"Unknowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exhausted to argue the point any more. He ran into the same stone wall with all the Pyrrans. Theirs was a logic of the moment. The past and the future unchangeable, unknowable—and uninteresting. "How is the perimeter battle going?" he asked, ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... irrational to doubt that he went further, to find, as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,—the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, lies ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and Plotinus ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main means of the development of capital—Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be developed—and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment's hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the beginning of the Christian era was fitly expressed by those Athenians, who erected near the Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86] The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... been recognised, {113} and has been described under the words "presentiment" or "foreboding." These words, however, refer, on the one hand, only to an unknowable in the future, separated from us by space, and not to one that is actually present; on the other hand, they denote only the faint, dull, indefinite echo returned by consciousness to an invariably distinct ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... "First Principles of Philosophy," (page 217): "Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, {129} emotion, thought: these, in their turns, being ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into causes ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... mysteries vanish, so will the ocean of veritable mystery stretch out further and further: the mystery of life, its aim and its origin; the mystery of thought; the mystery that has been called "the primitive accident," or the "perhaps unknowable essence of reality." ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... "float." He had wandered away from camp thirty miles before he remembered that he didn't know what float looked like. Then he thought he would go back and inquire. He got lost while in a dark brown study and drifted into the bosom of the unknowable. He didn't miss the trail until a perpendicular wall of the Rocky Mountains, about 900 feet high, rose up and hit him ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... her—the scheming mammas and the affectionate sisters and cousins who would plot to gain her confidence! For a man who was poor, and who meant to keep his self-respect, was there any possible conclusion except that she was entirely unknowable to him? ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Sir W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World," the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back into their own thoughts and feelings, and there ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... follows: Deign, divine one, to declare to us precisely and in due order the sacred laws of each of the four chief castes and of the intermediate ones. For thou, O Lord, alone knowest the purport, the rites, and the knowledge of the soul taught in this whole ordinance of the self-existent which is unknowable and unfathomable."[111] They were not only sacred in origin but they dealt with sacred things, and Sir Henry Maine has drawn the broad conclusion that "there is no system of recorded law, literally from China to Peru, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... recognise Billy Burr? And which was Dickie Lowe? Ah! those two must be the golden-haired twins about whom Mr. Owen had told her and Charlie three years ago, now no longer the foremost in the little procession, but as unknowable apart as ever, as they preceded the tenors. And there, behind all, was Mr. Owen's familiar face! Denys knelt with all the congregation, waiting and longing to hear his deep, strong voice in the collects which began the service. But it was a curate who read the prayers, and ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... And why shouldn't he? He may be, and generally is, sadly in need of a woman friend, "some one to share his joys and sorrows with", but because he knows few women is no reason why he should stand afar off and adore the unknowable. "Friendly like" is what appeals to us all; and the bush-folk are only men, not monstrosities—rough, untutored men for the most part. The difficult part to understand is how any woman can choose to stand aloof and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... appeared to contribute to the system. He produced in the end a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle with an admixture of Pythagorean or Oriental mysticism, and is closely allied to the Alexandrian school of thought. He recognized a God who is unknowable, and a series of beings (daimones) who hold intercourse with men. He recognized also Ideas and Matter, and borrowed largely from Aristotle ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... some human experience—there must be something behind subconsciousness to produce consciousness, and so on. But whatever the elements and origin of these so-called images are, that they DO stir deep emotional feelings and encourage their expression is a part of the unknowable we know. They do often arouse something that has not yet passed the border line between subconsciousness and consciousness—an artistic intuition (well named, but)—object and cause unknown!—here is a program!—conscious or subconscious what does it matter? Why try to trace any stream ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and matter ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... you realize its peculiarity. Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities. Spencer tossed all his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back on them forever. His books seem to have expressed all that there was to express ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some misfortune ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... blasphemy.' The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar [Greek: Agnosto Theo]—'To the unknown and unknowable God.'" A little later (p. 20) he says: "We should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he 'created in the image of God.' It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... of—strange speculations, impossible to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe, ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes of a ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "unknowable" to us ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He is not? It seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads on ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell. He cannot get Bisesa—poor little Bisesa—back again. He has lost her in the City where each man's house is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave; and the grating that opens into Amir Nath's Gully has ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... you to be the next Governor," I said quickly. "And you will be, too," I added, again using that queer place in my brain that seems to know perfectly unknowable things and that only works ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point—the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... elsewhere. To apply this now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually is such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so much as is God. Which thought? Which God?—are questions that have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which the general term was abstracted. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary could call to mind—and his imagination was never of the barren sort—Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... are not matter of choice: they are dictated by the nature of the situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in that permanent curiosity upon knowable things—nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things—which, in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the English turn, has sent out points further into the region of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... scholars who can tell us how far Emerson understood or misunderstood Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we need not be disturbed for his learning. It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... just been described may possibly carry us one step further, proving to us that these things are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... objective classification of the qualities which go to form our own character is a difficult achievement. And the idea of dispensing with essential parts of our mental equipment does not commend itself to us. There is a point in all our philosophy where speculation seeks the natural repose of the unknowable. It is quickly reached when we attempt to probe ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in the strong name of "reality" You mock yourselves anew with shapes of air, Lest it be you, agnostics, who re-write The fettering creeds of night, Affirm you know your own Unknowable, And lock the winged soul in a new hell; Lest it be you, lip-worshippers of Truth, Who break the heart of youth; Lest it be you, the realists, who fight With shadows, and forget your own pure light; Lest it be you who, with a little shroud Snatched from the sightless faces of the ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... remains, 'Which is the easier, the more probable, the more reasonable theory—that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid—a mysterious Unknown and Unknowable—which is neither mind nor matter?' For my own part, I see no reason to suppose that our inability to think of anything which is neither matter nor mind but quite unlike either is a mere imperfection of human ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... of the world-appearance is not wholly a subjective creation for each individual, for even before his cognition the phenomena of world-appearance were running in some unknowable state of existence (svena adhyastasya sa@mskarasya viyadadyadhyasajanakatvopapatte@h tatpratityabhavepi tadadhyasasya purvam sattvat k@rtsnasyapi vyavaharikapadarthasya ajnatasattvabhyupagamat). It is again sometimes objected that illusion is produced by malobserved similarity ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs the ultimate and antecedent causation the Unknowable. The philosophy of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or derided by ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Talmudist. That Jewish mysticism comes to look like a revolt against the Talmud is due to the course of mediaeval scholasticism. While Aristotle was supreme, it was impossible for man to conceive as knowable anything unattainable by reason. But reason must always leave God as unknowable. Mysticism did not assert that God was knowable, but it substituted something else for this spiritual scepticism. Mysticism started with the conviction that God was unknowable by reason, but it held that God was nevertheless realisable in the human experience. Accepting and adopting various Neo-Platonic ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Cause. Lao-tseu uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction to the Tao-te-king, pp. x-xv. ("Le Livre de la Voie et de ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... a highly abstract idea, but it is essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which estimates the relations between things, because here we ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... what it really is, than we know what sulphur is made of. We know it is a colored fluid, and it is in all parts of the flesh and bone. We know it builds up heaps of flesh, but how, is the question that leads us to honor the unknowable law of life, by which it does the work of its mysterious construction of all forms found in the parts of man. In all our efforts to learn what it is, what it is made of, and what enters it as life and ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... 