"Knowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the suppression of a correlative member in a relative couple—those, namely, connected with the designation, "Mystery," a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by disregarding its relative character. Mystery supposes certain things that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible, unknowable, unrevealed. When a man's conduct is entirely plain, straightforward, or accounted for, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... ion[TN-1] shows that it does not relate to contradictories. But certain concrete analytic propositions, relating to contraries, do have this form. The contrary as distinguished from the privative. The Conditioned and Unconditioned, the Knowable and Unknowable are not true contradictions. The synthesis of contraries is ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... music of pageantry, cloth-of-gold and scarlet vestments; pendant jewels and multicolored dimness shouldering upward to be lost in vaulted stone. It was music which awaited the accompaniment of whispers, thousands of awed, ritualistic sibilants which would carry no knowable meaning and only one avowed purpose. Soft music, soft, soft; not soft as to volume, for the volume grew and grew, but soft with the softness of clouds which are soft for all their mountain-size and brilliance; soft and living as a tiger's throat, soft as a ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... for, at best, what we leave unattained must immeasurably exceed our attainments, and there is an eternity before us for what we are compelled to omit here. At the same time, the unbounded scope and the vast diversity of things knowable and worthy to be known are adapted to stimulate self-culture, and in that same proportion to invest human life with a higher dignity, a larger intrinsic value, and a ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so, down through the ages, men have stretched out their hands in eager endeavour to know their God. And because only through the human was the divine knowable, the old peoples of the earth made gods of their heroes and not unfrequently endowed these gods with as many of the vices as of the virtues of their worshippers. As we read the myths of the East and the West we find ever the same story. That portion of the ancient Aryan race ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the real being. As this illusion is the mode of all our experience and its very essence, it is indeed difficult for us to conceive of the Brahman as apart from the modes of ajnana. Moreover such is the nature of ajnanas that they are knowable only by a false identification of them with the self-luminous Brahman or atman. Being as such is the highest truth, the Brahman. The ajnana states are not non-being in the sense of nothing of pure negation (abhava), but in the sense that they are not being. Being that is the self-luminous ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... learnt all that was knowable about them, and that they were all alike, and that—the third division of the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... see that in order to communicate to our foreigner a knowledge of language, we must follow rules similar to those necessary for the stability of a building. The foundation of the building must be well laid upon objects knowable by his five senses. Of course the mind, as well as the external object, may be a factor in determining the ideas which the words are intended to express; but this does not in any manner invalidate the conditions which we impose. Whatever theory we may adopt of the relative part played by ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... without denying it. For even to allow a shadow of finiteness in the Absolute is to negate it; to define it is to annihilate it! It swallows up all conditions and relations without becoming any more knowable; it embraces everything and remains a pure negation. It lies totally and eternally beyond the reach of man's faculties and yet demands his perfect and unreasoning surrender. A concept, this, born of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... reduce it when He transferred it to that little body." So likewise the soul of Christ sees the whole Essence of God, yet does not comprehend It; since it does not see It totally, i.e. not as perfectly as It is knowable, as was said in the First Part (Q. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable." [54] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty—the nebulous country in which words play ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... systems of philosophy are based. The Monistic or Mechanical philosophy affirms that all the phenomena of human life and of the rest of nature are ruled by fixed and unalterable laws; that there is everywhere a necessary causal connection of phenomena; and that, therefore, the whole knowable universe is a harmonious unity, a monon. It says, further, that all phenomena are due solely to mechanical or efficient causes, not to final causes. It does not admit free-will in the ordinary sense of ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... all the scattered scientific traditions and information of his time with regard to natural phenomena in a sort of encyclopedia of science. This consisted of twenty books—chapters we would call them now—treating almost de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis (everything knowable and a few other things besides). It is possible that the work may have been written by a number of collaborators under the patronage of the bishop, though there is no sure indication of this to be found either in the volume ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... that he has little to identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the "Father" in the Christian system. On the other hand he will assert that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul. He will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian) ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various |
