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More "Unknowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the workings of my moral nature were concerned, when I needed strength to bear the ills which could not be averted, or do what conscience said was right, then I should pray. And, if I had done my best in the same direction, I should trust in the Unknowable for help. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... coming more and more to recognize some unknown factor in evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn—heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection—play upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about the original start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... other anaesthetics a quarter of a century still finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as a previous theory, I shall be content with ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the Bible, and, in many cases, even denies the existence of a personal God. All the students were required to conduct chapel prayers in turn. Those who did not believe in a personal God explained that they were pronouncing an apostrophe to the great impersonal and unknowable force working in the universe. I had read Channing, Clark, Hale, Emerson, and other conservative Unitarians, and found much food for my soul, but I discovered that these were considered old "fogies" and back numbers by most of the students ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave; then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur the thing ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... God is my deeper self and yours too. He is the self of the universe, and knows all about it.... By Deity we mean the all-controling consciousness of the universe, as well as the unfathomable, all unknowable, and ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... silhouette of quiet rest awaiting dawn; then at a flash, the doom, the quake, the breaking down of outline, the caving in of walls, followed by the sickening collapse in which life, wealth, and innumerable beating human hearts went down into the unseen and unknowable. He saw and he heard, but his eyes clung to but one point, his ears listened for but one cry. There at the extremity of a cornice, clinging to a bending beam, was the figure again—the woman of the ice-floe and the desert. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... separated from some human experience—there must be something behind subconsciousness to produce consciousness, and so on. But whatever the elements and origin of these so-called images are, that they DO stir deep emotional feelings and encourage their expression is a part of the unknowable we know. They do often arouse something that has not yet passed the border line between subconsciousness and consciousness—an artistic intuition (well named, but)—object and cause unknown!—here is a program!—conscious or subconscious what does it matter? Why try to trace any stream that ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... good thing about Vailima, I am away from the little bubble of the literary life. It is not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my BALLADS seem to have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I shall get into THAT galley any more. But I should like to know if you join the shrill chorus of the crickets. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conception is, of course, not necessarily mystical—it is rather a recurring type of metaphysics—but it has peculiarly suited the mystical mind and is often regarded by Christian historians as synonymous with mysticism. God, for Everard as for Dionysius and for Eckhart, Tauler, and Franck, is unknowable, unspeakable, unnamable, abstracted from all that is created and visible, an absolute One, alone of all beings in the universe able to say "I am," since He alone is Perfect Reality; but just for that reason He is unrevealable in His inmost nature to finite beings ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... to find some "float." He had wandered away from camp thirty miles before he remembered that he didn't know what float looked like. Then he thought he would go back and inquire. He got lost while in a dark brown study and drifted into the bosom of the unknowable. He didn't miss the trail until a perpendicular wall of the Rocky Mountains, about 900 feet high, rose up and hit ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... divine one, to declare to us precisely and in due order the sacred laws of each of the four chief castes and of the intermediate ones. For thou, O Lord, alone knowest the purport, the rites, and the knowledge of the soul taught in this whole ordinance of the self-existent which is unknowable and unfathomable."[111] They were not only sacred in origin but they dealt with sacred things, and Sir Henry Maine has drawn the broad conclusion that "there is no system of recorded law, literally ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the azoic age we have nothing in the universe but matter and force, and according to Mr. Spencer, not only an unknown force, but also an unseen and an unknowable force. Subsequent to the azoic period and now we have the earth full of life, intelligence and religion due to the unknown force. This unknown, unseen and unknowable force may be studied in the light of its manifestations and effects, Mr. Spencer to the contrary ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... the holy pearls should pass into profane custody. In this century also S. Elizabeth of Hungary shines out with sweetness and purity, while Eckhart (A.D. 1260-1329) proves himself a worthy inheritor of the Alexandrian Schools. Eckhart taught that "The Godhead is the absolute Essence (Wesen), unknowable not only by man but also by Itself; It is darkness and absolute indeterminateness, Nicht in contrast to Icht, or definite and knowable existence. Yet It is the potentiality of all things, and Its nature is, in a triadic process, to come to consciousness of Itself ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... not for you to waste your time in useless speculation as to the unknowable source of your life-stream, or in seeking to trace it in the ocean. It is enough for you that it is, and that, while it runs its brief course, it is yours to make it yield its blessings. For this you must train your hand ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... indeterminate, indefinite; ambiguous, equivocal; undefined, undefinable; confused &c (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; occasional; provisional. unauthentic, unauthenticated, unauthoritative; unascertained, unconfirmed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... are correcting our Bible for us (?) inform us that their same literary discovery holds good here—that this part of the book was not written by Isaiah. They assume to hand over this part of the book, knowingly, to the "Great Unknown" and unknowable prophets. The testimony of Luke contradicts the critics. He gives Isaiah full credit as the author of the statement. The reader will doubtless accept the fact that the inspired writer, the author of Luke's gospel, obtained his information at first hand, from God himself, who ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... Plato's categories or elements is the infinite. This is the negative of measure or limit; the unthinkable, the unknowable; of which nothing can be affirmed; the mixture or chaos which preceded distinct kinds in the creation of the world; the first vague impression of sense; the more or less which refuses to be reduced to rule, having certain affinities with evil, with pleasure, with ignorance, ...
— Philebus • Plato
... this idea be conscious or not? Such speculation can have value only if our anxiety be to determine whether we should more rightly admire the bees that have the idea, or nature that has planted it in them. Wherever it lodge, in the vast unknowable body or in the tiny ones that we see, it merits our deepest attention; nor may it be out of place here to observe that it is the habit we have of subordinating our wonder to accidents of origin or place, that so ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are bound to a long ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sort of experience, some strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily unknowable. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in their professed religious creeds and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... friends talked philosophically for some minutes about the secret, unknowable troubles, which differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, which were not perceived at first, give rise to in families, and then Roger de Salnis, who was still looking at Madame de Mascaret through his opera-glasses, said: ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... there is inserted a rod which is capable of taking that tension at a proper unit, the safety of the chimney is assured, as far as that tensile stress is concerned. Why should frightfully complex formulas be proposed, which bring in the unknowable modulus of elasticity of concrete and can only be solved by stages or dependence on the ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... not been responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money—whether by fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter. Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something" with it—something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his—at least half the loss was his—and others had no right to complain. But Julian was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... truths and imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains unanswered. In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was problematised and questioned). While Thomas was still convinced of the possibility of proving the existence of a God by the power of the human intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a God and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... drink; all want a remedy for the sorrows of the world. The Buddhists believe that it can be found in the destruction of desire, by renouncing the world and following the noble path of peace until death shall open the portals of the unknowable, everlasting stillness from which there is no return. The Confucianists say the remedy is found within the world by fulfilling all its duties and leaving to a greater Justice the future and its rewards. The Christians give a whispered message of ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... a sum in which the unknown and unknowable quantity determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called life,—it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much resembles,—and I am half inclined to think ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... done, we know but little more of what it really is, than we know what sulphur is made of. We know it is a colored fluid, and it is in all parts of the flesh and bone. We know it builds up heaps of flesh, but how, is the question that leads us to honor the unknowable law of life, by which it does the work of its mysterious construction of all forms found in the parts of man. In all our efforts to learn what it is, what it is made of, and what enters it as life and gives ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never heard the fellow to this question for confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought. Wherefore I beseech you let the dog and the onions ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... interests me in myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation—its relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it—which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not made vocal in these ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... death and decrepitude, whose understanding is fixed on renunciation, and whose eyes are always directed towards his own faults, soon succeeds in emancipating himself from the bonds that bind him.[25] He that sees his soul void of smell, of taste and touch, of sound, of belongings, of vision, and unknowable, becomes emancipated.[26] He who sees his soul devoid of the attributes of the five elements to be without form and cause, to be really destitute of attributes though enjoying them, becomes emancipated.[27] Abandoning, with the aid of the understanding, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... paths more inviting, Maritza concluded that they were nearing the end of the journey. For a moment on entering the defile her heart sank within her. It was like leaving the open world and the sunlight to creep into the dark unknowable, where some horrible fate might await her. Would she ever step freely into the open light of day again? Her thoughts sped backward to the tower standing above the pass and to the man she had left there. Which road had he taken—the ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable things—nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things—which, in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the English turn, has sent ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the tramp ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist! Beautiful to the poet's vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... quale of what they offer us. Hence, the nature of imagination must be of interest to us, and the more so, as we need not concern ourselves with the relation between being and imagination. It may be that things may exist in forms quite different from those in which we know them, perhaps even in unknowable forms. The idealist, according to some authorities, has set this possibility aside and given a scientific reply to those who ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Buffon says. We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, and embraced ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... certainly would not have understood. To feel for others what they do not feel for themselves is a distortion of sympathy which often afflicts me. Her discomfort was purely childish, a sudden fear of the dark night, the dark world, the ways of fortune so dark and unknowable. No self-questioning and no sting of conscience had any part in it. She had been happy, and she wanted to go on being happy; but now she was afraid she was going to be unhappy, and she shrank from unhappiness as from a toothache. I took ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... thought which denies that we can know anything of God, or of a future state. It does not say that there is no God, but simply that it is impossible for us to know anything of God. It would do away with all revelation and theology, and make us think of God as the great Unknown and Unknowable. ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Rachel's name in her argument he yielded and turned immediately to the subject of their lonesome residence in the haunted tomb. "If aught befall me," he said, "for I am in the unknowable hands of the Hathors, disguise thyself and Rachel. If thou art skilled in altering thou canst find pigment among the roots of the Nile. Dye her hair and stain her face, take the boat and go to my father's house in Memphis. He is Mentu, the murket to the Pharaoh—a patriot ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... smelled. There was a thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew—as if he knew—what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in her ear, and still his ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... this tremendous reality," he says. "We have tried to isolate the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, powers which are forever at work, and belong ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... disregarding the inscrutable will; for we must be directed by the Word, not by that inscrutable will (nobis spectandum est Verbum relinquendaque illa voluntas imperscrutabilis; Verbo enim nos dirigi, non voluntate illa inscrutabili oportet). Indeed, who could direct himself by that inscrutable and unknowable will? It is enough merely to know that there is such an inscrutable will in God; but what, why, and how far it wills, that is altogether unlawful for us to inquire into, to wish [to know], and to trouble or occupy ourselves with; on the contrary, we should fear ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Herbert Spencer says, in his "First Principles of Philosophy," (page 217): "Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, {129} emotion, thought: these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly retransformable ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... therefore, when she came into relation with a soul such as Wingfold, a soul so much more developed than herself, so much farther advanced in the knowledge of realities as having come through difficulties unknown and indeed at present unknowable to Barbara, she met one of her own house, and her life was fed from his, and began to grow faster. For he taught her to know the eternal man who bore witness to his father in the face of his perverse children, to know that his heart was the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... these supernatural personages from his prior belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Mueller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as in some ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... cruelty is too certain, and those to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for the sake of leniency in a given case. A great enemy to indifference, a great friend to indulgence, said Turgot of himself; and perhaps ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... fighting off the chill of loneliness that comes to the strongest of us when we face the unknowable, the empty void that there is no escaping. Dying there in the falling dusk, he was singing to himself as an Indian brave chants his death-song when the red flame of the ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... on the basis of the theory of evolution. He holds that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, which are the manifestation in our consciousness of things which in themselves are unknown; and that behind and below all is "the Unknowable,"—an inscrutable force, out of which the universe of matter and mind is developed, and which gives to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... fire! When at the close of four thousand Yugas the Earth thus became flooded with water, like one vast sea, and all mobile creatures were hushed in death, and the sun and the moon and the winds were all destroyed, and the Universe was devoid of planets and stars, the Supreme Being called Narayana, unknowable by the senses, adorned with a thousand heads and as many eyes and legs, became desirous of rest. And the serpent Sesha, looking terrible with his thousand hoods, and shining with the splendour of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and be ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... unopened for a while. I poured tobacco and cigars into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think things out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think? To set down the problem thus: Here am I, a man of infinite, almost unknowable latent possibilities, suddenly repossessed of the supreme power and glory of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out those same possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to the highest and noblest uses, and so justify myself before men? In some such ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... share our feelings thus far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to find, as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,—the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... called the Noumenon. The dictionary definition of these two words is as follows: "Phenomenon—the appearance which anything makes to our consciousness as distinguished from what it is in itself." "Noumenon—an unknown and unknowable substance or thing as it is in itself—the opposite to the Phenomenon or form through which it becomes known to the senses or the understanding" (Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary). Whether the dictionary be right in saying that the "noumena" of things are entirely ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... with man; but it tells us, as plainly, that, without a fiction of resemblance, the proper relation between Creator and creature, between God and man, is unattainable.[121] If one exists, for whom the fiction or fancy has been converted into fact—for whom the Unknowable has proved itself to contain the Knowable: the ball of fire to hold within it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the magnitude, not scorn for the extravagance, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a number of ideas foreign to Aristotle, which are found first in Philo the Jew and appear later in medival philosophy. Thus God as a Being absolutely unknowable, of whom negations alone are true just because he is the acme of perfection and bears no analogy to the imperfect things of our world; matter in our world as the origin of evil, and the existence of matter in the intelligible world—all these ideas will meet us again in Ibn ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... toward the door with a new fear in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. Who ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of "faith," that is, belief in things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl of about fifteen, in the Hartz Forest, in Germany, and who one day, as I was reading "The Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable," the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, "What! you read Kant? Why, I, that am a German born, don't understand him!"' This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out, in no measured ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to the important consideration of Law. At first sight it may appear to you that the wills and passions of mankind are so diverse and unknowable, that it would be absurd to suppose that they can be calculated, or rendered amenable to any law. But Professor Amos has pointed out that in proportion as we examine history, and compare the actions present and past of different nations ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... open slave markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't answer back as you would, and ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... shadowy ways of intuition, he knew his weakness in that merciless sea with no heart of warmth, that threatened the unknowable thing, vaguely but terribly guessed, namely, death. As regarded himself, he did not comprehend death. He, who had never known the time when he was not alive, could not conceive of the time when he would cease to ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... to soothe the weary eyes, Where ranges forth the spirit far and free? Through what strange realms and unfamiliar skies Tends her far course to lands of mystery? To lands unspeakable—beyond surmise, Where shapes unknowable to being spring, Till, faint of wing, the Fancy fails and dies Much wearied with the spirit's journeying, Ere sleep comes down to ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... therefore follow that He is not? It seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads on 'the threshold ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... infinite, because He is a form unlimited by matter; whereas in material things, the term "infinite" is applied to that which is deprived of any formal term. And form being known in itself, whereas matter cannot be known without form, it follows that the material infinite is in itself unknowable. But the formal infinite, God, is of Himself known; but He is unknown to us by reason of our feeble intellect, which in its present state has a natural aptitude for material objects only. Therefore we cannot know God in our present life except through material effects. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... makes feeling the basis of all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Often I forgot my meals, and when old Madge summoned me to my tea I found my dinner lying untouched upon the table. At night I read Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant—all those who have pried into what is unknowable. They are all fruitless and empty, barren of result, but prodigal of polysyllables, reminding me of men who, while digging for gold, have turned up many worms, and then exhibit them exultantly as being what they sought. At times a restless spirit ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... that," she said, "I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... impulse, it may be, to speculate in this direction—think such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that might be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a human heart to be true, I expect to find true—in greater forms, and without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. Why should I not ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... find it utterly impossible to achieve this. Mere faith by no means fulfilled my requirements. God, then, remained inaccessible—the mind fell back from every attempt to reach Him. He was unknowable, yet not unthinkable—that is to say, He was not unthinkable as Being, but only in particularisation and in realisation. I could know Him to Be; but in that alone where was any consolation?—I found it totally inadequate. It was ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... form, and the permanency of the ego—that is, immortality—would still be illogical, would not exist within the realm of science, but would carry us beyond the limitations of the human mind into the unknowable. Permanency of the ego—that is, individual immortality—would require a form of entity "X," in which it is not further transformable. This would be the case if the transformations of entity "X" are not completely reversible, but tend one definite ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... to sit in the veranda, talk, smoke, and listen, until his companions began to discuss such abstract questions as, "What is the real driving force of life?" or to argue on the philosophy of Buddhism, or Herbert Spencer's "Descriptive Sociology" and the "Unknowable." ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... world and almost from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened by suffering and meditation, as far remote from their fellow men as if they were already of the Future—these men look deeply into the distance, towards the unknowable land of the living ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... their faces eagerly. Would she recognise Billy Burr? And which was Dickie Lowe? Ah! those two must be the golden-haired twins about whom Mr. Owen had told her and Charlie three years ago, now no longer the foremost in the little procession, but as unknowable apart as ever, as they preceded the tenors. And there, behind all, was Mr. Owen's familiar face! Denys knelt with all the congregation, waiting and longing to hear his deep, strong voice in the collects which began the service. But it was a curate who read the prayers, ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... seventeen years since aeroplanes first took the air, seen them grow from tentative experimental structures of unknown and unknowable performance to highly scientific products, of which not only the performances (in speed, load-carrying capacity, and climb) are known, but of which the precise strength and degree of stability can be forecast ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply this now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually is such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so much as is God. Which thought? Which God?—are questions that have to be answered by bringing in again ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... amid that vast desolation of plain and mountain, their horses' hoofs barely audible. What imaginings of evil, what visions of the past, may have filled the half-crazed brain of the leading horseman is unknowable. He rode steadily against the black night wall, as though unconscious of his actions, yet forgetting no trick, no skill of the plains. But the equally silent man behind clung to him like a shadow of doom, watching his slightest motion—a Nemesis ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... sure, Twiggs had come riding like the devil's imps with some new warning from Cynthia. How could such planning fail? And failed it had not but for the honour of this gentleman, or perhaps some design of the Unknowable behind the machinery ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... men the exponents of the old spirit of sloth, indifference, and laxity were weeded out as fast as their terms of service expired, and their places filled from the same sources whence the company officers were drawn. Colonel Broadcastle was a diplomat as well as a disciplinarian. By some unknowable system of suggestion and example it came, little by little, to be regarded in Kenton City as "the thing" to belong to the Ninth. Before the capital was aware of the transformation, every company roster ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... eyes—eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the—face—bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... to the powers that with him dwell:— Inflowings that divulged not whence they came; And that secluded spirit unknowable, The mystery we make ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... spark of child-life which still lies smouldering in the hearts of us all, no matter how poor and sorrowful our beginnings. As we read, how the old memories come back to us! Old hopes, rosy with the expectation of the indefinite and unknowable. Old misgivings and fears; old rompings and holidays and precious idle hours. We know them all, and we know how true they are. We remember in our own case the very hour and day, and how it all happened and why, and what came ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... finally broke the silence. His tones were no longer those of the erudite pedant theorizing upon the abstract and the unknowable; but those of the man of action—determined, but tinged also by a note of indescribable hopelessness and grief which wrung an answering ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one ball at rest and we can not say (as anything absolute) which of the balls has lost and which has gained energy. If there is such a thing as absolute energy of motion it is something entirely unknowable to us. Take the solar system, supposed isolated. We may take as our origin of coordinates the center of gravity of the system. Or we may take an origin with respect to which the center of gravity of the solar system has any (constant) velocity. The ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... know those of the Universe, who has looked upon those of the Universe, who has heard those of the Universe. He is mightier than all might, upon whose incomprehensible Face no one is able to gaze. Beyond all mind does He exist in His own Form, Solitary and Unknowable. The Universal Mystery is He, the Universal Wisdom, of all things the Beginning. In Him are all Lights, all Life, and all Repose. He is the Beatitude of which all in the Universe are in need, for that they might ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into the inmost recesses of man's being. Thought was disease; morality was blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an Unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship. Man's nature was discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its Wants. It was an endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy—not the infinite, because it is too great, not the ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other words, were merely and altogether transcendent—He would also be merely and altogether unknowable, exactly as Agnosticism avers. His transcendent attributes, all that partakes of infinity, cannot—and that of necessity—become objects of immediate knowledge to finite minds; if He is to be known at all to us, He can only be so known by being manifested through ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... change in my course of reading and the current of my thoughts, my mind was restored to its normal condition. I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions; and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Christian alike are not so susceptible to spiritual influences as you, Medoline; so in harmony with the unseen and unknowable as you are ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... ELLIOT'S elaborate and acute analyses, may get an impression of an obstinate old apriorist, a sort of White Knight of Philosophyland, with all manner of reasoned-out "inventions" at his saddle-bow (labelled "Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," "Unknowable," "Ghost Theory," "Presentative-Representative"), which don't seem, somehow, as helpful as their inventor assumes. And 'tis certain he took tosses into many of the pits of his dangerous deductive method. I don't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too religious and too sanguine to merit either ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and indeed do not, suit many of us. The worst of definite religions is that they are too definite. They try to enforce upon us a belief in things which we find incredible, or perhaps think to be simply unknowable; or they make out certain practices to be important, which we do not think important. We must never do violence to our minds and souls by professing to believe what we do not believe, or to think things certain which we honestly believe to be uncertain; ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said, thinking aloud rather than speaking, "I have to do not with unknowable pasts or with mystic futures, but with the things of my own life. Ayesha waited for me through two thousand years; Atene could marry a man she hated for power's sake, and then could poison him, as perhaps she would poison me when I wearied ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... a conception that for Anaxagoras, as for the modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is the artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the Unknowable. But nous itself is the equivalent of that universal energy of motion which science recognizes as operating between the particles of matter, and which the theologist personifies as Deity. It is Pantheistic deity as Anaxagoras conceives it; his may be called the first ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction to the Tao-te-king, pp. x-xv. ("Le Livre de la Voie et ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some misfortune were awaiting ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... him down in unhesitating, absolute statements. He who mastered words so completely that he learned to despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... another and an unexpected way. Duty lies here, in and around him in this world. Here he can right wrong, succour the weak, abase the proud, do something to make the world better than he found it; and in the performance of this he finds a holier calm than the vain strivings after the unknowable could ever afford. Let him work while it is day, for "the night cometh, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... pillows, the face in shadow, his eyes closed. Margaret was still on her knees, her head on the coverlet. Mrs. Horn stood on the other side of the bed, the same calm, fixed expression on her face, as if she was trying to read the unknowable. Dr. Wallace sat on a chair beside his patient, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... super-consciousness is so indeterminate that it is not allowed to hamper itself with any purpose more definite than that of self-augmentation. The course and goal of Evolution are to it unknown and unknowable. Creation, freedom, and will are great things, as Mr. Balfour remarks, but we cannot lastingly admire them unless we know their drift. It is too haphazard a universe which Bergson displays. Joy does not seem to fit in with what is so aimless. It would be better to invoke God with a purpose than ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... find it? Only through those doors Which, opening inward, in each separate soul Give each man access to that Soul of all Living within each life, not to be found Or known, till, looking inward, each alone Meets the unknowable and eternal God. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... go back from my digression, it was, as I have said, I had amazement at perceiving, in memory, the unknowable sunshine and splendour of this age breaking so clear through my hitherto most vague and hazy visions; so that the ignorance of, Aesworpth was shouted to me by the things which ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point—the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... "something far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... tagged to an orthodox conclusion. They told me to believe a doctrine because it was totally impossible that I should know whether it was true or not, or indeed attach any real meaning to it whatever. The highest altar, as Sir W. Hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable God. Others, seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to find in that the Christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment of the highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... agent of our sufferings, we shall not meet any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in the unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly; will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the last which the imagination can touch with its wing? Lastly, if there were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... learned world followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about unknowable trifles. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... disorder in his young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which nobody is leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the unknowable truths. ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... gentlemen would make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious. Clarke knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and convulsed with an unknowable terror, faded slowly from his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months, when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, and a bottle ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... to relate her dream; and his face became grave again. Husband and wife gazed a moment into each other's eyes, feeling together the same strange thrill—that mysterious faint creeping, as of a wind passing, which is the awe of the Unknowable. Then they looked at the child, lying there, pink checked with the flush of the blood returning; and such a sudden tenderness touched them as they had known long years before, while together bending above the slumbering loveliness ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... understand that there are things knowable and things unknowable. He came to see that truest wisdom is in this: for one to spend well his strength on the knowable things and refuse to dissipate his intellectual vigor upon the unknowable. Not until he began really to know things was he conscious in any saving degree ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... he has no temptation to be wicked; he is incapable of immorality, so that he is easily quit of all inducements to be vicious; he has no passions, so that he is superior to every sort of spiritual contest; he is monstrous clever, so that he has made up his mind about everything knowable and unknowable; he is excessively virtuous so that he has made it up in the right direction. He is, as Mr. Leslie Stephen remarks, a tedious commentary on the truth of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acute reflection upon ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... desire of applause that men seek the leadership on the road to heaven, for what man so decried in the history of the world as he who arrogates to himself the place and name of Priest? And yet priest and poet are akin. The man who seeks the place of mediator and interpreter betwixt his fellows and the Unknowable must needs be an idealist, and if he deal with illusion who so ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... Knollys was gone, utterly gone; no more to be met with by his girl-wife, save as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she resolved to go—to go home. Her strength now gave way; and when her aunt left she had with her but the ghost of Mrs. Knollys—a broken ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the beginning of the Christian era was fitly expressed by those Athenians, who erected near the Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86] The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with which we have to do. Their {theos} was really nothing more than Mr. Herbert ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... he was able to be about the city with his nearly two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating, and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of the liquid foods from time to time, to save ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale. It is not engaged in decking out unknowable entities with arbitrary and fantastic properties. What then is it that science is doing, granting that it is effecting something of importance? My answer is that it is determining the character of things known, namely the character of apparent nature. But ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... possibility of a conflict between one of the Members of the League and one of these two Great Powers, insisting, if we will, that such a possibility is highly remote so far as the United States is concerned, and utterly unknowable so far as Russia is concerned; but none the ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... thinking the same thing. Is this it? The Blind Spot is a secret that man may not attain to. It is unknowable and akin to death. The Rhamda knows it. He couldn't head off the professor. He simply employed Dr. Holcomb's wisdom to trap him; now that he has him secure, he intends to hold him. It is for our ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call by ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. As the smoke drifts and shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most potent force in existence. All the hot ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... come to be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs the ultimate and antecedent causation the Unknowable. The philosophy of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or derided by ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... these particles was a conception that for Anaxagoras, as for the modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is the artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the Unknowable. But nous itself is the equivalent of that universal energy of motion which science recognizes as operating between the particles of matter, and which the theologist personifies as Deity. It is Pantheistic deity as Anaxagoras conceives it; his may be called the first scientific conception ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... assertion as almost any of the troubled race of mankind. For, if we set aside external circumstances of life, what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of uncompromising ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... ignorance of facts under an affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many millions of angels could dance on a needle's point; writing treatises "de omni re scibili," and on a good many things unknowable also; and teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not. This is a very vicious system of training for a man's mind, the more especially when it is supposed ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... epilogue to the main composition, on the prow of the Ship of Earth are grouped the loves, greeds, passions, griefs and spiritual cravings of man and woman, who come and go from the Unknown to the Unknowable. The great arms of Destiny, pushing and pointing, giving and taking, guide the way. Between the four panels of Life on the Earth, stand the Hermes, milestones of ancient Rome, here used as milestones upon the road of Time. Sea-creatures indicate our origin in the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... the dim, shadowy ways of intuition, he knew his weakness in that merciless sea with no heart of warmth, that threatened the unknowable thing, vaguely but terribly guessed, namely, death. As regarded himself, he did not comprehend death. He, who had never known the time when he was not alive, could not conceive of the time when he would ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... preachers of the doctrine of a "universe of mind-stuff." The hypothesis is "unthinkable." But the most serious thinker will agree with the Buddhist assertion that the relation of all phenomena to the unknowable is merely that of waves to sea. "Every [219] feeling and thought being but transitory," says Mr. Spencer, "an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being but transitory,—nay, the objects amid which life is passed, though less transitory, being ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Power, of which humanity is but a small and fugitive product, which was in its course of ever-changing manifestation before humanity was, and will continue through other manifestations when humanity has ceased to be." If, on the one hand, the philosophy of the unknowable of the Infinite may be held in a merely quasi-theistic or even atheistic way, were not its ablest expounders and defenders Hamilton and Dean Mansel? One would sup-pose that Dr. Dawson might discern at least as much of a divine foundation to Nature as Herbert ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... creeds and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... letter lay unopened for a while. I poured tobacco and cigars into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think things out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think? To set down the problem thus: Here am I, a man of infinite, almost unknowable latent possibilities, suddenly repossessed of the supreme power and glory of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out those same possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to the highest and noblest uses, and ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew—as if he knew—what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... beyond the water—something dim, mysterious, unknowable. It might be the "Islands of the Blest"; it might be the "sacred isle." One thing he asserted firmly: "Atlas upholds the broad Heaven ... standing on earth's verge with head and unwearied hands," while the clear-voiced Hesperides guarded their beautiful golden ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... speculative genius. That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says. We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... marked out before it. Concentrated thought, deep emotion and lofty purpose, in view of these objects, is supremely profitable. But what is there left worthy of thought for the Vedantist Yogi when the Divine Being is the unknowable and the Yogi himself the deluded child of (Maya) illusion and (avidya) ignorance—those twin enemies to all true and worthy knowledge? It cannot be elevating to detach the mind from things worldly and attach ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... here, and after them the Moslem iconoclasts, that the destruction became final. To these new believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined themselves to be possessed of the ultimate religious formula and to know by His right name the great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt of "false gods," the abomination of abominations, which it behoved ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... eyes consider the poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’ ‘I should,’ he said, ‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’ He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’ and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... was essentially of the truth; and therefore, when she came into relation with a soul such as Wingfold, a soul so much more developed than herself, so much farther advanced in the knowledge of realities as having come through difficulties unknown and indeed at present unknowable to Barbara, she met one of her own house, and her life was fed from his, and began to grow faster. For he taught her to know the eternal man who bore witness to his father in the face of his perverse children, to know that his heart was the heart of a child in truth and love, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... her breath; the intensity of the situation seemed to her, almost physically, straining tighter and tighter with every passing instant. She was awed, stricken; and Laura appeared to her to be all at once a woman transfigured, semi-angelic, unknowable, exalted. The solemnity of those prolonged, canorous syllables: "I require and charge you both, as ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed," weighed down upon her spirits with an almost intolerable majesty. Oh, it was all very well to speak ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Lest in the strong name of "reality" You mock yourselves anew with shapes of air, Lest it be you, agnostics, who re-write The fettering creeds of night, Affirm you know your own Unknowable, And lock the winged soul in a new hell; Lest it be you, lip-worshippers of Truth, Who break the heart of youth; Lest it be you, the realists, who fight With shadows, and forget your own pure light; Lest it be you who, with a little shroud Snatched ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... vague; indeterminate, indefinite; ambiguous, equivocal; undefined, undefinable; confused &c (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; occasional; provisional. unauthentic, unauthenticated, unauthoritative; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... who was forty-five years old and a bachelor, liked his spacemen tough, yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable at every step of the way, you ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... away the silent, thin, little man, he began to expand again. John saw him scaling heights, cutting a path through impenetrable forests, wading across dismal swamps, an ever-moving figure, seeking the hitherto unknowable and irreclaimable, introducing order where chaos reigned supreme, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... only the Unknowable, the rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in "Abred," passing into the different kingdoms; "Amwn" is the state through which beings pass only once, which means that the "I," when once gained, continues for ever. "Gwynvyd" is the world of perfect and liberated souls, eternal Heaven, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... powers would do what he might ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its differentiation from ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles," ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... It was, after all, the mystical foreign elements which gave point to—we may rightly say rounded off—the early dualism by converting it into monism, carrying philosophical speculation from the Knowable to the Unknowable, and furnishing the Chinese with their first scientific theory of the origin, not of the changes going on in the universe (on which they had already formed their opinions), but ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily unknowable. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mysterious vessels of Life, which are always being filled by Love and emptied by Logic. "The external world," says the Materialist—"Does not exist," says the Idealist. "'Tis immaterial if it does or not," says the Hermit. And what if the three are wrong? The Universe, knowable and unknowable, will it be affected a whit by it? If the German Professor's Chair of Logic and Philosophy were set up in the Hermitage, would anything be gained or lost? Let the I deny the stars, and they will nevertheless roll in silence above it. Let the not-I crush ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... such divine metaphysics. Hence he continued to disappear from his grandmother's parlour at much the same hour as before. In the cold, desolate garret, he knelt and cried out into that which lay beyond the thought that cried, the unknowable infinite, after the God that may be known as surely as a little child knows his mysterious mother. And from behind him, the pale-blue, star-crowded sky shone upon his head, through the window that looked ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... plainly, that, without a fiction of resemblance, the proper relation between Creator and creature, between God and man, is unattainable.[121] If one exists, for whom the fiction or fancy has been converted into fact—for whom the Unknowable has proved itself to contain the Knowable: the ball of fire to hold within it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the magnitude, not scorn for ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... foreknown, the ignorance of them does not detract from the perfectness of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot make two and two five. Omnipotence cannot do what is intrinsically impossible. No more can Omniscience know what is intrinsically unknowable. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... and in the cases of ether and the other anaesthetics a quarter of a century still finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as a ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... turned toward the door with a new fear in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. Who ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... mind of the ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and be ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... whose secrets are beyond the reach of any intellectual aeronaut. But it is a part of the theistic creed that such a region is; and that the things that pass understanding are the most important things of life. Nothing would be gained, however, by postulating merely a mystery—an unknowable. This must be so far known by the theist, that he knows its connection with himself. He must know, too, that if this connection is to have any effect on him, it must be not merely temporary, but permanent and indissoluble. Such a connection he finds in his two distinctive ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... winds. Charles Knollys was gone, utterly gone; no more to be met with by his girl-wife, save as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she resolved to go—to go home. Her strength now gave way; and when her aunt left she had with her but the ghost of Mrs. Knollys—a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... and returned with the Kid to make Madeline's acquaintance. After that came a period such as the cabin had never seen before, and what with cutting, and fitting, and basting, and stitching, and numerous other wonderful and unknowable things, the male conspirators were more often banished the premises than not. At such times the Opera House opened its double ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... follow Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us. Yet it never actually disappears. There would seem to be inevitable a sort of kernel of matter or prick of sense about which all our thoughts are generated. Yet this residue is a vanishing quantity. This seemed to Fichte to be ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains unanswered. In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was problematised and questioned). While Thomas was still convinced of the possibility of proving the existence of a God by the power of the human intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a God and the immortality ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of ideas foreign to Aristotle, which are found first in Philo the Jew and appear later in medival philosophy. Thus God as a Being absolutely unknowable, of whom negations alone are true just because he is the acme of perfection and bears no analogy to the imperfect things of our world; matter in our world as the origin of evil, and the existence of matter in the intelligible world—all these ideas will meet ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... commercial and domestic, the professional and political affairs of daily living. We have been insisting in these chapters that it is that portion of human need and experience which lies between the knowable and the unknowable with which it is the preacher's chief province to deal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to its intuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights. There is a native alliance between the doctrine ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... December, and to all appearances he had settled down in his new residence with complete resignation, when that unknowable factor that upsets so many calculations came upon the scene,—the factor, I mean, that ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... belief in the unknowable, and the dire consequences arising from fanaticism, are ably depicted in the following passages, selected from Lecture ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... utterly impossible to achieve this. Mere faith by no means fulfilled my requirements. God, then, remained inaccessible—the mind fell back from every attempt to reach Him. He was unknowable, yet not unthinkable—that is to say, He was not unthinkable as Being, but only in particularisation and in realisation. I could know Him to Be; but in that alone where was any consolation?—I found it totally inadequate. ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... begins. There is a vague fear which springs from an unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable, unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of mind over soul, power of calm over fear avail nothing; suspense and misery, locked arm in arm, pervade ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... written. The doctrine has been attacked from two sides. Some thinkers, among whom are the late Professor Ferrier, in his Institutes of Metaphysic, and Professor John Grote, in his Exploratio Philosophica, appear to deny altogether the reality of Noumena, or Things in themselves—of an unknowable substratum or support for the sensations which we experience, and which, according to the theory, constitute all our knowledge of an external world. It seems to me, however, that in Professor Grote's case ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... for the past or future scene; while, to the ordinary observer, the scene progresses in sequence, the present being followed by something else which is at this moment "in the future," and therefore, unknowable. To the senses of the ordinary observer only the present is in existence; while, in fact, the "future" is equally truly in existence at the same time, although not evident to the senses of the observer. Think over this a little, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... define Deity as "the great unknowable;" but Christian Science brings God much nearer to man, and makes Him better known as ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... verse, was inspired a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife. Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: "There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... attain to proved certainties in this life—at least, you can't at present. I don't say that there are not certainties—indeed, I think that it is all certainty, and that we mustn't confuse the unknown with the unknowable. As you go on, if you are fair-minded and sympathetic, you will get intuitions; you will discover gradually exactly what you are worth, and what you can do, and how you can do it best. But don't expect to know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the plan of a great philosophical work. The common bounds of human knowledge are too narrow for his warm and aspiring imagination. He must go 'extra flammantia maenia Mundi', and explore the unknown and unknowable regions of metaphysics; which open an unbounded field for the excursion of an ardent imagination; where endless conjectures supply the defect of unattainable knowledge, and too often usurp both its name and ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point—the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel to make lucid ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... world outside ourselves. But the things-in-themselves which the sense-impressions symbolize, the 'reality,' as the metaphysicians wish to call it, at the other end of the nerve, remains unknown and is unknowable. Reality of the external world lies for science and for us in combinations of form and color and touch—sense-impressions as widely divergent from the thing 'at the other end of the nerve' as the sound of the telephone from ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too religious and too sanguine to merit ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... dear Mr. Holcroft," said C——, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, "you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl, about fifteen, that I met with in the Hartz forest in Germany—and who one day, as I was reading the Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable, the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, What, you read Kant? Why, I that am a German born, don't understand him!" This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out in no measured tone, "Mr. C——, you are ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Agnosticism, arbitrarily tagged to an orthodox conclusion. They told me to believe a doctrine because it was totally impossible that I should know whether it was true or not, or indeed attach any real meaning to it whatever. The highest altar, as Sir W. Hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable God. Others, seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to find in that the Christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment of the highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has caught some ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been described may possibly carry us one step further, proving to us that these things are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the organic ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the unknowable truths. ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... something that is forbidden, when that something is not sufficiently defined according to the general conceptions of requisite certainty in our criminal law, is not rendered sufficiently definite by that unknowable having been done 'willfully.' It is true also of a statute that it cannot lift itself up by its bootstraps."[55] In Williams v. United States,[56] however, it was held by a sharply divided Court that Sec. 20 did not err for vagueness where the indictment made it clear that the constitutional ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... vivacity, asked us in less than a quarter of an hour one dozen questions, to answer which would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly pledged herself to make a restoration of him ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some misfortune were awaiting me there. Why? Is it ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of potential, but in itself ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!' What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... ion[TN-1] shows that it does not relate to contradictories. But certain concrete analytic propositions, relating to contraries, do have this form. The contrary as distinguished from the privative. The Conditioned and Unconditioned, the Knowable and Unknowable are not true contradictions. The synthesis of contraries is ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... promising, but can we stop where Bergson has left us? Why should he banish teleology? His super-consciousness is so indeterminate that it is not allowed to hamper itself with any purpose more definite than that of self-augmentation. The course and goal of Evolution are to it unknown and unknowable. Creation, freedom, and will are great things, as Mr. Balfour remarks, but we cannot lastingly admire them unless we know their drift. It is too haphazard a universe which Bergson displays. Joy does not ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... to leave what he is doing and listen. And when in some depth of need he sends a message, then, because no other ear than his may catch the answer given, is there for that reason none? The soul is like science; it cannot break through its boundaries and burst in upon the unknowable that surrounds its little realm of knowledge, but wherever it presses against these barriers they recede without being destroyed, and the adventurer, still in his own domain, brings back new treasures to the old life. The source of power is, we ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... sighed in sympathy with the unknown, and, judging by his niece's expression, the unknowable. He rearranged the teacups, and, going to the kitchen, returned in a few minutes with a ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... fresh species of stoic, even more stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man has cut loose from leading-strings; he stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day's work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, or whatever it shall be called, has appointed. Observation tells me that modern man at large, far from inclining towards the new, personal, elder-brotherly God of Mr. Wells, has turned his ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... who did more to open out new tracks in the scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable—without form or attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like immense waves of light, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... expressed by those Athenians, who erected near the Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86] The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with which we have to do. Their {theos} ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... substance, however, being to us nothing but either that which causes, or that which is conscious of, phenomena; and the same being true, mutatis mutandis, of attributes; no assertion can be made, at least with a meaning, concerning these unknown and unknowable entities, except in virtue of the Phenomena by which alone they manifest themselves to our faculties. When we say Socrates was contemporary with the Peloponnesian war, the foundation of this assertion, as of all assertions concerning substances, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... And which was Dickie Lowe? Ah! those two must be the golden-haired twins about whom Mr. Owen had told her and Charlie three years ago, now no longer the foremost in the little procession, but as unknowable apart as ever, as they preceded the tenors. And there, behind all, was Mr. Owen's familiar face! Denys knelt with all the congregation, waiting and longing to hear his deep, strong voice in the collects which began the service. But it was a curate who read the prayers, and the words ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my BALLADS seem to have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I shall get into THAT galley any more. But I should like to know if you join the shrill chorus of the ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almighty. It is first of all a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "unknowable" to us has to ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Tyndall, Mr. John Morley and Sir James Stephen, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, and Dean Church, would gather around to hear and discuss a paper read by one of the members upon such questions as: 'What is death?' 'Is God unknowable?' or 'The nature of the Moral Principle'. Sometimes, however, the speculations of the Society ranged in other directions. 'I think the paper that interested me most of all that were ever read at our meetings,' says Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, 'was one ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... returned in October. It consisted of several ships and about three hundred men. That John and Sebastian Cabot sailed on this voyage. When it returned is not known. From the time of sailing of this expedition John Cabot vanishes into the unknowable, and from thenceforth Sebastian alone appears ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... the other hand, if the blind acceptance of authority appears to him in its true colours, as mere private judgment in excelsis, and if he have the courage to stand alone, face to face with the abyss of the Eternal and Unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not only to renounce the good things promised by "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Cause. Lao-tseu uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction to the Tao-te-king, pp. x-xv. ("Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu." ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... all tradition, goes on his way unmoved. And why shouldn't he? He may be, and generally is, sadly in need of a woman friend, "some one to share his joys and sorrows with", but because he knows few women is no reason why he should stand afar off and adore the unknowable. "Friendly like" is what appeals to us all; and the bush-folk are only men, not monstrosities—rough, untutored men for the most part. The difficult part to understand is how any woman can choose to stand aloof and freeze, with warm-hearted ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... weeks he was able to be about the city with his nearly two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating, and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of the liquid foods from time to time, to save me in ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... she is in herself unknowable. Aristotle teaches: there is nothing in the intellect which hath not first been in the senses, and the senses cannot penetrate beyond experience. But what the mind cannot grasp directly it may come to comprehend by a roundabout way. When we consider her ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... with mysticism of every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious. Clarke knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and convulsed with an unknowable terror, faded slowly from his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months, when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... eyes staring glassily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing. He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the will of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the questions which trouble youth. He had never wondered at anything. Wonder—the lovely mistress of wisdom—had taught him none of her secrets. Dead certainty had dogged his steps from his first appearance on this unknowable world. Once, when a very little boy, he admired a vase full of pink roses. "They will keep twice as long," said his nurse, "in dirty water. It is such a waste to put fresh water on roses!" This remark—slight in itself—remained ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... that is, belief in things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or otherwise ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the powers that with him dwell:— Inflowings that divulged not whence they came; And that secluded spirit unknowable, The mystery we make darker with ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... generally feel toward God, when he contemplates his "Conscious Principle," or his "Idea," or the "Substance" which he conceives as the identity of thought and extension, or, for that matter, "Mind-Stuff" or the "Unknowable." That other men may not see that he has anything in particular to be inspired about, or that he can hope for anything in particular for himself or for other men, does not rob him of his inspiration, and that may affect ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... themselves right. Meanwhile, let them learn that Occultism differs from Magic and other secret Sciences as the glorious Sun does from a rush-light, as the immutable and immortal Spirit of Man—the reflection of the absolute, causeless, and unknowable all,—differs from the mortal ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... knew To vision of that one Power which guides the world. How should men find it? Only through those doors Which, opening inward, in each separate soul Give each man access to that Soul of all Living within each life, not to be found Or known, till, looking inward, each alone Meets the unknowable and eternal God. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... confirm this conjecture. He, too, makes feeling the basis of all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and matter is ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... to live at his father's house at Sheen. After King William and Queen Mary were actually placed on the throne, Sir William Temple, in 1689, permitted his son to accept the office of Secretary at War. For reasons now obscure and unknowable, he drowned himself in the Thames within a week of his acceptance of office, ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... irrational to doubt that he went further, to find, as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,—the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, lies ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... position, which was never materially changed. His thoughts ran in the old grooves, though perhaps with a rather clearer perception of their direction. In June 1884 he published an article upon the 'Unknown and the Unknowable' in the 'Nineteenth Century,' declaring that Mr. Herbert Spencer's 'Unknowable' and Mr. Harrison's 'Humanity' were mere shadowy figments. 'Religion,' he maintains, will not survive theology. To this, however, he adds, with rather surprising calmness, that morality will ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... camp thirty miles before he remembered that he didn't know what float looked like. Then he thought he would go back and inquire. He got lost while in a dark brown study and drifted into the bosom of the unknowable. He didn't miss the trail until a perpendicular wall of the Rocky Mountains, about 900 feet high, rose up and hit him athwart ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can't know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... so will the ocean of veritable mystery stretch out further and further: the mystery of life, its aim and its origin; the mystery of thought; the mystery that has been called "the primitive accident," or the "perhaps unknowable essence of reality." ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know under the terms of "The Material Universe"; the "Phenomena of Life"; "Matter"; "Energy"; and, in short, all that is apparent to our material senses) is SPIRIT which in itself is UNKNOWABLE and UNDEFINABLE, but which may be considered and thought of as AN UNIVERSAL, INFINITE, LIVING MIND. It also explains that all the phenomenal world or universe is simply a Mental Creation of THE ALL, subject to the Laws of Created Things, and that the universe, as ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the "Unknowable," however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader's attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which it occupies his thought will tend ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... is God.... My God is my deeper self and yours too. He is the self of the universe, and knows all about it.... By Deity we mean the all-controling consciousness of the universe, as well as the unfathomable, all unknowable, and unknowable abyss ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... mysterious influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, as if some misfortune were ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... poetry stir up a class of readers which no other literature seems to reach, and Hawthorne was soon inundated with letters from unknown, and perhaps unknowable, admirers; but the most remarkable came from a man named Pyncheon, who asserted that his grandfather had been a judge in Salem, and who was highly indignant at the use which Hawthorne had made ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... because He is a form unlimited by matter; whereas in material things, the term "infinite" is applied to that which is deprived of any formal term. And form being known in itself, whereas matter cannot be known without form, it follows that the material infinite is in itself unknowable. But the formal infinite, God, is of Himself known; but He is unknown to us by reason of our feeble intellect, which in its present state has a natural aptitude for material objects only. Therefore we cannot know God in our present life except through material effects. In the future life this ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... completely that he learned to despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... asks that these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie between ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the Devil to forswear the study of history altogether as the pursuit of the Unknowable. 'How is it possible,' he whispers in our ear, as we stand gloomily regarding the portly calf-bound volumes without which no gentleman's library is complete, 'how is it possible to suppose that you have there, on your shelves— the actual facts of history—a true record ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any human gunner ever be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring me to the very middle of my guts. Your oath, Skipper, was for the good of the Service and, through the ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... guess that which we are. And in the deepest love of another being do we not indeed love ourselves? What are the personalities, the individualities of us but countless vibrations in the Universal Being? Are we not all One in the unknowable Ultimate? One with the inconceivable past? One with ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... for me to dwell upon the subsequent developments of this unhappy business—if I am right in calling it unhappy. The piteous little drama is played, both the actors are dead, and the issue of the piece is unknown and, for the present, unknowable. Bitterly opposed as I was to the suit of Merchison, justice compels me to say that, under the cloak of a rough unpromising manner, he hid a just and generous heart. Had that man lived he might have become great, although he would never have become ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... how far Emerson understood or misunderstood Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we need not be disturbed for his learning. It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that there is some real connection ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... M'Kenna, "the knowledge of that Darby More is unknowable! Here's a Carol I bought from him, an' if you wor but to hear the explanations he put to it! Why Father ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... shadow, his eyes closed. Margaret was still on her knees, her head on the coverlet. Mrs. Horn stood on the other side of the bed, the same calm, fixed expression on her face, as if she was trying to read the unknowable. Dr. Wallace sat on a chair beside his patient, his ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... not? It seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads on ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... is of metals, plants and animals) there is no breach of continuity; that "the living response in all its diverse modifications is only a repetition of responses seen in the inorganic" and that the phenomena of response "are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... be something behind subconsciousness to produce consciousness, and so on. But whatever the elements and origin of these so-called images are, that they DO stir deep emotional feelings and encourage their expression is a part of the unknowable we know. They do often arouse something that has not yet passed the border line between subconsciousness and consciousness—an artistic intuition (well named, but)—object and cause unknown!—here is a program!—conscious or subconscious what does it matter? Why try to trace any stream that flows ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... had owned to being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary could call to mind—and his imagination was never of the barren sort—Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact that ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... single ray of fertilising light. This religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the theory of evolution. He holds that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, which are the manifestation in our consciousness of things which in themselves are unknown; and that behind and below all is "the Unknowable,"—an inscrutable force, out of which the universe of matter and mind is developed, and which gives to it ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... cannot even be apprehended, and those who undertake to learn or to speculate regarding the infinite engage in a task beyond their powers. Such knowledge is not practical. The term "God" is merely an expression for a mode of the unknowable, conveying no meaning to those who use it. The view thus expressed originated in concessions unhappily made by certain writers, as Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, who, thinking to defend revealed ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... parsonage. Many commanders of fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... a way one would choose, and since near the entrance there were other paths more inviting, Maritza concluded that they were nearing the end of the journey. For a moment on entering the defile her heart sank within her. It was like leaving the open world and the sunlight to creep into the dark unknowable, where some horrible fate might await her. Would she ever step freely into the open light of day again? Her thoughts sped backward to the tower standing above the pass and to the man she had left there. Which road had he taken—the way ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... single spectator or apprehended by a single mind. The Critical Philosophy, although it intended to emphasise the subjective element in many apparent characteristics of the world, yet, by regarding the world in itself as unknowable, so concentrated attention upon the subjective representation that its subjectivity was soon forgotten. Having recognised the categories as the work of the mind, it was paralysed by its own recognition, and abandoned in despair the attempt to undo the work of subjective falsification. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... that the attesting miracle is superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to accept it on the faith of the miracle, for it might ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt with promptly: ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that might be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a human heart to be true, I expect to find true—in greater forms, and without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. Why ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... to argue the point any more. He ran into the same stone wall with all the Pyrrans. Theirs was a logic of the moment. The past and the future unchangeable, unknowable—and uninteresting. "How is the perimeter battle going?" he asked, wanting to ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into the Universal Spirit ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Spencer. The question remains, 'Which is the easier, the more probable, the more reasonable theory—that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid—a mysterious Unknown and Unknowable—which is neither mind nor matter?' For my own part, I see no reason to suppose that our inability to think of anything which is neither matter nor mind but quite unlike either is a mere imperfection of human thought. It seems more reasonable to assume that our inability to think of such a ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany Count ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of all created things. "The world by wisdom knew not God." The truth of this statement is monumented by the literature of the unbelievers of the nineteenth century. To-day, men who refuse Bible instruction talk of the unknown and the unknowable, thus conceding that their efforts as naturalists, or "natural men," are not sufficient in their results to disclose the character of the great first cause. The same great failure has been, and ever will be, made by all mere naturalists. ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... axiom that science is not a fairy tale. It is not engaged in decking out unknowable entities with arbitrary and fantastic properties. What then is it that science is doing, granting that it is effecting something of importance? My answer is that it is determining the character of things known, namely the character of apparent ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... serf; so also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great self-organized institution of mediaeval religion. Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God; study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this—to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy—must we ascribe, I think, the strange ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the second Table of the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... introduces metaphysics into natural history; he invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power, called the elan vital, on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific vitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical sort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is whether the living processes in nature can be resolved ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... or anyone else writes about 'the Unknowable' I care not. I KNOW IN WHOM I have believed. Joel, sing that last sequence again. Stand where I can see thee." And the lad's joyful ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... sense in nature, of "something far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... comfortably side by side, the mosque and the idol temple decorating the same street, and the praying-machines of the Lamas grinding out perpetual bliss without let or hinderance from those who believe in another way of reaching the ear of the Unknowable. This Utopian scene of universal toleration has not failed to attract the representatives of our own faith. The Moravians have long had an establishment on the south-eastern mountains, and we read of the conversion of the descendants of the last rajah of Kishtwar by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... independent of our seeing. He is thus led to regard the 'real' table as an idea in the mind of God. Such an idea has the required permanence and independence of ourselves, without being—as matter would otherwise be—something quite unknowable, in the sense that we can only infer it, and can never be directly and immediately aware ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
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