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More "Agnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, where ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... him every night," but Mrs. Arundell still refused consent. She reiterated her statement that whereas the Arundells were staunch old English Catholics, Burton professed no religion at all, and declared that his conversation and his books proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities. The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating themselves ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end to Olivia's quaint surmises, but she could only be certain of two facts—that the mysterious Mr. Gaythorne was methodical by nature, and whatever might be the weather always took his exercise at the same hour, and also that only tradespeople entered ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in 1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern literature. The lecturer here flies his agnostic colors from beginning to end. He treats "The Romantic School in Germany" as Voltaire treated Rousseau—with sovereign wit, superior intelligence, but scant sympathy. At the same time he penetrates to the fountains of life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... like an anachronism to put the very words of the modern agnostic into the mouth of Buddha's tempter, but these men are merely threshing over old straw. The sneer of Epicurus curled the lip of Voltaire, and now merely breaks out into a broad laugh on ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his place, and who, so far as his reasoning went, is unassailed ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... rule, gross materialists now as they were forty years ago, although all theories regarding the composition of matter have been radically altered since that day? Evidently, the modern scientist is not on account of his research and speculation induced to proclaim himself as agnostic; quite the reverse, the fact that on any system of physics, zoology, psychology, the conclusions remain the same, proves that these conclusions were in the mind before the facts were investigated. Unbelief is not a product of scientific and philosophic speculation, it is rather their origin ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... for such feeling. In the second century B.C. old Cato had described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting at their meal in front of the image of the Lar[378]. We may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with that revival of the cultivation of the vine ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Even his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has lost the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... be the fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill somewhere in ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... "Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape, get rid of your eternal subjunctive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had lost his faith, and he no longer ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... great and supreme in manhood. In France, man now knows himself to be the only God; England—good, slow-pacing England—is approaching France in intelligence by degrees, and I rejoice to see that it is possible for a newspaper like the Agnostic to exist in London. Only the other day that excellent journal was discussing the possibility of teaching monkeys to read, and a witty writer, who adopts the nom de plume of 'Saladin,' very cleverly remarked 'that supposing monkeys were able ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have no regard for group beliefs but only for those of the individual. Each has his own beliefs, and he must have confidence in them, for they are the grounds on which he acts, if he is a normal man. Even the faith of an Agnostic is based on a very positive belief. As for me, I feel that the churchman goes one step beyond him: he even doubts Doubt. Said Socrates: "I know nothing except this one thing, that I know nothing. The rest of you ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Pythagoras, according to which the philosopher was wont to declare that in an earlier state he had visited Hades, and had there seen Homer and Hesiod tortured because of the absurd things they had said about the gods. Apocrypbal or otherwise, the tale suggests that Pythagoras was an agnostic as regards the current Greek religion of his time. The same thing is perhaps true of most of the great thinkers of this earliest period. But one among them was remembered in later times as having ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... mutterings of some of the other Scherzi. There is the same "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... He's a Gentile by religion, by the way; an ordinary agnostic. Aunt Cynthia, don't go on spreading that nonsense, if you don't mind. You might contradict it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... false systems it is important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... among scientific people, the affirmation which is the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted—not Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school of thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; he was far too scientific a man ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to be literally the voice of the disease itself speaking through them. They may ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... admitted that he was a reverent agnostic, and if Gibbon had been a reverent free-thinker these two chapters would have been far different in tone. Lecky regarded the Christian church as a great institution worthy of reverence and respect although he stated the central thesis of Gibbon with emphasis just as great. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... identity or nonduality (advaitha) lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This Being which is devoid of qualities (nirguna), because incomprehensible to man, can be of no comfort to him. In this respect the Hindu is an agnostic of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... to the forthcoming book. Huxley was one of the few privileged to learn Darwin's argument before it was given to the world; but the greatness of the book, mere instalment as it was of the long accumulated mass of notes, almost took him by surprise. Before this time, he had taken up a thoroughly agnostic attitude with regard to the species question, for he could not accept the creational theory, yet sought in vain among the transmutationists for any cause adequate to produce transmutation. He had had many talks with Darwin, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the way we have ourselves gone. Investigate every nook and corner of your mind, and learn how to control it and your sense perceptions. Then you will no longer mistrust your results as possibly imperfect, but you will have attained to some closer contact with Truth." To both the Agnostic and the indifferent, the study of Theosophy will bring a consciousness of the responsibility towards others, which is the basis of our universal brotherhood. It will tend to remove the personal element ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... dear; he didn't know the meaning of the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... blue paper. The other was the living room, and contained a cedar piggin and gourd on a shelf; a bread tray, dishpan, a pot and two skillets on another shelf near the fireplace, two split-bottom chairs, a table, and a cat. The cat was a large, gray agnostic. He never admitted William's presence by so much as a purr or a claw, and I have noticed that the agnostic is the only creature living who can treat a preacher with so much contempt. We found him curled up on the window sill next to the milk pitcher, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Lincoln was the most honest man he ever knew. Well, if Lincoln was an honest man in his character, he must have been honest in talking about his religion and his faith in God. Was Abraham Lincoln an agnostic in that hour when he spoke his farewell words to his neighbours in Springfield, about starting on the memorable journey to his inauguration? He said: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same divine aid that sustained Washington, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... coincidence, Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the stairs ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... years Secretary of the Historical Society of Southern California; author of a History of Los Angeles City, and another of Los Angeles County; and another of San Diego County, and one in MSS of Orange County; also a work on State Division (in MSS) engaged in oil and mining business; agnostic in religion; independent ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
... this simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As we sat and ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... call ourselves agnostics can recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders upon intolerance; ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... afflicted with cholera, next with trichinae, and then with Andy Johnson, all in the same year, and that was more than any country could stand. Ebon C. Ingersoll was a brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, the world's greatest agnostic. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... may not be misunderstood, I would say that the doctrine of Duty agrees perfectly with every form of religion—a man may be Roman Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Agnostic, or what he will; and, if a form aids him in the least to be sincerely honest, it would be a pity for him to be without it. Truly there are degrees in forms, and where I live in Italy I am sorry to see so many abuses or errors in them. But to know and do what is right, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly, three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional faith-holding Christianity is rare ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... which was most widespread, most intense, and most formative. Nor could it be otherwise with a Capitalist enterprise whose directing motive was not conversion or even expression, but mere gain. There was nothing to distinguish a large daily paper owned by a Jew from one owned by an Agnostic or a Catholic. Necessity of expression compelled the creation of a Free Press in connection with this one motive ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... Intervals too of poetic enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then—a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Cultivated fiddlesticks, madam! You cannot change this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it: when I don't believe it I say I don't believe it. I do not shirk my responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can believe nothing. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... is the creed of the Agnostic, but the confession of the spiritual numbness of humanity? Natural Law, Death, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, 'Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!' as I stooped over him. I pushed him ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... no; the author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand him, almost as greatly as he misapprehends ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic non possumus the ancient oracles of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... manner or movement: to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation often by long similes.) And he either made a language for himself, or ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the agnostic teachings of Confucius and their own practical temperament, the Chinese are a very superstitious people and live in constant terror of evil spirits. The grossest superstitions prevail among them, while beyond any other people ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... must be miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: who ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... was a confirmed agnostic. His young son Santosh had implored me to take an interest in his father. So far my invaluable aid had been a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... that every form of faith was good in its way or according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule Christianity because the tale of Balaam's ass was incredible. Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such preaching against "infidels" seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... his room, and sat there and waited and watched. His thoughts were far from enviable. He was in the mood of a man who, from being an utter sceptic, or at least Agnostic, is suddenly shaken up into a recognition of something supernatural, and does not as yet know how to make the other fashions of his life fit in with this new revelation. Selfish as he was, he would not have put off taking action on the warning he had received from ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... these well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer. Face to ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man. You have never yet talked to the real question. You reject religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes of the Creator. You pose as an agnostic—a religious Know- nothing—because the Almighty has not taken you completely into his confidence. Because the blind have sometimes led the blind and both have fallen into the foul ditch of fanaticism and cruelty, you infer ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... madam! You cannot change this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it: when I don't believe it I say I don't believe it. I do not shirk my responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can believe ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... he interposed. He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... conveys no meaning to him. If you think that the best way to show your belief in the All-Father and your love to all His children lies in refusing so much as to touch those who don't know Him, you are of course justified in shunning every atheist or agnostic in the world. But I do not think that the best way. It was not Christ's way. Therefore, I hail every possible opportunity of meeting Mr. Raeburn or his colleagues, try to find all the points we have in common, try as far as possible to meet ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... American Catholic, rather strict and narrow. His brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the brothers, K——, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's sake, was ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... chapter is devoted to the forms of Egyptian verse, its rhythm and accent. The interesting "Song of the Harper," which is found on the same Harris Papyrus, is also fully edited and collated with the parallel texts from the Theban tombs, and compared with other writings dealing with death from the agnostic point of view. The following extracts are ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... self-discipline have triumphed over their passions and have attained perfection. Buddhism succumbed to, and was absorbed by, a new militant Brahmanism, which we call Hinduism. Jainism, on the other hand, has maintained itself as a distinct faith and now has 1,334,148 followers. Like Buddhism, it is an agnostic religion, knowing no object of worship save the seventy-two ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... priesthood has played into the hands of popular superstition. Here, as elsewhere, there have been evolved charms, amulets, pilgrimages, and gorgeous temple services, in which the people worship not only the Buddha, who was himself an agnostic, but his disciple, and even such abstractions as Amida, which are mistaken for actual divine personages."[CC] The deities of Shinto have been more or less confused with those of popular Buddhism; in ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... manner in which the trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... epicureanism, a prudent animalism, would sway the greater part of mankind; in a word, that we should be "whited sepulchres," fair to look on without, but "inside full of dead men's bones, and all filthiness". The agnostic was no less certain that morality, which had outgrown the cumbrous garments manufactured by theology, would get on equally well in the handy raiment provided by science. The Rev. Dr. Martineau, speaking as a theistic philosopher, accurately delineated ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... by the governess. In that case, ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life. Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest preparation for receiving the happy revelations ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... and reluctant witnesses. Sooner or later, he would forget for an instant and betray himself. Then he smiled, remembering the books he had discovered, in his late 'teens, on his father's shelves and recalling the character of the openminded agnostic lawyer. If he could only avoid the inevitable unmasking until he had ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... Atheist, the Agnostic, the Christian, the Pagan, the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Sun-worshipper, the Republican, the Democrat, the Progressive, the Prohibitionist, the Brewer, all these are sincere in their beliefs. And as these beliefs are different, it is common sense to say that no one creed, sect, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... looks as she does now. She is not in the least inclined to devotional rhapsodies or to subserviency to priestcraft, like so many women abroad. She merely appears to recognize a divine power as she accepts nature, only more reverently and consciously. I suppose I am an agnostic as much as anything, yet I should only be too glad to have Stella at my side with such an expression on her face. I wonder if she will go with me this afternoon. I will submit to this diplomacy a few ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... predominant in the attitude of those wild, uncouth mortals. Few of them had thought of outward expression of God—a fierce resentment world galvanise into life at the slightest sneer upon the unprotected back of those who HAD the pluck. From his couch in a solitary blanket the agnostic grunted. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... awakening the opposition from the apathy which had fallen upon it after its defeat at the polls. Churchill roused the Conservatives and gave them a fighting issue, by putting himself at the head of the resistance to Mr Bradlaugh, the member for Northampton, who, though an avowed atheist or agnostic, was prepared to take the parliamentary oath. Sir Stafford Northcote, the Conservative leader in the Lower House, was forced to take a strong line on this difficult question by the energy of the fourth party, who in this case clearly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... you remember me well?... I had a sad life in many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what real happiness was until I came here.... I was an unbeliever, in fact almost an agnostic when I left my body, but when I awoke and found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is, my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no struggling to hold on to the material ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio Valdes in the less measure of Marta y Maria, and La Hermana de San Sulpicio and even with the romanticist Valera in Pepita Jimenez. But it may be said that while Ibanez does not go any farther than Galdos, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to glance at the Bar Senestro. Despite the triumph he was apprehensive of the princes's keen genius. An agnostic is seldom converted by what could be explained away as mere coincidence. Moreover, as it ultimately appeared, the Bar now had more than one reason for antagonising the man who claimed to be the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... continued to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As we ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... imaginary stories about their neighbour. "He was a miser—a recluse—a misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end to Olivia's quaint surmises, but she could only be certain of two facts—that the mysterious Mr. Gaythorne was methodical by nature, and whatever might be the weather always took his exercise at the same hour, and ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in speaking of these two works out of their order, I shall have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in 1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern literature. The lecturer here flies his agnostic colors from beginning to end. He treats "The Romantic School in Germany" as Voltaire treated Rousseau—with sovereign wit, superior intelligence, but scant sympathy. At the same time he penetrates to the fountains of life which infused ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... beings while we do not know how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas and movements and forces ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... she said, after she had come to call him by that name, "let me give you a caution. The most fanatical belief is less evil than dogmatic denial. If you are really the agnostic you claim to be, your very confession that the truth is too great for human grasp binds you to respect ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... to omit altogether the next book which I wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough of Despond by planting ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other shades of opinion are open to him, if he ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... "I'm a agnostic by trade," I says. I spotted that there word in a religious book one time, and that's the first chancet I ever has to try it on any one. You can't never tell what them reg'lar sockdologers is going to do till you ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach. To Huxley it meant simply one who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... had never touched upon. Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the father-atom ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Atheism. His religious opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic." ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... I receive this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism. Let me read you ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of philosophy founded by Pyrrho (4th contury B.C.). He advocated "suspension of judgment," and taught the relativity of knowledge and impossibility of proof. The school is not unlike the Agnostic school. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... you've done, lad. Even if you were sick in the mind and did not understand what you were doing, it's a mighty cruel thing you have done. Probably she mistook you; probably she thought you cared. I'm neither an infidel nor an agnostic, so I'll content myself by saying that the hand of God is in this somewhere. 'He's a good fellow, and 'twill all end well'. You have set out to do something which is neither God's way nor ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... opposite the entrance to Chancery Lane, and was for nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop of Mr. James Westell, whose career ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... what is called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look upon the knifing as merely a means ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... him. But the books she ordered from Paris, or Germany, and every now and then the things she let fall about them, were enough for any shrewd observer. It was here too, perhaps, that she and Arthur were in closest sympathy; and every one knew that Arthur, poor old boy, was an agnostic. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... (VII.—XI.) which deal with the consequences of the application of the agnostic principle to Christian Evidences, contained in this volume, there are several references to the results of the attempts which have been made, during the last hundred years, to solve this problem. And, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... assertions, all of which were individually derived from experience. This is the position scientists as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. They are entirely consistent, therefore, when they arrive ultimately at the agnostic position, and contend that our knowledge must necessarily be confined to the world of experience, and that nothing can be known of the world beyond. But they are fundamentally wrong in overestimating the place of the sense organs, and forgetting that while these ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... from going all the way with you, and taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery gives to living;—thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to thee do I owe ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... the doctor iterated. "Doubts are generally more or less digestive in their origin. Caviar would have made a total agnostic of Saint John himself, and Saint Luke would have been the first one to tell him so, and order a blue pill." As he spoke, he gazed at Brenton critically. "You're running down, man, for a fact. Is this thing worrying ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, where is Agnes?" ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... in the F. O. I was called back on account of my familiarity with the Pamirs, and there's a good bit of Blue Book work that my knowledge of Penj Deh, and the whole Himalayan line has helped out." The captain was a bit agnostic now. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... description has here been given deserve a place of honor in the comments to Suetonius' "Lives of the Emperors." The exploration of underground Rome must be greeted with pleasure, not only by the pious believers in Christ and his martyrs, but also by agnostic students of classical history. A tombstone, which on one side is inscribed with the records of the victories gained by the imperial legions, on the other with the simple and humble name of a Christian who has given his life for his faith, is a monument worthy the consideration of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble truths have been ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... of Eden, Dinah and Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had lost his faith, and he no longer ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things—modesty in the biographer and mystery ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... every nook and corner of your mind, and learn how to control it and your sense perceptions. Then you will no longer mistrust your results as possibly imperfect, but you will have attained to some closer contact with Truth." To both the Agnostic and the indifferent, the study of Theosophy will bring a consciousness of the responsibility towards others, which is the basis of our universal brotherhood. It will tend to remove the personal element which has hitherto done so much to cloud and obscure ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... it. He was content with the thought that he had found fragments of true ore. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of classifying him. One would be inclined to place him as a Theist, yet can we give any other name but Agnostic to a man who speaks in such ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... to believe that a man who could express himself in this way and show this courage was a doubter, a skeptic, an unbeliever, an agnostic, an infidel. "Christ is God." This was Lincoln's faith in 1860, found in a letter addressed to ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... himself is the hero of the Piccolo Mondo Moderno. For those who have not read the preceding volumes it should be explained that his wife being in a lunatic asylum, Maironi, artist and dreamer, had fallen in love with a beautiful woman separated from her husband, Jeanne Dessalle, who professed agnostic opinions. Recalled to a sense of his faith and his honour by an interview with his wife, who sent for him on her death-bed, he was plunged in remorse, and disappeared wholly from the knowledge of friends and relatives after depositing in the hands of a ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... That is possible with us; for the very bond of our union is sympathetic regard for one another's freedom. It is also specially possible with us because our teachings do not, at all events, outrage the reason and shock the moral sense. Even an agnostic might listen to us and hope ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... is a danger to the nation, needing the right use of platform; in literature—well, we all know bourgeois, but who has done justice to the artist who gets on a platform to talk about the bourgeois?—in religion, the poseur is more likely to make agnostics than all the Rationalist Press; and the agnostic poseur in turn is very funny. Now all these are an affliction, a collection of absurdities of which we must cure the nation. If we cannot cure the nation of absurdity we cannot set her free. Let it be our rule to combine gaiety with gravity ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... of the old Laird of Dumbiedikes to his son Jock: 'When ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... admirable coincidence, Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences ...
— Reginald • Saki
... prolific verbosity of pontificated dogma which has graced the scroll of medical science, whole libraries have been written—and ably written, too—by skillful pens for the sole purpose of covering the simple nudity of the agnostic position of science—the dreaded, confidence-shattering ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... misrepresented by the belief being ascribed to him that 'the forces operating on the globe have never acted with greater intensity than at the present day.' But his real position in this matter was a frankly 'agnostic' one. 'Bring me evidence,' he would have said, 'that changes have taken place on the globe, which cannot be accounted for by agencies still at work when operating through sufficiently long periods of time, and I will abandon my position.' ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective. Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute, possessing many of the marks of Roman Catholicism. The name 'agnostic' was so loosely used that one must say that the contention was hostile to religion in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... believe it, even from you. I had an argument with young O'Connor, half-fun and half-earnest. He was an Agnostic, while I profess to be a Christian of no denomination—just a Christian. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... the author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand him, almost as greatly as he ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... anything that may seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but that I did not attain to the faith I hold ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... and strong, she knew might be very speedily fatal. Straightway she said to her husband: "In two or three days I shall probably 'know'—or cease from all knowing. There will not be long to wait. Therefore bring me three books," which she named, works of authors of extreme agnostic views. Rather reluctantly he complied with her wish. She went steadily through the joyless pages, turned the last with the significant remark: "If this is all they can say, well!—" The skeleton cupboard, once opened, was speedily swept out. She ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... just as Mr. Shaw is an opportunist in politics. Dickens's waiter is ready to stand up seriously for "the true principles of waitering," just as Dickens was ready to stand up for the true principles of Liberalism. Mr. Shaw's waiter is agnostic; his motto is "You never can tell." Dickens's waiter is a dogmatist; his motto is "You can tell; I will tell you." And the true old-fashioned English waiter had really this grave and even moral attitude; he was the servant of the customers as a priest is the servant of the ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... orders, but he had become a complete agnostic for some years. During the last few weeks of his life—when he had to keep his bed—Mr Dale was always going up there, and having long arguments and discussions with him; but I don't suppose it did much good: it only worried ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... upward or downward? These are great fundamental questions, and the answers we give them lie at the bottom of our thinking and give tone to our writing. The world is not the same to the Christian theist and to the agnostic. Human life has a deeper significance to the man who believes in the loving providence of God than to the man who believes only in the existence of matter and natural law. The man who believes in the presence and sovereignty of God in ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Hindus who have studied in England, Chunerbutty professed to be completely Anglicised. In the presence of Europeans he sneered at the customs, beliefs, and religions of his fellow-countrymen and posed as an agnostic. It galled him that Englishmen in India thought none the more of him for foreswearing his native land, and he contrasted bitterly their manner to him with the reception that he had met with in the circles in which he ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... hole and whispers things. If he were visible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood at the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people are so ignorant of his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnostic about it himself. The few others know little and care less. Only two or three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function. They refer to him as M. