, superstition, and imagination are all on equal terms, and are equally respectable factors when confronted with human historical evidence, so long as they are kept rigidly apart from the latter, As an eminent Catholic has recently said: ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... most strongly marked of these tendencies have been shown in the Tractarian Movement which took Anglican in the direction of High Churchism and Catholicism, and in the Scientific Movement which led in the direction of Agnosticism. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Health" is mystical and beautifully human. The author's oar often fails to catch the water. For instance, she tries to show that animal magnetism, spiritualism, mental science, theosophy, agnosticism, pantheism and infidelity are all bad things and opposed to ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... novel religious views; he would be in vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result, and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... stimulated him to reflect upon the great historical reality which Christianity is, he had as yet but dim glimpses of it. He had given up his superficial unbelief, and yet did not believe in anything definite. He drifted into a sort of agnosticism compounded of mental indolence and discouragement. When he scrutinized his conscience to the depths, the most he could find was a belief in the existence of God and His providence—quite abstract ideas which he was incapable of enlivening. But whatever was the use ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs. Florence Barclay—needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be mid-Victorian just as soon as she ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... [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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fluency, vigor, and polish which made him so famous among the orators and talkers of the day. Bolingbroke's views were for that time distinctly heterodox, and, if logically developed, led to complete agnosticism. But he seems to have avoided a complete statement of his ideas to Pope, possibly for fear of shocking or frightening the sensitive little poet who still remained a professed Catholic. Pope, however, was very far from being ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... great deal of the real Christian spirit. But he had spent his life in seeking for scientific knowledge in various directions and was content, as he often said, to leave the unknowable without investigation. I wondered whether, in these novel circumstances, he would care to give voice to his agnosticism. But the doctor was honest or he was nothing, and he could not endure that Thorwald should rest under the false impression implied by his closing words. So with some effort, as ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... ransack your young Englishman for religion, you will be amazed to find scarcely a trace of School. In spite of a ceremonial adhesion to the religion of his fathers, you will find nothing but a profound agnosticism. He has not even the faith to disbelieve. It is not so much that he has not developed religion as that the place has been seared. In his time his boyish heart has had its stirrings, he has responded with the others to "Onward, Christian Soldiers," the earnest ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the vague hypotheses of 111:1 agnosticism, pantheism, theosophy, spiritualism, or millenarianism and the demonstrable truths of Chris- 111:3 tian Science; and I find the will, or sensuous reason of the human mind, to be opposed to the divine Mind as ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... 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
... come under the influences of the place and the time. There is an entry headed May, 1863: "I find a fair argument against miracles in my notes for this month." He had abandoned attendance at Communion, but, according to Judge Steavenson, did not go further in opinions or in talk than a vague agnosticism—which was also the attitude of another subtle and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... my faith, the faith in which I die? It is the faith of modern thought; it is the faith of the ages. It is a spiritual Pantheism, an impassioned Agnosticism. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... people came out. Still, it seems to me beyond question that his version of the 'Rubaiyat' is an utterance of his soul's deepest doubts, and that hereafter it will come to be recognised as the highest expression of Agnosticism:— ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... upon the teaching of philosophers known as 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
... they allow the supreme facts of their moral life to remain in the confusion of tradition, and seek to compromise the demands of their spirit by sacrificing to the idols of their childhood's faith; if they fortify themselves in the indifference of agnosticism,—they must reap the harvest of their irreflection. Ignorance is not harmless in matters of character any more than in the concerns of our outer life. There are in national and in individual history seasons of despair, and that despair, when it is deepest, is ever ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Agnosticism is a fundamental fact. It is the starting-point of the wise man who has discovered that it ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... have confidence in the questioner, perhaps nine out of ten 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. Never does ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the work of propagandism to vulgar and ignorant sects. There seems to be nothing offered the young Hindus graduated in the universities of India except a repulsive "Salvationism" on the one hand, and a cold Agnosticism on the other. I had conversed with a company of students at Madras, and found them hardly able to understand the interest with which I followed the processions of "idols" about the streets, such things being looked on by them much as a march of the Salvation Army might be regarded ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... issues are obscured through failure of evidence, repels the great multitude of religious thinkers who are not otherwise sufficiently drawn towards Catholicism to care to examine these claims. To say that there is no logical alternative between Rome and Agnosticism is a sufficiently shallow though popular sophism. At most it means that from certain given premisses one or other of those conclusions must follow syllogistically—a statement that would be more interesting were the said premisses indisputable ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Brian's broadly-declared agnosticism had long been a cause of pain and grief to his wife. She had felt that this alone would have made sympathy impossible between them, had there been no other ground for difference. She thought with a bitter sense of contrast of his cousin, who was a student and a thinker, and who yet ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... than the master, and their teaching when pushed to extremities resulted in a peculiarly dreary kind of materialism, a mental attitude which still survives to a certain extent among scientific and pseudo-scientific men of the old school. In more Recent times this dogmatic agnosticism of the middle Victorian period has been gradually replaced by speculations of a more positive type, such as those of the Mendelian school in biology and the doctrines of Bergson on the philosophical side. With these later developments we are ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... 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. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... reached after much discussion, and by the way of compromise. The issues thus raised were brought forward again at St. Louis, in 1885, when Rev. J.T. Sunderland, the secretary and missionary of the conference, deplored the growing spirit of agnosticism and scepticism in the Unitarian churches of the west. His report caused a division of opinion in the conference; and in the controversy that ensued the conservatives were represented by The Unitarian, edited by Rev. Brooke Herford and Rev. J.T. Sunderland, and the radicals by Unity, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... 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 enough, it was ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... inchoate regret, of passionate agnosticism as to the world's meanings, if any, does one too often wake, and know not why! Henry, on some mornings, would wake humming (as the queer phrase goes) with prosperity, and spring, warm and alive, to welcome ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Thus Leslie Stephen in his life of Swift wrote: Sir William Temple, though he seems to have been vigorous and in spite of gout a brisk walker, was approaching his grave. And again when he was triumphantly recording the progress of agnosticism he has: Even the high-churchmen have ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... oftener magnificently written articles by him began to appear in his remarkable little magazine, The Dawn. And the Ingersoll of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ... and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty habits, their ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... that as a German I would think as they did, and that I should not be surprised if they looked on me as not quite sincere. It was not only honest doubt that disturbed them. They had done with honest doubt, and they were satisfied with a kind of Voltairian philosophy, which at last ended in pure agnosticism. But even that, even professed agnosticism, I could understand, because it often meant no more than a confession of ignorance with regard to God, which we all confess, and need not necessarily amount to the denial of the existence of Deity. ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... the other men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy. Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in first. That there were many ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Douglas' greatest solace that long winter. Charleton had a good many, mostly representing his young delvings into the realms of agnosticism. His later purchases simmered down to a few volumes of poetry. There were several of Shakespeare's plays around the cabin and these Douglas read again and again. He did not see much of Little Marion, who was a great gad-about, and who, when she ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... forth-reaching, questioning soul can never be satisfied if it touches only a dead wall in the darkness, if its seeking meets with the reply, "You do not know, and you never can know, and you must not try to know." This is agnosticism. It is only another ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... scientist has been more conspicuous in the battle between the doctrine of evolution and the older religious orthodoxy. Outside of this particular issue, he was a vigorous opponent of supernaturalism in all its forms, and a supporter of the agnosticism which demands that nothing shall be believed "with greater assurance than the evidence warrants"—the evidence intended being, of course, of the same kind as that admitted in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... claim that his 'Confessions' created a new genre is futile; they confess nothing epoch-making,—no real crises of soul, merely the adventures of a truant schoolboy, the recollections of a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous and effeminate British prejudices against agnosticism and Continental geniuses. "And so," Mr. Stephen continues, "in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims—i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the Fortnightly Review; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate stage—marked ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... yourself, sir, should be very careful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these days to admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now on the point of closing the doors of its deserted temples because nations feel that its agnosticism in the economic field and its indifference in political and moral matters, causes, as it has already caused, the sure ruin of States. That is why all the political experiences of the contemporary world are anti-Liberal, and it is supremely silly to seek ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... AGNOSTICISM. A school of thought which denies that we can know anything of God, or of a future state. It does not say that there is no God, but simply that it is impossible for us to know anything of God. It would do away with all revelation and theology, and make us think of God ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... their old rare harmony. Edgar had stayed to Communion—he wondered what it was like—with Mrs. Morel. So Paul came on alone with Miriam to his home. He was more or less under her spell again. As usual, they were discussing the sermon. He was setting now full sail towards Agnosticism, but such a religious Agnosticism that Miriam did not suffer so badly. They were at the Renan Vie de Jesus stage. Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs. While he trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth came out for him. She alone was his ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Ptolemy, with true scientific caution, had left undefined the extent of Africa to the south; but Eratosthenes and many of the Roman geographers, even after Ptolemy, were not content with this agnosticism, but boldly assumed that the coast of Africa made a semicircular sweep from the right horn of Africa, just south of the Red Sea, with which they were acquainted, round to the north-western shore, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... my mind being in a just balance of agnosticism. If ghosts at all, they were ghosts with a purpose. The species ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... chronicled in this year are, as might be expected, either domestic or literary. The letters are full of allusions to his long controversy in defence of Agnosticism, mainly with Dr. Wace, who had declared the use of the name to be a "mere evasion" on the part of those who ought to be dubbed infidels (Apropos of this controversy, a letter may be cited which appeared in the "Agnostic Annual" for 1884, in answer to certain ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... climate and the use the place 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 ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... 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
... systems of thought and these alone. The explanation is a simple one: he considers it necessary to deal only with those theories which can form, and have formed, bases for a whole system of life. Mere theoretical ideas of life, especially negative ideas such as those of agnosticism and scepticism, do not form such a basis, but the five chosen for discussion can, and have to some extent, posed as complete theories of life, upon which a system of life ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... of Confucius, B.C. 551-479, the old order of things began to undergo a change. The Sage's attitude of mind towards religion was one of a benevolent agnosticism, as summed up in his famous utterance, "Respect the spirits, but keep them at a distance." That he fully recognised the existence of a spirit world, though admitting that he knew nothing about it, is manifest from the following remarks ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... development after ages of repression, has resulted with many of the sex, in an agnosticism which, at first liberal, has grown to be a dogmatic materialism. She "speaks against" spiritual insight and its revelations. In forsaking her dogmas and creeds she has forsaken religion. She is to be "brought in again"— ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... go on considering 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, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... freedom, or he liked the bitter tang of his own tongue too well, and he had remained a leading lawyer in Equity, when he might have ended a judge, or even a Congressman. Of late years, however, since people whom he could have joined in their agnosticism so heartily, up to a certain point, had begun to make such fools of themselves about Darwinism and the brotherhood of all men in the monkey, he had grown much more tolerant. He still clung to his old-fashioned deistical opinions; but ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... confess ignorance. Out of the darkness no voice has come. The veil over the statue of the god of the future has never been lifted, and inquiry concerning such subjects is folly. To this I reply agnosticism is consistent, but it is not wise. Because it cannot explain all things it turns from the clues which may yet lead out ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... to 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 with wild white hair will have ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 is generous and noble and unselfish, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... chiefly depend on modern books, such as Payne, Knight, Inman, Davies, Forlong; and there is quite a small library on that branch which touches on theosophy and similar speculations—all having a common source in the grand principle of Agnosticism. Further information will be found collected on this and the topics which we notice below ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how people ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... of all, and at the root of all, lies their attitude toward the Divine Being. Jesus was preeminently a God-intoxicated Being, while the most manifest mental attitude of Gautama was his agnosticism. Christ never ceased speaking of and communing with His Father in heaven. He was wont to retire regularly from human society in order that He might enjoy the Heavenly Presence whose very radiance shone in and upon Him daily. He declared that He did nothing without consulting with ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... times of our era, the sneers and taunts of atheism and agnosticism have been directed at the humble believer, who bows down in submission and questions not. The fathers of the Church, such as Augustine and Chrysostom and Thomas of Aquinas and, at a later time, Luther, and ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... philosopher Paul Elmer More, who died in 1937, and who was one of the most profound scholars in the world, after prolonged thought and study and observation, came from agnosticism into a complete and passionate faith in the Christian religion and in the incarnation. He said that while love was the main principle in religion as a way of life, the most important contribution to humanity made by religion was hope. Hope in the destiny of man, in the superlative value ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... reckoned she would get along now, for she had sent for the seventh son of a seventh son, and didn't I think he could certainly cure her? I said that combination ought to fetch any disease except agnosticism. That woman probably influenced a vote in the legislature. The legislature believes in incantations; it ought to have in attendance ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," is an axiom with most Englishmen to whom the oriental character seems an insoluble enigma. This form of agnosticism is unworthy of a nation which is responsible for the happiness of 300,000,000 Asiatics. It is not justified by history, which teaches us that civilisation is the result of the mutual action of Europe and Asia; and that the advanced races ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic. And, indeed, on this point I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance. We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... from heaven, or from men?" They could not say "from heaven," for they had rejected John; they dared not say "from men," for they feared the people by whom John was regarded as a prophet. So they tried to escape by cowardly replying that they did not know. Agnosticism is usually cowardly and ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... breaks out into that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism, and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a series of theological and economical questions which surprised her father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a courteous attention when the minister came to call, ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... hallucinations, the more provincial, nay parochial, they became in their interests, the less did they feel the need of any intellectual stimulus from abroad; and when Dr. Brandes introduced them to modern realism, agnosticism, and positivism they thanked God that none of these dreadful isms were indigenous with them; and were disposed to take Dr. Brandes to task for disturbing their idyllic, orthodox peace by the promulgation of such ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... practical spirit; and while these men professed theistic beliefs, their systems of thought had done much, when applied and amplified by their followers, to undermine that belief. These men furnished the source of a later agnosticism. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... bonds of the State. You must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church: you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have thought ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... said Bearwarden, who had been out early, and had succeeded in bringing in half a dozen birds, "was so disturbed I could not sleep. It seemed to me as though half the men I have ever known came and warned me against agnosticism and my materialistic tendencies. They kept repeating, 'You are losing the reality for the shadow.'" "I am convinced," said Ayrault, "that they were not altogether dreams, or, if dreams indeed, that they were superinduced ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... 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 for ever incomplete. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Socialism 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 their ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... in its grip. Since all of us, men 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, the same passionate ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... instance, is more characteristic of our age than its tendency to agnosticism? I pass by the manifestations of this spirit in the world of religion, of which so much has been heard, and give an illustration or two from the field of history and politics. Picturesque Pocahontas, we are told, is no more to be believed ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... that one of the favourite teachings of the positive school is, that as to this question the proper attitude is that of Agnosticism; in other words, that a state of perpetual suspense on this subject is the only rational one. They are asked, have we a soul, a will, and consequently any moral responsibility? And the answer is that they must shake their heads in doubt. It is true they tell us that it is but as men of science ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain. Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life (see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend Thing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 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 ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Protestant sympathies in the "Confessions" but a proud agnosticism, and an exalted individualism which in certain passages leads the reader to the sundered rocks about the cave of Zarathoustra. My book was written before I heard that splendid name, before Zarathoustra was ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Agnosticism is the very life and mainspring of science. Not merely as to the supernatural but as to the natural world must science believe nothing save under compulsion. Little of value has a man got from science who has not learned to be slow of faith. Those early lessons in the study of the natural ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions, with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water—an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water—which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee—it awakens, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie |