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 proofs, which we ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... was busy with my distillations and analyses. Often I forgot my meals, and when old Madge summoned me to my tea I found my dinner lying untouched upon the table. At night I read Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant—all those who have pried into what is unknowable. They are all fruitless and empty, barren of result, but prodigal of polysyllables, reminding me of men who, while digging for gold, have turned up many worms, and then exhibit them exultantly as being what they sought. At times a restless spirit would come upon me, and I would walk ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it is accepted without a miracle to attest its goodness, so that the attesting miracle is superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to accept it on the faith of the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation—its relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it—which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel's intellectual interest is untiring. Philosophy, science, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... parts, and it will be perceived, therefore, that it was out of his power to theorize in the wonderfully brilliant manner which often made his successes due to an intuitive inspiration that at times seemed to hover on the verge of the unknowable sixth sense. ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... do what he might ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... allowed to die a natural death. It was, after all, the mystical foreign elements which gave point to—we may rightly say rounded off—the early dualism by converting it into monism, carrying philosophical speculation from the Knowable to the Unknowable, and furnishing the Chinese with their first scientific theory of the origin, not of the changes going on in the universe (on which they had already formed their opinions), but of ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... experience, some strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily unknowable. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... already pictured, and may be seen by one who knows the secret and how to look for the past or future scene; while, to the ordinary observer, the scene progresses in sequence, the present being followed by something else which is at this moment "in the future," and therefore, unknowable. To the senses of the ordinary observer only the present is in existence; while, in fact, the "future" is equally truly in existence at the same time, although not evident to the senses of the observer. Think over this a little, and let the idea sink into your mind—it may help ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... For, if we set aside external circumstances of life, what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of uncompromising ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... ceremonial organization of the most polished and civilized existence, leave the simple European speechless—especially when he remembers the swampy origin of the main part of the ground.... The inscrutable, the unknowable Back Bay! ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... given by Darwinism and the principles of Weismann, Mendel, and De Vries, still fails to solve the mystery completely, and appeal has been made to other agencies, even to teleology and to "unknown" and "unknowable" causes as well as to circumstantial factors. A combination of Lamarckian and Darwinian factors has been proposed by Osborn, Baldwin, and Lloyd Morgan, in the theory of organic selection. The theory of orthogenesis propounded by Naegeli and Eimer, now gaining much ground, holds that evolution takes ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of Plato's categories or elements is the infinite. This is the negative of measure or limit; the unthinkable, the unknowable; of which nothing can be affirmed; the mixture or chaos which preceded distinct kinds in the creation of the world; the first vague impression of sense; the more or less which refuses to be reduced to rule, having certain ...
— Philebus • Plato
... which our highest reason causes us to assume to exist is Being Unmanifest—God the Father—who cannot be known through the senses—whose existence is made known to us only through Pure Reason, or through the workings of the Spirit within us. In the material sense "God is Unknowable"—but in the higher sense He may be known to the Spirit of Man, and His existence may be known and proven by the exercise of the highest ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 'An angel is not above being taught even by a creature of earth. And in Fan there is one thing lacking, angel though she be, and this I shall point out to her. I can find no mysticism in her: what she knows she knows, and with the unknowable, which may yet be known, she concerns herself not. Who shall say of the seed I scatter that it will not germinate in this fair garden without weeds and tares, and strike root and blossom at last? For why should she not be ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... action closely, for he was capable of reading many of the signs of the Iroquois unknowable to others, and there was a chance for him to gain important information. The torch was not merely vibrating as if carried by a person walking along the margin of the river, but it was swung round in a circle, slowly and impressively, beginning ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... men who—without my impulse, it may be, to speculate in this direction—think such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that might be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a human heart to be true, I expect to find true—in greater forms, and without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. Why ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale. It is not engaged in decking out unknowable entities with arbitrary and fantastic properties. What then is it that science is doing, granting that it is effecting something of importance? My answer is that it is determining the character of things ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it. Here is room for endless aspiration towards the unseen ideal; none for ambition. Ambition would only be higher than others; aspiration would be high. Relative worth is not only unknown—to the children of the kingdom it is unknowable. Each esteems the other better than himself. How shall the rose, the glowing heart of the summer heats, rejoice against the snowdrop risen with hanging head from the white bosom of the snow? Both are God's thoughts; both are dear to him; ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... method many a time inflicts horrible cruelty is too certain, and those to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for the sake of leniency in a given case. A great enemy to indifference, a great friend to indulgence, said Turgot of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... it lasts we wander far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too religious and too sanguine to merit either epithet as ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... quarter of a century still finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as a previous theory, I shall be content with it until a better ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... called agnosticism or positivism. It accepts the Protagorean doctrine only in the sense of attributing to human knowledge as a whole an incapacity for exceeding the range of perception. Beyond this realm of natural science, where theories can be sensibly verified, lies the unknowable realm, more ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and skittles, is it? By the by, my BALLADS seem to have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I shall get into THAT galley any more. But I should like to know if you join the shrill chorus of the crickets. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... examination of the Theistic objection to the scientific train of reasoning on account of its symbolism, and showing that a no less cogent objection lies against the metaphysical train of reasoning on account of its embodying the supposition of unknowable causes. Distinction between "inconceivability" in a formal or symbolical, and in a material or realisable sense. Reply of a supposed Atheist to the previous pleading of the supposed Theist. Herbert Spencer quoted on inconceivability of cosmic evolution ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... ignorance of them does not detract from the perfectness of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot make two and two five. Omnipotence cannot do what is intrinsically impossible. No more can Omniscience know what is intrinsically unknowable. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... afraid of the reptiles which lived in the kingdom of Keb. The legend, or "Chapter of the Divine God," begins by enumerating the mighty attributes of Ra as the creator of the universe, and describes the god of "many names" as unknowable, even by the gods. At this time Isis lived in the form of a woman who possessed the knowledge of spells and incantations, that is to say, she was regarded much in the same way as modern African peoples regard their "medicine-women," or "witch-women." She had used her spells on men, and was tired ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... as it is given unto you. My friends and brethren, accept it as Zanoni's last work on earth—his legacy to you, and may the spirit of the All-Father-Mother, the ineffable spirit of Life, Light, and Love,—the Unknowable, whom men call God, rest upon you and be with you now ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... of philosophy on the basis of the theory of evolution. He holds that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, which are the manifestation in our consciousness of things which in themselves are unknown; and that behind and below all is "the Unknowable,"—an inscrutable force, out of which the universe of matter and mind is developed, and which gives to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... fighting off the chill of loneliness that comes to the strongest of us when we face the unknowable, the empty void that there is no escaping. Dying there in the falling dusk, he was singing to himself as an Indian brave chants his death-song when the red flame of the torture-fire bites into ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with eyes staring glassily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing. He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the will of a dictator, inhuman ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... eternal force. We should rather think of it as a revelation and an invitation than as a mere command. For what is it but the declaration that at the centre of things is throned, not a rabble of godlings, nor a stony impersonal somewhat, nor a hypothetical unknowable entity, nor a shadowy abstraction, but a living Person, who can say 'Me,' and whom we can call on as 'Thou,' and be sure that He hears? No accumulation of finite excellences, however fair, can satisfy the imagination, which feels after one Being, the personal ideal of all perfectness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... scientist is almost always a man who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labour in making his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... while. I poured tobacco and cigars into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think things out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think? To set down the problem thus: Here am I, a man of infinite, almost unknowable latent possibilities, suddenly repossessed of the supreme power and glory of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out those same possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to the highest and noblest ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... make it sufficiently definite and ascertainable. 'Willfully' doing something that is forbidden, when that something is not sufficiently defined according to the general conceptions of requisite certainty in our criminal law, is not rendered sufficiently definite by that unknowable having been done 'willfully.' It is true also of a statute that it cannot lift itself up by its bootstraps."[55] In Williams v. United States,[56] however, it was held by a sharply divided Court that Sec. 20 did not err for ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... practical magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any human gunner ever be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring me to the very middle of my guts. Your oath, Skipper, was for ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... of the ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and be ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the Devil to forswear the study of history altogether as the pursuit of the Unknowable. 'How is it possible,' he whispers in our ear, as we stand gloomily regarding the portly calf-bound volumes without which no gentleman's library is complete, 'how is it possible to suppose that you have there, on your shelves— ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... learned world followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... may feel much as men generally feel toward God, when he contemplates his "Conscious Principle," or his "Idea," or the "Substance" which he conceives as the identity of thought and extension, or, for that matter, "Mind-Stuff" or the "Unknowable." That other men may not see that he has anything in particular to be inspired about, or that he can hope for anything in particular for himself or for other men, does not rob him of his inspiration, and that may ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... laboring in the ditches with a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest philosophy under the free air of the pines. How, coming unexpectedly on them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt, and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had filled their Arcadian ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... talked philosophically for some minutes about the secret, unknowable troubles, which differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, which were not perceived at first, give rise to in families, and then Roger de Salnis, who was still looking at Madame de Mascaret through his opera-glasses, said: "It is almost incredible that that woman ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the water—something dim, mysterious, unknowable. It might be the "Islands of the Blest"; it might be the "sacred isle." One thing he asserted firmly: "Atlas upholds the broad Heaven ... standing on earth's verge with head and unwearied hands," while the clear-voiced Hesperides guarded their beautiful golden ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... "There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing." Everything ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... vast sea, and all mobile creatures were hushed in death, and the sun and the moon and the winds were all destroyed, and the Universe was devoid of planets and stars, the Supreme Being called Narayana, unknowable by the senses, adorned with a thousand heads and as many eyes and legs, became desirous of rest. And the serpent Sesha, looking terrible with his thousand hoods, and shining with the splendour of ten thousand suns, and white as the Kunda ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man has cut loose from leading-strings; he stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day's work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, or whatever it shall be called, has appointed. Observation tells me that modern man at large, far from inclining towards the new, personal, elder-brotherly God of Mr. Wells, has turned ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... "We have tried to isolate the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... impossible for us to tell what is the real principle of unity in the world, or even whether such a principle exists. The attempts to discover it, made by Theology and Metaphysics, have been nothing more than elaborate anthropomorphisms, in which men gave to the unknown and unknowable reality, a form which was borrowed from their own. They saw in the clouds about them an exaggerated and distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded this Brocken spectre as the controlling power whose activity was the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... term the real world outside ourselves. But the things-in-themselves which the sense-impressions symbolize, the 'reality,' as the metaphysicians wish to call it, at the other end of the nerve, remains unknown and is unknowable. Reality of the external world lies for science and for us in combinations of form and color and touch—sense-impressions as widely divergent from the thing 'at the other end of the nerve' as the sound of the telephone from the subscriber at the other end of the wire. We are ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... exponents of the old spirit of sloth, indifference, and laxity were weeded out as fast as their terms of service expired, and their places filled from the same sources whence the company officers were drawn. Colonel Broadcastle was a diplomat as well as a disciplinarian. By some unknowable system of suggestion and example it came, little by little, to be regarded in Kenton City as "the thing" to belong to the Ninth. Before the capital was aware of the transformation, every company roster read 103, the field and staff ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... there is only the Unknowable, the rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in "Abred," passing into the different kingdoms; "Amwn" is the state through which beings pass only once, which means that the "I," when once gained, continues for ever. "Gwynvyd" is the world ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... these mysterious influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some misfortune were awaiting me there. Why? ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... group, a prelude and epilogue to the main composition, on the prow of the Ship of Earth are grouped the loves, greeds, passions, griefs and spiritual cravings of man and woman, who come and go from the Unknown to the Unknowable. The great arms of Destiny, pushing and pointing, giving and taking, guide the way. Between the four panels of Life on the Earth, stand the Hermes, milestones of ancient Rome, here used as milestones upon the road of Time. Sea-creatures indicate our origin in the waters. ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... discipline, he had seen her give all her thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession, an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when she was a child, and still more, later, when she grew up, she went straight to the why and the how of things, she demanded ultimate causes. If he showed her a flower, she asked why this flower produced a seed, why this seed would germinate. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... secretary had been wanting in respect, and to punish him invented a previous engagement out of hand. Withered by his senior's Jove-like frown, the young man apologized in hot-skinned contrition for his ignorance of the unknowable. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... for life's origin and life's ultimate end, we are content to say that they are unknown, perhaps unknowable. We know only that living matter, like lifeless matter, has its own place in the cosmic processes; that the gigantic forces which operated to produce a world upon which life could exist, as a logical sequence, when the time ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... up of two elements that never mix any more than oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical combination, of morality and dogma. Dogma is the science of the unseen: the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this science plausibility, its promulgators have always fastened upon it morality. Morality can and does exist entirely separate and apart from dogma, but dogma is ever a parasite on morality, and the business of the ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the Atom. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... which all Nature is but varying degrees of manifestation, emanation, or expression. All have recognized that Life is a stream flowing from One great fount, the nature and name of which is unknown—some have said unknowable. Differ as men do about theories regarding the nature of this one, they all agree that it can be but One. It is only when men begin to name and analyze this One, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... things, the term "infinite" is applied to that which is deprived of any formal term. And form being known in itself, whereas matter cannot be known without form, it follows that the material infinite is in itself unknowable. But the formal infinite, God, is of Himself known; but He is unknown to us by reason of our feeble intellect, which in its present state has a natural aptitude for material objects only. Therefore we cannot know God in our present life except through material effects. In the future ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... arbitrarily tagged to an orthodox conclusion. They told me to believe a doctrine because it was totally impossible that I should know whether it was true or not, or indeed attach any real meaning to it whatever. The highest altar, as Sir W. Hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable God. Others, seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to find in that the Christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment of the highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one believes ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men were ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was inspired a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife. Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: "There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that story, so human and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... October. It consisted of several ships and about three hundred men. That John and Sebastian Cabot sailed on this voyage. When it returned is not known. From the time of sailing of this expedition John Cabot vanishes into the unknowable, and from thenceforth Sebastian alone appears in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... her breath; the intensity of the situation seemed to her, almost physically, straining tighter and tighter with every passing instant. She was awed, stricken; and Laura appeared to her to be all at once a woman transfigured, semi-angelic, unknowable, exalted. The solemnity of those prolonged, canorous syllables: "I require and charge you both, as ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed," ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... miraculous in the Bible, and, in many cases, even denies the existence of a personal God. All the students were required to conduct chapel prayers in turn. Those who did not believe in a personal God explained that they were pronouncing an apostrophe to the great impersonal and unknowable force working in the universe. I had read Channing, Clark, Hale, Emerson, and other conservative Unitarians, and found much food for my soul, but I discovered that these were considered old "fogies" and back numbers by most of ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... anxieties. That is the danger of all sensitive people. You can't attain to proved certainties in this life—at least, you can't at present. I don't say that there are not certainties—indeed, I think that it is all certainty, and that we mustn't confuse the unknown with the unknowable. As you go on, if you are fair-minded and sympathetic, you will get intuitions; you will discover gradually exactly what you are worth, and what you can do, and how you can do it best. But don't expect to know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful temptation of saying, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this new-found world of snow, and the very solitude had a fascination. It is good sometimes for the spirit to be alone; strange vague thoughts, half memories, half imaginings, fill the brain like a full high tide; strong impressions, unfelt and unknowable in the distraction of human company, force themselves silently yet persistently upon us; the corporal and the tangible lose their hard outlines and begin to merge into the in visible—in such moments the soul grows. It is perhaps ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... immeasurable and incomprehensible, inaccessible and abysmal, and that He surpasses all created light and all finite comprehension. This is the highest knowledge acquired in the active life, to recognise thus, in the light of faith, that God is inconceivable and unknowable. In this light Christ saith to the desire of a man: "Come down quickly, for I must lodge at thy house to-day." This rapid descent to which God invites him is nothing else but a descent, by desire and love, into the abyss of the Godhead, to ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... that rules Here, rules There, and Everywhere. And remember this, ye seekers after ultimate truths—the highest authorities inform us that even the few stages or planes just ahead of us in the journey are so far beyond our present powers of conception, that they are practically unknowable to us—this being so, it will be seen that states very much nearer to us than the End must be utterly beyond the powers not only of our understanding but also of our imagination, even when strained to its utmost. This being so, why should we attempt to speculate ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained, and ignorance was cunningly veiled in mystery. But the science will never be in the right tract of improvement, until we consider, conjointly, the mechanical operations of the fluids, the chemical agency of the substances ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... thy hope it was, That so ungrateful he might prove), would scorn, And not believe it, adding so fresh weight Of condemnation to the doomed world. Concerning that, thou art forbid to speak; Know thou didst count it, falling from My tongue, A lovely song, whose meaning was unknown, Unknowable, unbearable to thought, But sweeter in the hearing than all harps Toned in My holy hollow. Now thine ears Are opened, know it, and discern and fear, Forbearing ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... of ideas foreign to Aristotle, which are found first in Philo the Jew and appear later in medival philosophy. Thus God as a Being absolutely unknowable, of whom negations alone are true just because he is the acme of perfection and bears no analogy to the imperfect things of our world; matter in our world as the origin of evil, and the existence ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... letting the smaller figure a, the sphere of immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other words, were merely and altogether transcendent—He would also be merely and altogether unknowable, exactly as Agnosticism avers. His transcendent attributes, all that partakes of infinity, cannot—and that of necessity—become objects of immediate knowledge to finite minds; if He is to be known at all to us, He can only be so known ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Present and Future unknown Events "revealed". Theory of "Mental Telegraphy" or "Telepathy" fails to meet Dreams of the unknowable Future. Dreams of unrecorded Past, how alone they can be corroborated. Queen Mary's Jewels. Story from Brierre de Boismont. Mr. Williams's Dream before Mr. Perceval's Murder. Discrepancies of Evidence. Curious Story of Bude Kirk. Mr. Williams's Version. Dream of a Rattlesnake. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... during the seventeen years since aeroplanes first took the air, seen them grow from tentative experimental structures of unknown and unknowable performance to highly scientific products, of which not only the performances (in speed, load-carrying capacity, and climb) are known, but of which the precise strength and degree of stability can be ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... in which the unknown and unknowable quantity determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called life,—it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much resembles,—and I am half inclined to think Nature has ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... pleasure to this audience, and would add nothing to my present argument. It is sufficient to say that, with real estate almost immeasurable, with personal property incalculable, with a wealth of material resources of every conceivable description, absolutely unknown and unknowable, she yet contrives to support her costly establishment by a system of oppressive taxation almost unparalleled in the annals of the human race. Some of you must remember the graphic but not exaggerated ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... he gets all mixed up and concludes that he never can know anything about it at all, and the dear old "one," that came to him at first as such a simple thing, is so tangled up with all creation that he gives it up as an entirely unknown and unknowable quantity, and begins to guess at it and when he comes to that point, look out! He has taken the first step in recklessness, and has begun his initial work ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... and almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened by suffering and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as if they were already of the Future—these men look deeply into the distance, towards the unknowable land of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... or three weeks he was able to be about the city with his nearly two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating, and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of the liquid ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... veranda, talk, smoke, and listen, until his companions began to discuss such abstract questions as, "What is the real driving force of life?" or to argue on the philosophy of Buddhism, or Herbert Spencer's "Descriptive Sociology" and the "Unknowable." ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... it nearly all its energy. But we have no right to call one ball at rest and we can not say (as anything absolute) which of the balls has lost and which has gained energy. If there is such a thing as absolute energy of motion it is something entirely unknowable to us. Take the solar system, supposed isolated. We may take as our origin of coordinates the center of gravity of the system. Or we may take an origin with respect to which the center of gravity of the solar system has any (constant) velocity. The kinetic energy of the earth, for ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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, we call that an intelligible case; when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing person, we say it is all ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... things, they have rightly been condemned. Their fancy is manifestly erroneous, for a spirit, as Christ says (Lk 24, 39), has not flesh and bone. I am rather of the opinion that the Anthropomorphites intended to adapt the form of their doctrine to the plainest people. For in his substance, God is unknowable, indefinable, inexpressible, though we may tear ourselves to pieces in our efforts to discern ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... French Protestant; he brought his wife to live at his father's house at Sheen. After King William and Queen Mary were actually placed on the throne, Sir William Temple, in 1689, permitted his son to accept the office of Secretary at War. For reasons now obscure and unknowable, he drowned himself in the Thames within a week of his acceptance of office, leaving ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... tough, yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable at every step of the way, ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... journey in the month of June, an entire change in my course of reading and the current of my thoughts, my mind was restored to its normal condition. I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions; and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... acts of brigandage cannot satisfy my distressing habit of following each reply obtained with a fresh question, until the granite wall of the unknowable rises before me. If the Philanthus is an expert in killing Bees and emptying crops swollen with honey, this cannot be merely an alimentary resource, especially when, in common with the others, she has the banqueting-hall of the flowers. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... that it has a will of its own?' Alas! if we look more closely, we shall find that this does not make against the supposition that the vapour-engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this whole world, or in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only! ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... 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 as the great Unknown and Unknowable. ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... blind. We see ourselves in others only; only through others do we dimly guess that which we are. And in the deepest love of another being do we not indeed love ourselves? What are the personalities, the individualities of us but countless vibrations in the Universal Being? Are we not all One in the unknowable Ultimate? One with the inconceivable past? One with the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... but misleading, for instead of the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of potential, but in itself ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the scrutiny of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... sounded singularly like the usual answer of British science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it; but the Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of interest in all perfections except her own was honester than the formal phrase of science; since nothing was easier than to follow her advice, and turn to Thomas ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... might have been less cause to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... would not have understood. To feel for others what they do not feel for themselves is a distortion of sympathy which often afflicts me. Her discomfort was purely childish, a sudden fear of the dark night, the dark world, the ways of fortune so dark and unknowable. No self-questioning and no sting of conscience had any part in it. She had been happy, and she wanted to go on being happy; but now she was afraid she was going to be unhappy, and she shrank from unhappiness ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... all in a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into the inmost recesses of man's being. Thought was disease; morality was blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an Unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship. Man's nature was discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its Wants. It was an endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy—not the infinite, because it is too great, not the finite, because ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation church ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... difference subsists between religion and morality. That any such distinction should exist in men's minds is due to the fact that dogma is inseparably connected with religion. If you eliminate dogma, what does religion consist of but morality? Substitute the love of Humanity for the love of the Unknowable—which is the subject of worship of Mr Germsell; or of the Deity, who is the object of worship of the majority of mankind—and you obtain a stimulus to morality which will suffice for all human need. It is in this great emotion, as it seems to me, that you will find ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... details and their condensation into portable and incontrovertible formulae. History, which is more encumbered with details than any other science, has the choice between two alternatives: to be complete and unknowable, or to be knowable and incomplete. All the other sciences have chosen the second alternative; they abridge and they condense, preferring to take the risk of mutilating and arbitrarily combining the facts to the certainty ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... whirled away the silent, thin, little man, he began to expand again. John saw him scaling heights, cutting a path through impenetrable forests, wading across dismal swamps, an ever-moving figure, seeking the hitherto unknowable and irreclaimable, introducing order where chaos reigned ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... built the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't answer back as you would, ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... source of it, he had imbibed a 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 ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan |