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... whether you will ever get any large, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless they are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who owe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic missionary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... orthodoxies of the various churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development from the simplicity of their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already reached—the position of suspending judgment where ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... traced to the spirit in which it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... to lose. Eleven out of every twelve jurymen in this state would mulct an Agnostic ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... their propagation, implies a development of opinion. He had entirely dropped his theology. In the early years of his London life, Mill had been only a rationalist. He had by this time become what would now be called an agnostic. He thought 'dogmatic atheism' absurd, says J. S. Mill;[6] 'but he held that we can know nothing whatever as to the origin of the world.' The occasion of the change, according to his family, was his intercourse with General Miranda, who was sitting at Bentham's ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... maintain the thesis that fashion has a great deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic; perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... the creed of the Agnostic, but the confession of the spiritual numbness of humanity? Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... the hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was answered ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... superb thunderbolts of invective which the ancient Hebrew prophets hurled against an unfaithful Church and priesthood. For the most part, they are attacks upon religious hypocrisy rather than upon Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an atheist, but he was full of sympathy with the underlying ethical principles of all the great religions. Always tolerant of the religious opinions of others, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do we really get over any difficulty—do we not rather create new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... is another course open to you, a course which, terrible as it is, is better than the one that you are now following, because it is more honest. Be honest with yourselves and each other, and, what is of more consequence, be honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the fate of the hypocrite. Remember that ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... But agnostic man labors in vain. He cannot escape the mysteries which surround him on every hand, like a gulf in which reason is inevitably lost so soon as it ceases to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of the Cross, and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—as agnostic countries. But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism which ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... of science, and on that I place reliance, And I hurl a stern defiance at what other people say: Learning's torch I fiercely kindle, with my HAECKEL, HUXLEY, TYNDALL, And all preaching is a swindle, that's the motto of to-day. I'd give the wildest latitude to each agnostic attitude, And everything's a platitude that springs not from my mind: I've studied entomology, astronomy, conchology, And every other 'ology that anyone can find. I am a man of science, with my bottles on the shelf, I'm game to make a little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... be misunderstood, I would say that the doctrine of Duty agrees perfectly with every form of religion—a man may be Roman Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Agnostic, or what he will; and, if a form aids him in the least to be sincerely honest, it would be a pity for him to be without it. Truly there are degrees in forms, and where I live in Italy I am sorry to see so many abuses or errors in them. But to know and do what is right, when understood, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... not always an Agnostic, or a Rationalist, or an "Infidel," or whatever Christians may ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... fullest sense, as is repeatedly shown in his lyrics. But in the years just before 1877 study of modern science and philosophy, of the history of the Church and dogma, led him to become an evolutionist, an agnostic theist. Nevertheless, he ever practiced the Christian art of life, as he tried to realize his ideals of truth, justice, and love of humanity. This large and simple Christian art of life, in distinction from the dogmas of the Church, he early sung in lines which sound ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... God. This is decidedly not a Jewish mode of conceiving of God, but it is not even Aristotelian. Aristotle has very little to say about God's attributes, it is true, but there seems no warrant in the little he does say for such an absolutely transcendental and agnostic conception as we find in Maimonides. To Aristotle God is pure form, thought thinking itself. In so far as he is thought we may suppose him to be similar in kind, though not in degree, to human thought. The only source of Maimonides's ideas is to ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Infidel, The Millerites, The Agnostic, The Mormons, The Baptist, The Laurence Oliphant The Methodist, Harrisites, The Catholic, and the other The Grand Lama's people, 115 Christian sects, the The Monarchists, Presbyterian excepted, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a contemplation. The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully apprehended. And so the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... a long time he avoided them, but at length he fell into a particularly damp one, and would inevitably have been drowned, had not the sagacious Stray brought men to his assistance. And thus SONOGUN, the scoffer, the agnostic, the moody, gloomy, morose, cast-iron, Roman-faced misanthrope, got home. That same evening he changed his clothes and his character, and on the following day ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... she took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... tells you that woman is independent, self-sufficing. Your instincts cry feebly for passion, that savage outlaw which still lies in wait for the modern woman, to carry her whither she would not. Hence your lapse from strict agnostic morality into matrimony, bondage, subjection, and the ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders upon intolerance; and while such is the feeling even ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... "All agnostic writers seem to think that there is no reason in religion, and at times they come pretty near proving ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I know.... I have lived a long time, and my real ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of English ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... 'An agnostic,' said the man behind the moat, 'is a bloke wot don't believe nothing unless 'e see it with 'is ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... therefore regards every human being who has been born only once as totally depraved. He thinks that God never made a single creature that didn't deserve to be damned the minute He finished him. So every one who opposes Mr. Talmage is infamous. The generosity of an agnostic is meanness, his honesty is larceny and his love is hate. Talmage is a consistent follower of Calvin and Knox, and a consistent worshiper of the Jehovah of the ancient Jews. I oppose not him, but his creed, because it tends to crush out the natural tendencies in men to joyousness and goodness. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the wit, the wisdom, that give proud distinction to the name of Clerkenwell Green. Towards sundown, that modern Agora rang with the voices of orators, swarmed with listeners, with disputants, with mockers, with indifferent loungers. The circle closing about an agnostic lecturer intersected with one gathered for a prayer-meeting; the roar of an enthusiastic total-abstainer blended with the shriek of a Radical politician. Innumerable were the little groups which had broken away from the larger ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the man, who, five years ago, had gone down at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver, not a nerve stirred in his face, as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... know, that I know nothing.'' But Arcesilaus went farther and denied the possibility of even the Socratic minimum of certainty: "I cannot know even whether I know or not.'' Thus from the dogmatism of the master the Academy plunged into the extremes of agnostic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Penrod's faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after ten thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was. On Monday Penrod was virtually an agnostic. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... everything that is great and supreme in manhood. In France, man now knows himself to be the only God; England—good, slow-pacing England—is approaching France in intelligence by degrees, and I rejoice to see that it is possible for a newspaper like the Agnostic to exist in London. Only the other day that excellent journal was discussing the possibility of teaching monkeys to read, and a witty writer, who adopts the nom de plume of 'Saladin,' very cleverly remarked 'that supposing monkeys ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the expense of degrading man's knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains God at ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... say this," he said. "I have told Mrs. Stapleton already. It is this. I must confess that so far as I am concerned I am not a believer. But neither am I a skeptic. I am just a real agnostic in this matter. I have read several books; and I have been impressed. But there's a great deal in them that seems to me nonsense; perhaps I had better say which I don't understand. This materializing business, for instance.... I can understand that the minds of the dead can affect ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... in modo' has quite as much charm for him as its counterpart, 'Fortiter in re.' The consequence is that superficial people take him for a Socialist because he neither prosecutes nor persecutes Socialists for the opinions they hold. Himself an agnostic, and lacking religions sentiment, he realises so well the supreme influence of religion on numberless people and the comfort they derive from it, that many consider him not nearly firm enough in his intercourse with Roman Catholics or 'orthodox' ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... of the so-called "Occult" have done my reputation in this narrow provincial town much harm. I have been sneered at as a "spiritualist," a "spook hunter," an "agnostic." I am none of the three. I am a seeker after Truth; even while fully aware of the impossibility of absolutely finding that elusive quality. Nor do my researches in any way conflict with revealed religion, nor in the simple Bible faith that has ever been mine ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... opinion of the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these superstitions, and the time ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... that you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... increasing sphere we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience,"[43] from his standpoint he is quite correct. The endeavors of well-meaning persons to show that the Agnostic's position, when he asserts his ignorance of the Spiritual World, is only a pretence; the attempts to prove that he really knows a great deal about it if he would only admit it, are quite misplaced. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... would not believe it, even from you. I had an argument with young O'Connor, half-fun and half-earnest. He was an Agnostic, while I profess to be a Christian of no denomination—just a Christian. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I know.... I have lived a long time, and my real problems have ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... come by Mah[a]tmaism and Yogism, just as they are moved by native seance-spirits and mesmerism. Blavatskyism (which represents no phase of Buddhism) will always find disciples among the ignorant classes, especially in an agnostic or atheistic environment, so that one should attribute the mental attitude of such minds to their lack of culture rather than to India; for if Mah[a]tmaism had not been discovered, they would still profess it under another name. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... development from the simplicity of their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... him out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... The agnostic holds that there are limits to human reason, and that theology lies outside those limits. Within those limits lies the world with which science (including psychology) deals. Science deals entirely with phenomena, and has nothing ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... what Meyrick's religious views are; he attends his College chapel with a cool decorum. But I suspect him of being a quiet agnostic. I do not think he cares a straw whether his individuality endures, and he looks forward to a progress which can be tabulated and statistics about the decrease of crime and disease that can be verified; that, I am sure, is his idea ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... we are asked to believe that a man who could express himself in this way and show this courage was a doubter, a skeptic, an unbeliever, an agnostic, an infidel. "Christ is God." This was Lincoln's faith in 1860, found in a letter addressed ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave offspring—I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design seems obvious. Famine ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consideration of Mr. Chesterton's use of paradox is more relevant to our present subject than it may seem. For, curiously enough, the habit of paradox has been his way of entrance into faith. At the age of sixteen he was a complete agnostic, and it was the reading of Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh which brought him back to orthodox theology. For, as he read, he found that Christianity was attacked on all sides, and for all manner of contradictory reasons; and this discovery led him to the conviction ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... to say about Mr. Booth personally, for I know nothing. On that subject, as on several others, I profess myself an agnostic. But, if he is, as he may be, a saint actuated by the purest of motives, he is not the first saint who, as you have said, has shown himself "in the ardour of prosecuting a well-meant object" to be capable of overlooking "the plain maxims of every-day morality." If I were a Salvationist soldier, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... is a thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... health and physical condition, though not fond of athletics. His mental ability is much above the average, especially in scientific directions; he was brought up in narrow and strict religious views, but at an early age developed agnostic ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and who was not aware that ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. Conversely, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Bentham's principles, and his resolution to devote his life to their propagation, implies a development of opinion. He had entirely dropped his theology. In the early years of his London life, Mill had been only a rationalist. He had by this time become what would now be called an agnostic. He thought 'dogmatic atheism' absurd, says J. S. Mill;[6] 'but he held that we can know nothing whatever as to the origin of the world.' The occasion of the change, according to his family, was his intercourse with General ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... same "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the romance of my father's life," the soft voice went on, speaking as if I had not interrupted him, "but nobody knows the tragedy. Love for my mother came upon him like an arrow shot out of ambush, and he married into a worldly, pleasure-loving, agnostic circle of people who all adored and flattered him until he—he became confused and doubting. He had transgressed the law: 'yoke not yourselves with unbelievers,' and he suffered. She never understood. It killed him, and when he had been dead nearly twenty years ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... people, gave me to know that he welcomed me to the land of spirits, and that he was deputed to carry me to the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. I am no Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Americans would sit and look at her as if they half believed her a creature from another world. Sometimes Harris would draw her into conversation on topics pertaining to philosophy and religion, for he had early seen her bent and, agnostic that he was, delighted to hear her express her views, which to him were so childishly impossible. But as often he would voluntarily retire from the conflict, sometimes shaking his head dubiously, sometimes muttering his impatience with a mere child whose logic ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... common unbelief—a cold negation. He was unhappy. He found no territory on which to stand. He hated the cant and formalism that chilled him in the fashionable church. He hated the insolent creed of the deist, and the ignorance of the agnostic. He seemed to be hating almost all things with himself included. If he had been sure there was a God who heard mortals pray, he would have cried to Him to deliver him from so wretched a position. But he roused himself ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... about Pythagoras, according to which the philosopher was wont to declare that in an earlier state he had visited Hades, and had there seen Homer and Hesiod tortured because of the absurd things they had said about the gods. Apocrypbal or otherwise, the tale suggests that Pythagoras was an agnostic as regards the current Greek religion of his time. The same thing is perhaps true of most of the great thinkers of this earliest period. But one among them was remembered in later times as having ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... truly Liberal. Old prejudices about "this England," old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, we might find in ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... drawing-room tables of devout Catholics and high-flying Anglicans article after article, sending divinities, creeds, and Churches all headlong into limbo, was indeed piquant. Much of all this elegant dabbling in infidelity has been a caprice of fashion. The Agnostic has had his day with the fine ladies, like the black footboy of other times, or the spirit-rapper and table-turner of our own. What we have been watching, after all, was perhaps a tournament, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams: are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the meaning of the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... instance, as the old-fashioned scheme of redemption, by which men have attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways of God to man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete. The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every one has a right to ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Laird of Dumbiedikes to his son Jock: 'When ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived her who ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... backwards and forwards. Four classes of writers wage war over the facts: the Baconians, like the late Mr. Donnelly, who deny everything; the Romanticists, who accept what is pleasant, and occasionally believe manufactured tradition to suit their inclinations; the agnostic Shakespeareans, like Halliwell-Phillipps, who really work, but believe only what they can see and touch, if it accords with their opinions; and the ingenuous workers who seek saving truth like the agnostics, but bring human influences ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... sceptical and agnostic days it may sound a little strange, and perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the brothers, K——, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's sake, was so intense, nervous, rapid-talking, rapid-living, that he frightened me ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... passionate card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand —they are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner in heaven or ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... soothing in certain moods; but it was the noble personality of Father Damon. He was devoted to the people as she was, he understood them; and for the moment their passion of humanity assumed the same aspect, though she knew that what he saw, or thought he saw, lay beyond her agnostic vision. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lessons of evolution, summarized in the foregoing statements. The atheist, who declines to personify the ultimate powers of the universe, may, nevertheless, find direction for his life in the principles brought to light by science. The agnostic, who doubts the validity of many conventional dicta that may not seem well grounded, can also find something to believe and to obey. Finally, the orthodox theist of whatever creed may discover cogent reasons for many of his beliefs like ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... your physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to be literally the voice of the disease itself speaking through them. They may tell you much that ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Why not? That is possible with us; for the very bond of our union is sympathetic regard for one another's freedom. It is also specially possible with us because our teachings do not, at all events, outrage the reason and shock the moral sense. Even an agnostic might listen to us and hope that our ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... hell, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.' . . . And do you think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that appeal? A few of us agnostics, perhaps. But we are human souls, after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it. We should be ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a weekly journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little for ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... all of which were individually derived from experience. This is the position scientists as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. They are entirely consistent, therefore, when they arrive ultimately at the agnostic position, and contend that our knowledge must necessarily be confined to the world of experience, and that nothing can be known of the world beyond. But they are fundamentally wrong in overestimating the place of the sense organs, and ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... suffered at this time from an extreme scepticism. As he expressed it he "felt as if everything might be a dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." The agnostic doubts the existence of God. Gilbert at moments doubted the existence ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... I do?" asked Strong. "She jammed me close up to the wall. I did not know where to turn. You would have been still less pleased if I had done what she wanted, and given her the whole Agnostic creed." ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... could dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... readers who possess the rare gift of patience, for anything that may seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but that I did not attain to the faith I hold without hard training and bitter ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains God at ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... never of the fine world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Orthodox and agnostic are as the poles asunder, yet they could not but both agree with Barty Josselin, who so cleverly extended a hand to each, and acted ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... consistent agnostic, and a believer in the slow evolution of morals, in his "Science of Ethics,"[1] naturally holds, like Herbert Spencer, to the gradual development of the custom of truthfulness, as a necessity of society.[2] The moral sense of primitive man, as he sees it, might seem to justify falsehood to an ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... here been given deserve a place of honor in the comments to Suetonius' "Lives of the Emperors." The exploration of underground Rome must be greeted with pleasure, not only by the pious believers in Christ and his martyrs, but also by agnostic students of classical history. A tombstone, which on one side is inscribed with the records of the victories gained by the imperial legions, on the other with the simple and humble name of a Christian who has given his life for his faith, is a monument worthy the consideration of all thoughtful ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... agnostic teachings of Confucius and their own practical temperament, the Chinese are a very superstitious people and live in constant terror of evil spirits. The grossest superstitions prevail among them, while ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... embarrassments and difficulties. First, he said, it was afflicted with cholera, next with trichinae, and then with Andy Johnson, all in the same year, and that was more than any country could stand. Ebon C. Ingersoll was a brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, the world's greatest agnostic. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... The Infidel, The Millerites, The Agnostic, The Mormons, The Baptist, The Laurence Oliphant The Methodist, Harrisites, The Catholic, and the other The Grand Lama's people, 115 Christian sects, the The Monarchists, Presbyterian excepted, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan sects, The Democrats, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... glad, Miss Fenwick, that you have put those questions. I desire to state briefly and frankly my attitude, up to this time, towards mediumship and the philosophy and phenomena of spiritual manifestations generally: I believe I was a born agnostic. All my life I have been skeptical as to the verity of a life beyond the grave. In this I have differed widely from my people, a large majority of whom have been zealous Presbyterians for at least five generations, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... like to say this," he said. "I have told Mrs. Stapleton already. It is this. I must confess that so far as I am concerned I am not a believer. But neither am I a skeptic. I am just a real agnostic in this matter. I have read several books; and I have been impressed. But there's a great deal in them that seems to me nonsense; perhaps I had better say which I don't understand. This materializing business, for instance.... ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Japan in view of the labour and money devoted by different religious bodies to its propagation for many years past. There is, let me add, no marked hostility to Christianity in Japan—only indifference. The educated Japanese of to-day is, I believe, for the most part an agnostic, and he views Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity alike, except in so far as he regards the first two as more or less national and the last as ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... he had nothing whatever to do. Goddess-like she had descended upon him from skies in which previously he had held no faith at all; and even yet it was a tussle for his conscience to accept anything coming from that quarter as really divine. He was agnostic; he did not like the Church, and he rather despised that attitude of mind which accepted miracle as a directing power in human affairs, and looked to an unseen world for the inspirations of life. It was as though some modern Endymion gazing ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... manhood. In France, man now knows himself to be the only God; England—good, slow-pacing England—is approaching France in intelligence by degrees, and I rejoice to see that it is possible for a newspaper like the Agnostic to exist in London. Only the other day that excellent journal was discussing the possibility of teaching monkeys to read, and a witty writer, who adopts the nom de plume of 'Saladin,' very cleverly remarked 'that supposing monkeys were able ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... would have delighted Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... do the work to be done in the interest of the temporal as a basis for the spiritual advancement of humanity. The African and the Jew are the spiritual races, and to them political ascendence among the nations of the earth is not promised. It was M. Renan, the great French agnostic, who said: "The fate of the Jewish people was not to form a separate nationality; it is a race which always cherishes a dream ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... governess. In that case, ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life. Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest preparation for receiving the happy revelations ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Borrow determined to try his fortunes in London with those bundles of unsaleable manuscripts, gave him introductions to Sir Richard Phillips and to Thomas Campbell. It was in the agnostic spirit that he had learned from Taylor that he wrote during this period to his one friend in London, Roger Kerrison. Kerrison was grandson of Sir Roger Kerrison, Mayor of Norwich in 1778, as his son ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... described as Atheism. His religious opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic." ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... course open to you, a course which, terrible as it is, is better than the one that you are now following, because it is more honest. Be honest with yourselves and each other, and, what is of more consequence, be honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the fate of the hypocrite. Remember that ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Christianity filtering to men who stand apart from it. But I gravely doubt whether you will ever get any large, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless they are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who owe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic missionary societies ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... lovers walked in the Garden of Eden, Dinah and Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... die unless I kill myself,—which it is possible I may do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness of my nature. It ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was quite aware of it. He was content with the thought that he had found fragments of true ore. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of classifying him. One would be inclined to place him as a Theist, yet can we give any other name but Agnostic to a man who speaks in such ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... this possible? And I so filled with tenderness and interest! Can it be, dear Somerset, that you are under the empire of these outworn scruples? or that you judge a patriot by the morality of the religious tract? I thought you were a good agnostic." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... theories.[126] The peculiar forms adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impassioned exposition which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... Welsford, Mithridates Minor, p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his time, see Monk's Life of Bentley, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the leading representative of the Scottish School; Bentham is known as the advocate of utilitarianism; Mill, an exponent of the traditional empiricism of English thinking, develops the theory of induction and the principle of utility; Spencer combines an agnostic doctrine of the absolute and thoroughgoing evolution in the phenomenal world into a comprehensive philosophical system.[2] In recent years there has been a reaction against empirical doctrines on the basis of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian principles. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of English law and society in order to take up ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Philosophy—humbler perhaps and more practical, but not less profound than any vain attempt to discover to finite conception the Absolute as it is in itself. Therefore it is that the efforts of negative and agnostic criticism to dispense with the recognition of Reality as a necessary postulate of our activity are foredoomed to failure. They leave us not a solitude which we might pretend to be peace, but a seething sea of troubles urgently demanding ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, "Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!" as I stooped over him. I ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... interesting "Song of the Harper," which is found on the same Harris Papyrus, is also fully edited and collated with the parallel texts from the Theban tombs, and compared with other writings dealing with death from the agnostic point of view. The following extracts are translated from ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... intervals of ennui and discontent. Intervals too of poetic enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then—a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern test ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... theology, and he was quite aware of it. He was content with the thought that he had found fragments of true ore. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of classifying him. One would be inclined to place him as a Theist, yet can we give any other name but Agnostic to a man who speaks ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... problems is the best and highest contribution that they can make to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a brewery or a bank. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of English law and society in order to take ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... "Occult" have done my reputation in this narrow provincial town much harm. I have been sneered at as a "spiritualist," a "spook hunter," an "agnostic." I am none of the three. I am a seeker after Truth; even while fully aware of the impossibility of absolutely finding that elusive quality. Nor do my researches in any way conflict with revealed religion, nor in the simple Bible faith that has ever ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour^, heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort [Fr.], freethinker, latitudinarian, rationalist; materialist, positivist, nihilist, agnostic, somatist^, theophobist^. V. be irreligious &c adj.; disbelieve, lack faith; doubt, question &c 485. dechristianize^. Adj. irreligious; indevout^; undevout^; devoutless^, godless, graceless; ungodly, unholy, unsanctified^, unhallowed; atheistic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... another course open to you, a course which, terrible as it is, is better than the one that you are now following, because it is more honest. Be honest with yourselves and each other, and, what is of more consequence, be honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... more leisure and opportunity for such feeling. In the second century B.C. old Cato had described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting at their meal in front of the image of the Lar[378]. We may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with that revival ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... his village; but the moment he discovered that the teaching about Jehovah was opposed to their Heathen customs, he sternly forbade us. One day, during my address, he blossomed out into a full-fledged and pronounced Agnostic (with as much reason at his back as the European type!), and ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... opposition from the apathy which had fallen upon it after its defeat at the polls. Churchill roused the Conservatives and gave them a fighting issue, by putting himself at the head of the resistance to Mr Bradlaugh, the member for Northampton, who, though an avowed atheist or agnostic, was prepared to take the parliamentary oath. Sir Stafford Northcote, the Conservative leader in the Lower House, was forced to take a strong line on this difficult question by the energy of the fourth party, who in this case clearly expressed the views of the bulk of the opposition. The long and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... of the schools behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... all, your physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... privileged to learn Darwin's argument before it was given to the world; but the greatness of the book, mere instalment as it was of the long accumulated mass of notes, almost took him by surprise. Before this time, he had taken up a thoroughly agnostic attitude with regard to the species question, for he could not accept the creational theory, yet sought in vain among the transmutationists for any cause adequate to produce transmutation. He had had many talks ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things—modesty in the biographer and mystery in ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... itself is what is called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look upon the knifing as merely a means of removing objectionable ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... are perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a contemplation. The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully apprehended. And so the Liszt symphony of the nineteenth century ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... without ever having heard of the term, he was an agnostic, but not one of the self-complacent, superior type who fancy that they have developed themselves beyond the trammels of faith and are ever ready to make the world aware ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Christianity in Japan in view of the labour and money devoted by different religious bodies to its propagation for many years past. There is, let me add, no marked hostility to Christianity in Japan—only indifference. The educated Japanese of to-day is, I believe, for the most part an agnostic, and he views Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity alike, except in so far as he regards the first two as more or less national and ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... gentle seeker, a sympathetic friend. Why not? That is possible with us; for the very bond of our union is sympathetic regard for one another's freedom. It is also specially possible with us because our teachings do not, at all events, outrage the reason and shock the moral sense. Even an agnostic might listen to us and hope that our Gospel ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the place where they lived, as ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... reflection will serve to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... neuropath often peruses certain agnostic works, the result usually being deplorable, for this class are dependent on some stable base outside themselves, such as is found in a calm religion manifested in a steadfast attempt to overcome the weakness of the flesh, by ordering life in accordance with ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the absolute entirety of any given play). "The Author" or "Shakespeare" is not a syndicate (like the Homer of many critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the male sex. As to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is "agnostic." He himself is not Anti-Baconian. He does not oust Bacon and put the Unknown in his place. He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may have contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work. To ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... intense, and most formative. Nor could it be otherwise with a Capitalist enterprise whose directing motive was not conversion or even expression, but mere gain. There was nothing to distinguish a large daily paper owned by a Jew from one owned by an Agnostic or a Catholic. Necessity of expression compelled the creation of a Free Press in connection with this ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... one like himself must be the fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill somewhere in South Africa "his church." It was not his ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... late enough to be truly Liberal. Old prejudices about "this England," old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, we might find in ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the thesis that fashion has a great deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic; perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly as there are tides in the fashion of dress. There was a Weismann tide, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... saluting me in the fashion of his people, gave me to know that he welcomed me to the land of spirits, and that he was deputed to carry me to the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. I am no Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Dinah and Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had lost his faith, and he no longer believed ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... talk foolishness. They think, but they do not know," rejoined this Hyperborean agnostic, as positively and as ignorantly as if he had been a ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... "She has had an enormous influence upon her. She has taught Hadria to see that one may hold one's own ideas quietly, without flying in everybody's face. Lady Engleton is a pronounced agnostic, yet she never misses a Sunday at Craddock Church, and I am glad to see that Hadria is following her example. It must be a great satisfaction to you, Hubert. People used to talk unpleasantly about Hadria's extremely irregular attendance. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... ignorance. This doctrine of identity or nonduality (advaitha) lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This Being which is devoid of qualities (nirguna), because incomprehensible to man, can be of no comfort to him. In this respect the Hindu is an agnostic of a profound type. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... days they man or woman who was moved by the enthusiasm of humanity put on robe or veil and swore celibacy and obedience, can really be practised quite as well without religious vows, peculiar dress, articles of religion, papal allegiance, or anything of the kind. The doubter, the agnostic, the atheist, may as truly sacrifice himself and give up his life for humanity as the most saintly of the faithful. There was an enthusiast fifteen years ago who cheerfully endured prison and exile, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... and destroyed, for the mind would have become engaged with something that was beneficial and helpful. And remember this: God is good, and it is His pleasure to help those who are seeking to help themselves. Or to put it in a way that even our agnostic friends can receive, Nature is on the side of the man or woman who is seeking to live naturally, that is, rightly. Hence, substitute good thoughts for the worrying thoughts and the latter will fade away as do the mist and fog ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... course, he assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a clergyman. One who reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well think that Carlyle was throughout his life an atheist, or an agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... years old. Her labors were quite heavy for the neat six years. At the end of that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill, she came under the influence of free-thinking friends and became an agnostic, which she remained through the rest of her life. This home was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her father. Through the advice of friends she sought comfort in travel ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but that I did not attain to the faith I hold without hard ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling—then in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... knowledge could lead him. We learn this from the concluding words of his chapter on religion "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."[86] ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... old-fashioned scheme of redemption, by which men have attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways of God to man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete. The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every one has a right to deduce ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... when they are formulated as creeds. These persons mean that they have no regard for group beliefs but only for those of the individual. Each has his own beliefs, and he must have confidence in them, for they are the grounds on which he acts, if he is a normal man. Even the faith of an Agnostic is based on a very positive belief. As for me, I feel that the churchman goes one step beyond him: he even doubts Doubt. Said Socrates: "I know nothing except this one thing, that I know nothing. The rest of you are ignorant even of this." Socrates was a great man. If he had been greater still, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... we've polished his wicked wits for him! Even his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has lost the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... is a thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the tradition of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... devote his life to their propagation, implies a development of opinion. He had entirely dropped his theology. In the early years of his London life, Mill had been only a rationalist. He had by this time become what would now be called an agnostic. He thought 'dogmatic atheism' absurd, says J. S. Mill;[6] 'but he held that we can know nothing whatever as to the origin of the world.' The occasion of the change, according to his family, was his intercourse with General Miranda, who was sitting at Bentham's feet about ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... silliness; in literature, an intemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue; chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat for a ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... how, a short time previous to his death, Col. Robert Ingersoli, the agnostic lecturer, gave out a thesis with the above title, offering a negative conclusion. Some discussion ensued in public print; the question was debated hotly, and whole columns of pros and cons were inflicted on the suffering public by the theologues who ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness of my nature. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic." ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... founded by Pyrrho (4th contury B.C.). He advocated "suspension of judgment," and taught the relativity of knowledge and impossibility of proof. The school is not unlike the Agnostic school. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... "agnostic'' was invented by Huxley in 1869 to describe the philosophical and religious attitude of those who hold that we can have scientific or real knowledge of phenomena only, and that so far as what may lie behind phenomena is concerned—God, immortality, &c.—there is no evidence which entitles ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... her great surprise that so secret and private a matter should have been correctly stated. Mrs. Nicol then explained that she and her husband, both connected with journalism and both absolutely agnostic, had discovered that she had the power of automatic writing. That while, using this power she had received communications purporting to come from Fred Bridger whom they had known in life, and that upon reading ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the while impressed with a profound and sad conviction that the machine is in a bad way, and certain to smash up, whatever is done? Consequently we have just such weak documents as this encyclical letter, emanating now from an eminent agnostic scientist, now from a millionnaire "philanthropist" and now from the Pope—all conflicting with each other, the first denying that man has any more rights than a rattlesnake, the second lauding a "triumphant democracy" which has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, with a life of his own which made him incurious ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... a Catholic. His mother was an American Catholic, rather strict and narrow. His brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the brothers, K——, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's sake, was so ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... spiritual beings while we do not know how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... in the course of the prolific verbosity of pontificated dogma which has graced the scroll of medical science, whole libraries have been written—and ably written, too—by skillful pens for the sole purpose of covering the simple nudity of the agnostic position of science—the dreaded, confidence-shattering admission: "I ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... orthodoxy; and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... 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, powers which are forever ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... (in imprisonment) And in an awful storm at sea she asked the mate what mizzen meant; It was a plucky act; if I'd neglected to report it you'd Never have known the depth and true dimensions of her fortitude. If you remain agnostic, if you hold it still not proven, I'll Give fifty more examples of her courage when a juvenile; They lie in my portfolio, all printed, filed and docketed, Including one in which a stick ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... under the shadow of the Cross, and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—as agnostic countries. But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. As he told his friend Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion—a kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God because it was all God—that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... science, for it assumed its position in an age of dense ignorance, and claimed too much infallibility to admit of enlightenment. Nevertheless, the Church feels the spirit of the age and slowly moves. At the present time it is being slowly permeated by the modern spirit of agnostic scepticism, which is another form ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... Sundays, despite all of the execrations of the priest, and the terrible threats of eternal damnation, he often dozes the Sabbath away unperturbed on the stove; and lets the women attend to the church going. Under Bolshevik rule Holy Russia will be Agnostic Russia; and it is a pity, for religious teaching was the guiding star of these poor people, and religious precepts, hard, gloomy and dismal though they were, the foundation of ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as "falling asleep in the Lord." "Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ages, insult the face of the sun any ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the lot of our suffering fellow creatures here on this earth. You can publish this if you please, but without suppressing any of it. If not and any notice is given of subscriptions as I see you are doing, I beg it may be notified that I send this mite as a reverent agnostic to our ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other shades of opinion are open to him, if he ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... state of settled gloom, I then became acutely anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic, atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely discussed the new school of ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... receive this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... talk and in soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... to believe literally in the devil, or in devils—concerning whose existence many persons will prefer to remain agnostic—in order to find in the figure of the devil, as he appears in Biblical and other literature, a convenient personification of certain forms of evil. There is an atmosphere of evil about us, a Kingdom ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... a Christian man, I did not dare to deny that miracles happened; as a reasonably humble man, I did not dare to deny that they happened at Lourdes; yet, I suppose, my attitude even up to now had been that of a reverent agnostic—the attitude, in fact, of a majority of Christians on this particular point—Christians, that is, who resemble the Apostle Thomas in his less agreeable aspect. I had heard and read a good deal about psychology, about the effect of mind on matter and of nerves ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... David, "are around him." "No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the work of God." ... The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that it's your duty to yourself—and to me—and to people who can know how to profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on the truth. I don't know what your Rixonitism is for if it won't let you wait upon the divine will in such a thing, too. You're more conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... was nearly opposite the entrance to Chancery Lane, and was for nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop of Mr. James Westell, whose career as ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... any additional details which Cowperwood might want to have taken into consideration. When he was ushered in, Cowperwood turned to him his keen, analytical eyes and saw at once a personality he liked. McKibben was just remote and artistic enough to suit him. He liked his clothes, his agnostic unreadableness, his social air. McKibben, on his part, caught the significance of the superior financial atmosphere at once. He noted Cowperwood's light-brown suit picked out with strands of red, his maroon ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... as the heathen temples are going into decay. If it does, Christianity will be as much benefited by it as the Japanese. The cast iron theology of the Anglo-Saxon race will not suit the Japanese. The works of agnostic scientists and liberals have already a strong hold on the Japanese. The Christianity of the past will have to be reformed and ameliorated to suit Japan. They will never appreciate the theology of the Andover creed, which has been versified as follows ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... man, however great and wise, could dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. We are ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... a satisfaction, even though it is not a delight, to come in contact with a mind like Mr. Hughes'; it is so definite, so hard and firm and palpable. You feel sure that it rests somewhere on the eternal verities. It is never agnostic. It has none of the malaise of the twentieth century. Mr. Justice Brandeis, when Mr. Hughes was governor of New York and a reformer and progressive, said of him, "His is the most enlightened mind of the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
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