"Agnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the impossibility of knowing anything beyond mundane life led Confucius practically to ignore divine agency. He did not deny the existence of Powers outside of men, but he declined to speak of them, regarding them as of no practical importance. This sort of agnosticism appears in Greece as early as the fifth century B.C., when Protagoras's view that "man is the measure of all things" makes extrahuman Powers superfluous. Epicurus reached a similar practical atheism apparently from a scientific view of the construction of the world. According to him there are gods, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... in them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy. Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in first. That there ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... whatever with our more earnest-minded juniors who—perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practice have, whatever their paradisial entree, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash—perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted to believe ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... it somewhat later than the measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or typhoidal cast,—not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... indevotion^; godlessness, ungodliness &c adj.; laxity, quietism. skepticism, doubt; unbelief, disbelief; incredulity, incredulousness &c adj.^; want of faith, want of belief; pyrrhonism; bout &c 485; agnosticism. atheism; deism; hylotheism^; materialism; positivism; nihilism. infidelity, freethinking, antichristianity^, rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour^, heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... between the vague hypotheses of 111:1 agnosticism, pantheism, theosophy, spiritualism, or millenarianism and the demonstrable truths of Chris- 111:3 tian Science; and I find the will, or sensuous reason of the human mind, to be opposed to the divine Mind as ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... was discussing with an acquaintance the not unfamiliar question of Immortality. I professed Agnosticism - strongly impregnated with incredulity. My friend had no misgivings, no doubts on the subject whatever. Absolute certainty is the prerogative of the orthodox. He had taken University honours, and was a man of high position at the Bar. I was curious to ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... is true that one of the favourite teachings of the positive school is, that as to this question the proper attitude is that of Agnosticism; in other words, that a state of perpetual suspense on this subject is the only rational one. They are asked, have we a soul, a will, and consequently any moral responsibility? And the answer is that they must ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... his duty upon one occasion to avow his disbelief in it; but he was too wise a man to suggest any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... men and women of this restless and eager generation—surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals—since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... men to allow an error if he were found in it. In one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, be declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring Brace's 'Gesta Christi'; or, 'History ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that mechanical analysis which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: to the non-mechanical theory of man—that he is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... magnificently written articles by him began to appear in his remarkable little magazine, The Dawn. And the Ingersoll of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ... and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty habits, their business traits, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... nine out of ten will answer: 'To die for His Majesty Our Emperor.' And the wish soars from the heart pure as any wish for martyrdom ever born. How much this sense of loyalty may or may not have been weakened in such great centres as Tokyo by the new agnosticism and by the rapid growth of other nineteenth-century ideas among the student class, I do not know; but in the country it remains as natural to boyhood as joy. Unreasoning it also is—unlike those loyal ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... philosophy, Hume shows himself the spiritual child and continuator of the work of Locke, he appears no less plainly as the parent of Kant and as the protagonist of that more modern way of thinking, which has been called "agnosticism," from its profession of an incapacity to discover the indispensable conditions of either positive or negative knowledge, in many propositions, respecting which, not only the vulgar, but philosophers of the more sanguine sort, revel in the luxury of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... are replies. But for the convenience of any who may wish to find them, I append their titles and places of publication. These are as follows:—"Retrogressive Religion," in The Nineteenth Century for July 1884; "Last Words about Agnosticism and the Religion of Humanity," in The Nineteenth Century for November 1884; a note to Prof. Cairns' Critique on the Study of Sociology, in The Fortnightly Review, for February 1875; "A Short Rejoinder" [to Mr. J. F. McLennan], Fortnightly Review, June 1877; ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... How could he let a human being suffer as this one was suffering? Quickly his thoughts shifted their basis. He could not affect the mind of the lawyer; might he reach now, perhaps, the soul of the man? He knew the difficulty, for before this his belief had crossed swords with the agnosticism of his uncle, an agnosticism shared by his father, in which he had been trained, from which he had broken free only five years before. He had faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out with the brightness of his new-found ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic — an actual republic is still a long way off — as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier |
