"Agnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neuropath often peruses certain agnostic works, the result usually being deplorable, for this class are dependent on some stable base outside themselves, such as is found in a calm religion manifested in a steadfast attempt to overcome the weakness of the flesh, by ordering life in accordance ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Goddess-like she had descended upon him from skies in which previously he had held no faith at all; and even yet it was a tussle for his conscience to accept anything coming from that quarter as really divine. He was agnostic; he did not like the Church, and he rather despised that attitude of mind which accepted miracle as a directing power in human affairs, and looked to an unseen world for the inspirations of life. It was as though ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... triumphed over their passions and have attained perfection. Buddhism succumbed to, and was absorbed by, a new militant Brahmanism, which we call Hinduism. Jainism, on the other hand, has maintained itself as a distinct faith and now has 1,334,148 followers. Like Buddhism, it is an agnostic religion, knowing no object of worship save the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism. Let me read ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... disease. If I were a Social reformer—and were I with my present knowledge still an ingenuous youth in the fulness of strength with my life before me I do not know that I would not be a Social reformer—I would profess myself a Social agnostic, and prosecute my mission by the methods of the opportunist. I would endeavor to direct the Social ax to the most obvious and obtrusive roots of the Social evil, and having removed them and watched the result, would then determine what to do next. Possibly I would ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... admitted that he was a reverent agnostic, and if Gibbon had been a reverent free-thinker these two chapters would have been far different in tone. Lecky regarded the Christian church as a great institution worthy of reverence and respect although he ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... to Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, 'Ya Hasan! ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill, she came under the influence of free-thinking friends and became an agnostic, which she remained through the rest of her life. This home was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her father. Through the advice of friends she sought comfort in travel on ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... priestess of humanity—the protectress of the purity of a thousand homes[A]—I am prepared to say that to have "no morals at all" is better than to accept such infamy and call it "morals"; as it is better to be an agnostic or an atheist than to worship a devil—to have no standard than to say: "Evil be ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the man, who, five years ago, had gone down at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver, not a nerve stirred in his face, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... differentiated in the course of development from the simplicity of their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This Being which is devoid of qualities (nirguna), because incomprehensible to man, can be of no comfort to him. In this respect the Hindu is an agnostic of a ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... of philosophy; 'impassibility'—this for the moral. The doctrine is a negation of doctrine, the idle dream of idle men; even Pyrrho once, when surprised in some sudden access of fear, confessed that it was hard for him 'to get rid of the man in himself.' Vigorous men and growing nations are never agnostic. They decline to rest in mere suspense; they are extremely the opposite of impassive; they believe ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... and revengeful, with an "Eternal that makes for righteousness." In the presence of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the Begriff of Providence, our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed by the perception of a Causa Causans (a misnomer), and to that intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of distinct statement but incapable ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... answer and the astronomer said to her, "Why dost thou not speak?" Quoth she, "I will not speak except the Commander of the Faithful give me leave." So the Caliph laughed and said, "How so?" Cried she "I would have thee give me a sword, that I may strike off his head, for he is an Infidel, an Agnostic, an Atheist.[FN421]" At this, loud laughed the Caliph and those about him laughed, and she continued "O astronomer, there are five things that none knoweth save Allah Almighty;" and she repeated the verset; "'Aye! Allah!—with Him is the knowledge of the hour ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Garden of Eden, Dinah and Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern ...
— Reginald • Saki
... book. Huxley was one of the few privileged to learn Darwin's argument before it was given to the world; but the greatness of the book, mere instalment as it was of the long accumulated mass of notes, almost took him by surprise. Before this time, he had taken up a thoroughly agnostic attitude with regard to the species question, for he could not accept the creational theory, yet sought in vain among the transmutationists for any cause adequate to produce transmutation. He had had many ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... only lead to Agnosticism. That is to say, it leaves a clear field of choice as between Theism and Atheism; and, therefore, to a carefully reasoning Monist, there are three alternatives open. He may remain a Monist, and nothing more; in which case he is an agnostic. He may entertain what appears to him independent evidence in favour of Theism, and thus he may become a theist. Or he may entertain what appears to him independent evidence in favour of Atheism, and ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... or later, he would forget for an instant and betray himself. Then he smiled, remembering the books he had discovered, in his late 'teens, on his father's shelves and recalling the character of the openminded agnostic lawyer. If he could only avoid the inevitable unmasking until he had a plausible ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look upon the knifing as merely a means of removing ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Cultivated fiddlesticks, madam! You cannot change this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it: when I don't believe it I say I don't believe it. I do not shirk my responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can believe nothing. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... mixed feelings. For Challis, the man of property, the man of high connections, of intimate associations with the world of science and letters, Crashaw had a feeling of awed respect; but in private he inveighed against the wickedness of Challis, the agnostic, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... places and at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... And I hurl a stern defiance at what other people say: Learning's torch I fiercely kindle, with my HAECKEL, HUXLEY, TYNDALL, And all preaching is a swindle, that's the motto of to-day. I'd give the wildest latitude to each agnostic attitude, And everything's a platitude that springs not from my mind: I've studied entomology, astronomy, conchology, And every other 'ology that anyone can find. I am a man of science, with my bottles on the shelf, I'm game to make a little world, and govern ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... am awaiting some ripening affairs in the F. O. I was called back on account of my familiarity with the Pamirs, and there's a good bit of Blue Book work that my knowledge of Penj Deh, and the whole Himalayan line has helped out." The captain was a bit agnostic now. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... would not believe it, even from you. I had an argument with young O'Connor, half-fun and half-earnest. He was an Agnostic, while I profess to be a Christian of no denomination—just a ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... writes:] "Do you remember me well?... I had a sad life in many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what real happiness was until I came here.... I was an unbeliever, in fact almost an agnostic when I left my body, but when I awoke and found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is, my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no struggling to hold on to the material body, I found it had all been a ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... scientific people, the affirmation which is the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted—not Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school of thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; he was far too scientific a man to crudely deny, far too scientific to be willing to speak positively of that ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... for true happiness and in his analysis of the meaning of life, he found no abiding joy, for his outlook was sadly circumscribed. Life beyond the grave offered to him no hope or compensation. He was, however, by no means an agnostic. He believed in God's rulership of the world; but the God of his faith was inscrutable, far removed from the life of men. Hence, unlike many of his contemporaries, as for example the psalmists, he found little joy or inspiration in his religion. According to the conclusion, which he proclaimed ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... are perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a contemplation. The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully apprehended. And so the Liszt symphony of the nineteenth century is not a complete reflection of the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... to any one but myself. But, as you ask, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates...In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... know nothing.'' But Arcesilaus went farther and denied the possibility of even the Socratic minimum of certainty: "I cannot know even whether I know or not.'' Thus from the dogmatism of the master the Academy plunged into the extremes of agnostic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... what the lawyers say? Can't you see how miserable I am, and how hollow everything seems all at once? I don't believe in any one, and I don't feel as if I knew anything, except that love is an inexplicable phenomenon of matter. I shall become an agnostic. ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... know what Meyrick's religious views are; he attends his College chapel with a cool decorum. But I suspect him of being a quiet agnostic. I do not think he cares a straw whether his individuality endures, and he looks forward to a progress which can be tabulated and statistics about the decrease of crime and disease that can be verified; that, I am sure, is his idea of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that die she ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... believed abundantly in spirits without it having the least influence on their morals; and, on the other hand, materialists like Ludwig Buchner, or Vogt, or Moleschott, were idealists (in the moral sense) of the highest order. Look around you and see whether the belief or non-belief (for the Agnostic is in the same predicament here) in spirit is a dividing-line in conduct. There is no ground in fact for the confusion, and it ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... fine world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the stairs ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... "She has had an enormous influence upon her. She has taught Hadria to see that one may hold one's own ideas quietly, without flying in everybody's face. Lady Engleton is a pronounced agnostic, yet she never misses a Sunday at Craddock Church, and I am glad to see that Hadria is following her example. It must be a great satisfaction to you, Hubert. People used to talk unpleasantly about Hadria's extremely irregular attendance. It is such a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... at the Bar Senestro. Despite the triumph he was apprehensive of the princes's keen genius. An agnostic is seldom converted by what could be explained away as mere coincidence. Moreover, as it ultimately appeared, the Bar now had more than one reason for antagonising the man who claimed to ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has lost ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... ourselves agnostics can recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'An agnostic,' said the man behind the moat, 'is a bloke wot don't believe nothing unless 'e see it with ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... own fundamental theology, and he was quite aware of it. He was content with the thought that he had found fragments of true ore. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of classifying him. One would be inclined to place him as a Theist, yet can we give any other name but Agnostic to a man who speaks ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... "Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape, get rid of your eternal subjunctive mood? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... I always felt that answer would have delighted Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Cross, and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—as agnostic countries. But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... that you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... described as Atheism. His religious opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic." ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... for its existence in Greece, and for the first instance I know of, I would refer to the once famous or notorious work of Protagoras, certainly one of the wisest philosophers or sophists of ancient times. He was the first avowed Agnostic, for he wrote a work on the gods, of which the very first remark was that the existence of gods at all he could not himself either affirm or deny. For this offensive sentiment his book was publicly burnt; but Protagoras, could he have foreseen the future, might ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... me to know that he welcomed me to the land of spirits, and that he was deputed to carry me to the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. I am no Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere exist, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Orthodox and agnostic are as the poles asunder, yet they could not but both agree with Barty Josselin, who so cleverly extended a hand to each, and acted as a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... to believe that a man who could express himself in this way and show this courage was a doubter, a skeptic, an unbeliever, an agnostic, an infidel. "Christ is God." This was Lincoln's faith in 1860, found in a letter addressed to the Hon. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... all of the execrations of the priest, and the terrible threats of eternal damnation, he often dozes the Sabbath away unperturbed on the stove; and lets the women attend to the church going. Under Bolshevik rule Holy Russia will be Agnostic Russia; and it is a pity, for religious teaching was the guiding star of these poor people, and religious precepts, hard, gloomy and dismal though they were, the foundation of the ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They have fought, are fighting, and will ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the defence with an air of depression which gave little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions. "I do not know enough to be an agnostic," he said, rather wearily, "and I can only master the known and admitted elements in such controversies. As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... "If only that meant to me what it does to you, I might risk it. I'm no blatant atheist or anti- religionist. I'm simply agnostic; I don't believe. That's all. You have faith. I haven't. I didn't wish to get rid of my faith. It ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... was in orders, but he had become a complete agnostic for some years. During the last few weeks of his life—when he had to keep his bed—Mr Dale was always going up there, and having long arguments and discussions with him; but I don't suppose it did much good: it only worried him very ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... bad joke. I merely meant that I have no right whatever to argue with anyone who has given serious attention to such things. They are altogether beyond my sphere. I was born an agnostic, and no subtlety of demonstration could incline me for a moment to theological views; my intellect refuses to admit a single preliminary of such arguments. You astonish me, and that's all I ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... however great and wise, could dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... glad you have changed your view about the "Sleeper" lectures being a "fake." The writer was too earnest, and too clear a thinker, to descend to any such trick. And for what? "Agnostic" is not in Shakespeare, but it may well have been used by someone before Huxley. The parts of your Address of which you send me slips are excellent, and I am sure will be of great interest to your audience. I quite agree with your proposal that the "Lectures" shall be given ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Herbert Spencer affirms, "Regarding Science as a gradually increasing sphere we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience,"[43] from his standpoint he is quite correct. The endeavors of well-meaning persons to show that the Agnostic's position, when he asserts his ignorance of the Spiritual World, is only a pretence; the attempts to prove that he really knows a great deal about it if he would only admit it, are quite misplaced. He really does ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... misrepresented by the belief being ascribed to him that 'the forces operating on the globe have never acted with greater intensity than at the present day.' But his real position in this matter was a frankly 'agnostic' one. 'Bring me evidence,' he would have said, 'that changes have taken place on the globe, which cannot be accounted for by agencies still at work when operating through sufficiently long periods of time, ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... Socialism, but they are not one whit more bitter than the superb thunderbolts of invective which the ancient Hebrew prophets hurled against an unfaithful Church and priesthood. For the most part, they are attacks upon religious hypocrisy rather than upon Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an atheist, but he was full of sympathy with the underlying ethical principles of all the great religions. Always tolerant of the religious opinions of others, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... we do not know how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... "I'm a agnostic by trade," I says. I spotted that there word in a religious book one time, and that's the first chancet I ever has to try it on any one. You can't never tell what them reg'lar sockdologers is going to do ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... present press less heavily, I do not think that wise men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history; and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in respect of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could be got to act up to this last ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... us!" as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it in the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... not sight, else it were no venture. It does not bring with it a particularised programme to meet all the changing and complex circumstances of life. It does not carry with it anticipatory knowledge. Yet it is not an agnostic gazing into the mist of heaven. It is the looking unto Jesus. There is light—light on His Cross, telling of the love and will and desire of God Who ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... the spirit in which it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling—then in his later glory—and of Oken, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... to its propagation for many years past. There is, let me add, no marked hostility to Christianity in Japan—only indifference. The educated Japanese of to-day is, I believe, for the most part an agnostic, and he views Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity alike, except in so far as he regards the first two as more or less national and the last ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... no; the author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... summary description has here been given deserve a place of honor in the comments to Suetonius' "Lives of the Emperors." The exploration of underground Rome must be greeted with pleasure, not only by the pious believers in Christ and his martyrs, but also by agnostic students of classical history. A tombstone, which on one side is inscribed with the records of the victories gained by the imperial legions, on the other with the simple and humble name of a Christian who has given his life for his faith, is a monument worthy the ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... narrow. His brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the brothers, K——, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's sake, was so intense, nervous, rapid-talking, rapid-living, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... her vocal cords were so involved in the diphtheritic membranes that her voice was gone completely—'O mamma! I see Jesus!' The ecstasy lasted a moment or so, and then I laid her back upon the pillow—dead! Here again is an opportunity for the agnostic to cavil and reject such evidence. But of one thing you may be sure: If he derives as much pleasure from his unbelief as I do in believing, then he is ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other shades of opinion are open to him, if ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... his best and highest point. Stephen A. Douglas said Lincoln was the most honest man he ever knew. Well, if Lincoln was an honest man in his character, he must have been honest in talking about his religion and his faith in God. Was Abraham Lincoln an agnostic in that hour when he spoke his farewell words to his neighbours in Springfield, about starting on the memorable journey to his inauguration? He said: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same divine aid ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one's own most secret self ever ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery gives to living;—thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to thee ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... totally depraved. He thinks that God never made a single creature that didn't deserve to be damned the minute He finished him. So every one who opposes Mr. Talmage is infamous. The generosity of an agnostic is meanness, his honesty is larceny and his love is hate. Talmage is a consistent follower of Calvin and Knox, and a consistent worshiper of the Jehovah of the ancient Jews. I oppose not him, but his creed, because it tends to crush ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... lose. Eleven out of every twelve jurymen in this state would mulct an Agnostic rather ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things—modesty in the biographer ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of patience, for anything that may seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but that I did not attain to the faith I hold without hard training and bitter ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... forms adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 'so-called mystical phenomena of savage life.' I then compare them with the better vouched for modern examples. To return to the question of evidence, I confess that I do not see how the adverse anthropologist, psychologist, or popular agnostic is to evade the following dilemma: To the anthropologist we say, 'The evidence we adduce is your own evidence, that of books of travel in all lands and countries. If you may argue from it, so may we. Some ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour^, heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort [Fr.], freethinker, latitudinarian, rationalist; materialist, positivist, nihilist, agnostic, somatist^, theophobist^. V. be irreligious &c adj.; disbelieve, lack faith; doubt, question &c 485. dechristianize^. Adj. irreligious; indevout^; undevout^; devoutless^, godless, graceless; ungodly, unholy, unsanctified^, unhallowed; atheistic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... up petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Holland's Bitter Sweet is a thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the tradition of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... tiger (in imprisonment) And in an awful storm at sea she asked the mate what mizzen meant; It was a plucky act; if I'd neglected to report it you'd Never have known the depth and true dimensions of her fortitude. If you remain agnostic, if you hold it still not proven, I'll Give fifty more examples of her courage when a juvenile; They lie in my portfolio, all printed, filed and docketed, Including one in which a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... by the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent agnostic parsimony. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... it is so coming, and this present book is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic cults amidst which it ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... there is another course open to you, a course which, terrible as it is, is better than the one that you are now following, because it is more honest. Be honest with yourselves and each other, and, what is of more consequence, be honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the fate of the hypocrite. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Hannah, and meeting many of her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the winter of 1823-4. The teacher was Ithamar Butters, called Dr. Butters from the circumstance that he had studied medicine for a time with Dr. Aaron Bard, a physician in the village. Of Dr. Butters as a teacher I remember little. He became a disbeliever in the Bible—an agnostic of those days. I recollect a remark of his made many years after: That he would prefer the worst hell to annihilation, which he ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... have met him several times at Benares, and also at Buddh Gaya, to interrogate him on releegious points and devil-worship. He is pure agnostic—same as me.' ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... aged 28, delicate in childhood, but now normal in health and physical condition, though not fond of athletics. His mental ability is much above the average, especially in scientific directions; he was brought up in narrow and strict religious views, but at an early age developed agnostic views of his own. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Minor, p. 2. As to Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Borrow determined to try his fortunes in London with those bundles of unsaleable manuscripts, gave him introductions to Sir Richard Phillips and to Thomas Campbell. It was in the agnostic spirit that he had learned from Taylor that he wrote during this period to his one friend in London, Roger Kerrison. Kerrison was grandson of Sir Roger Kerrison, Mayor of Norwich in 1778, as his son Thomas ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... interest of these well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... maintain the thesis that fashion has a great deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic; perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly as there are tides in the fashion of dress. There was a Weismann tide, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... evidence to support it; both agree that there is room for doubt though not necessarily for rejection in cases where the evidence is contaminated or insufficient. It is in the application that the difference lies. The scientific theologian admits the agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those reached by the majority of agnostics. "But, as between agnosticism and ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the Channel call it, clericalism, there can be neither ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... which were individually derived from experience. This is the position scientists as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. They are entirely consistent, therefore, when they arrive ultimately at the agnostic position, and contend that our knowledge must necessarily be confined to the world of experience, and that nothing can be known of the world beyond. But they are fundamentally wrong in overestimating the place of the sense organs, and forgetting ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... plays in the Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the absolute entirety of any given play). "The Author" or "Shakespeare" is not a syndicate (like the Homer of many critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the male sex. As to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is "agnostic." He himself is not Anti-Baconian. He does not oust Bacon and put the Unknown in his place. He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may have contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work. To put it briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... interposed. He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a little ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... silliness; in literature, an intemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue; chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... know the eighteenth century in its social spirit, literary tendencies, revolutionary aims, romantic aspirations, philosophy and science, to know Goethe, so must we know the nineteenth century in its scientific attainments, agnostic philosophy, realistic spirit and humanitarian aims, in order to know George Eliot. She is a product of her time, as Lessing, Goethe, Wordsworth and Byron were of theirs; a voice to utter its purpose and meaning, as well as a trumpet-call to lead it on. As Goethe came after ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... to explain this unwarranted, agnostic caprice, Oswald discreetly proceeds with his general line ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ages, insult ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... to a certain extent. And I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he's in prison under some false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic. The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven't any good writers any more. I'm sick ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... awakening the opposition from the apathy which had fallen upon it after its defeat at the polls. Churchill roused the Conservatives and gave them a fighting issue, by putting himself at the head of the resistance to Mr Bradlaugh, the member for Northampton, who, though an avowed atheist or agnostic, was prepared to take the parliamentary oath. Sir Stafford Northcote, the Conservative leader in the Lower House, was forced to take a strong line on this difficult question by the energy of the fourth party, who in this case clearly expressed the views of the bulk of the opposition. The long and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I know.... I have lived a long time, and my real ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... pirated English fiction. Readers of the "New York Ledger" suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic analysis of human character and motives, with an agnostic bias on the analyst's part. Schoolboys are under the impression that it is a tale of Western chivalry and Indian outrage—price, ten cents. Most of us agree in the belief that it should contain a brace or two of lovers, a suspense, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the universe it is surely clear that they must all be transcended and comprehended within infinity. There cannot be two infinities, nor can there be an infinite and also a finite beyond it. What infinity may be we have no means of knowing. Here the most devout Christian is just as much of an agnostic as Professor Huxley; we can predicate nothing with confidence concerning the all-comprehending unity wherein we live and move and have our being, save and except as we see it manifested in that ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... having heard of the term, he was an agnostic, but not one of the self-complacent, superior type who fancy that they have developed themselves beyond the trammels of faith and are ever ready to make the world ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... "Reformed Agnostic," Ronny said. This one was possibly where he ran into a brick wall. Many of the planets had strong religious beliefs of one sort or another. Some of them had state religions and you either belonged ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... upward or downward? These are great fundamental questions, and the answers we give them lie at the bottom of our thinking and give tone to our writing. The world is not the same to the Christian theist and to the agnostic. Human life has a deeper significance to the man who believes in the loving providence of God than to the man who believes only in the existence of matter and natural law. The man who believes in the presence and sovereignty of God in all things looks hopefully to the future. He is optimistic rather ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... can publish this if you please, but without suppressing any of it. If not and any notice is given of subscriptions as I see you are doing, I beg it may be notified that I send this mite as a reverent agnostic to ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... this century, popular thought—in England as elsewhere—had retraced its steps so far as to acknowledge that if Christianity were true—true, really and actually—the Catholic Church was the only possible embodiment of it. Not only did the shrewdest agnostic minds of the time acknowledge this—such men as Huxley in the previous century, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mallock, and scores of others—but even popular Christianity itself began to turn in that direction. Of course there were survivals ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... difference. The Agnostic is an Atheist. The Atheist is an Agnostic. The Agnostic says: "I do not know, but I do not believe there is any God." The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God; but we know that he does not know. He simply believes. He cannot know. The Atheist cannot ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the old civilization, he is in the broad way of the surface consciousness, and in his midst there dwells the specialized individuals who are approaching the central zones of mind; they are called the scientist, the physicist, the materialist, the agnostic, the mentalist, the reasoner, and the atheist, all true and perfect for their type but all more or less unconscious of the latent states of mind within themselves and the universe to which they must ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D. |
