"Agnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Germany has not much use for religion except as a factor in government. The notorious spread of extreme agnosticism in the last quarter of a century renders it essential for the clergy to hold their places by stooping to the violence of the Professors. Mixed with their attitude of hostility to Britain is a considerable amount of professional ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... relief to me. I thought the present day young man was an agnostic! Isn't agnosticism all the thing ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... addition of the word "character." These results were reached after much discussion, and by the way of compromise. The issues thus raised were brought forward again at St. Louis, in 1885, when Rev. J.T. Sunderland, the secretary and missionary of the conference, deplored the growing spirit of agnosticism and scepticism in the Unitarian churches of the west. His report caused a division of opinion in the conference; and in the controversy that ensued the conservatives were represented by The Unitarian, edited by Rev. Brooke Herford and Rev. J.T. Sunderland, and the ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... influence of Confucius, B.C. 551-479, the old order of things began to undergo a change. The Sage's attitude of mind towards religion was one of a benevolent agnosticism, as summed up in his famous utterance, "Respect the spirits, but keep them at a distance." That he fully recognised the existence of a spirit world, though admitting that he knew nothing about it, is manifest from ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... religious principle is a curse rather than a blessing." And President M. E. Gates says: "In place of the fermenting despair of nihilism, the reckless immoralities of atheism, and the suicidal negations of agnosticism which have cursed liberally-educated Europe, if we are to have here in America an influence strong, binding and beneficient in our social system, as the result of collegiate education, it must be, it can be only by retaining ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... N. irreligion^, indevotion^; godlessness, ungodliness &c adj.; laxity, quietism. skepticism, doubt; unbelief, disbelief; incredulity, incredulousness &c adj.^; want of faith, want of belief; pyrrhonism; bout &c 485; agnosticism. atheism; deism; hylotheism^; materialism; positivism; nihilism. infidelity, freethinking, antichristianity^, rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that mechanical analysis which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: to the non-mechanical theory of man—that he is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... first order of importance and solid interest, we chiefly depend on modern books, such as Payne, Knight, Inman, Davies, Forlong; and there is quite a small library on that branch which touches on theosophy and similar speculations—all having a common source in the grand principle of Agnosticism. Further information will be found collected on this and the topics which we notice below in Hazlitt's Popular ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... hopeful philosophy, which recognizes "some soul of goodness, in things evil"; * which sees in human nature, "potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work". In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope. He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher, or poet, or divine, has been ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic — an actual republic is still a long way off — as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for freedom to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... little be bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a character. From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either of them.[1] {31} Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the demand ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... man has five senses, and no more, would that be wrong? Yet having myself only five senses, Icould not possibly prove that other men may not have a sixth sense, or at all events a disposition to develop it. But I am quite willing to carry my agnosticism, with regard to the inner life of animals, still further, and to say again what I wrote ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... life. There is none of the real 'love of God' found, for example, in the fervent as distinguished from the conventional Christian. And as ancestor-worship gradually loses its hold and dies out agnosticism ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... an echo. Where is the Environment to complete this rational soul? Men either find one—One—or spend the rest of their days in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must be forever incomplete. Still more grave becomes man's case when he begins further to explore his moral and social nature. The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... interesting to know whether any human heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain. Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life (see p. 184). One seems to ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... what is sometimes called "the religious instinct" in man, and that however coldly philosophers may reason, however sternly science may speak, there is in man some upwelling power which refuses to take the agnosticism of the intellect, as it refuses to accept the positivism of the senses; and with that every ruler of men has to deal, with that every statesman has to reckon. There is something in man which from time to time wells up with irresistible power, sweeping away every limit ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... point of closing the doors of its deserted temples because nations feel that its agnosticism in the economic field and its indifference in political and moral matters, causes, as it has already caused, the sure ruin of States. That is why all the political experiences of the contemporary world are anti-Liberal, and it is ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... a theory as to the effect of music upon the human heart,—a theory that will satisfy himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,—he is welcome to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism: if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... is one who, till the late 'seventies, was only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims—i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the Fortnightly Review; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate stage—marked by his editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette—the tone of the biography ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accustomed at Oxford to keeping his own opinions to himself on such subjects. What chance of sympathy or response was there for such a man as he in that coldly critical and calmly deliberative learned society? Not, of course, that all Oxford was wholly given over even then to extreme agnosticism. There were High Churchmen, and Low Churchmen, and Broad Churchmen enough, to be sure: men learned in the Fathers, and the Canons, and the Acts of the General Councils; men ready to argue on the intermediate state, or on the three witnesses, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen |
