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More "Agnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism. Let me read you ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, with a life ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist or ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of this simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As we sat and talked, she ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... 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
... think that the best way to show your belief in the All-Father and your love to all His children lies in refusing so much as to touch those who don't know Him, you are of course justified in shunning every atheist or agnostic in the world. But I do not think that the best way. It was not Christ's way. Therefore, I hail every possible opportunity of meeting Mr. Raeburn or his colleagues, try to find all the points we have in common, try as far as possible to meet them ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... best he could. It was very dark, and the clouds were threatening. For a long time he avoided them, but at length he fell into a particularly damp one, and would inevitably have been drowned, had not the sagacious Stray brought men to his assistance. And thus SONOGUN, the scoffer, the agnostic, the moody, gloomy, morose, cast-iron, Roman-faced misanthrope, got home. That same evening he changed his clothes and his character, and on the following ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... for some time to come by Mah[a]tmaism and Yogism, just as they are moved by native seance-spirits and mesmerism. Blavatskyism (which represents no phase of Buddhism) will always find disciples among the ignorant classes, especially in an agnostic or atheistic environment, so that one should attribute the mental attitude of such minds to their lack of culture rather than to India; for if Mah[a]tmaism had not been discovered, they would still profess it under ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... he continued to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... redemption, by which men have attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways of God to man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete. The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... deluge of 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
... back to his room, and sat there and waited and watched. His thoughts were far from enviable. He was in the mood of a man who, from being an utter sceptic, or at least Agnostic, is suddenly shaken up into a recognition of something supernatural, and does not as yet know how to make the other fashions of his life fit in with this new revelation. Selfish as he was, he would not have put off taking action on the warning he had received ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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 criticism. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 of a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... or monstrosities. How can we serve spiritual beings while we do not know how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... was to become of his aimless, empty existence. As he passed through the Piazza San Marco he had half a mind to pick a pebble from the gardened margin of the fountain there and toss it against the Rev. Mr. Waters's window, and when he put his skull-cap out, to ask that optimistic agnostic what a man had best do with a life that had ceased to interest him. But, for the time being, he got rid of himself as he best could by going to the opera. They professed to give Rigoletto, but it was all Mrs. Bowen ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... talk! What do I care 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
... that Artie, a full-grown male person, with all the learning of the schools behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though he had more than ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... no reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... a certain point of view the stand of the agnostic is a right one. We cannot know God in the sense of knowing His being or His "Personality," any more than we can know the essence of the life-principle. Just as we know the life-principle only from what it does, so we know God only from such manifestations of Himself as reach ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... progression is completed, an insoluble problem. For the sequel to this purely descriptive procedure on the part of science is the disavowal of "metaphysics" by those who will have no philosophy but science. Thus the scientific conservatism of Newton has led to the positivistic and agnostic phase of naturalism. But a further treatment of this development must be reserved until the issue of epistemology shall have ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... of Mr. J. Brown, whose shop was nearly opposite the entrance to Chancery Lane, and was for nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop of Mr. James Westell, whose career as a bookseller embraces a period of over half a century, having ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... 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 conductor ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... myself,—which it is possible I may do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... no fear of lion or of 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 stick of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... 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
... land and held in strict obedience to them without the slightest voice in their making, with neither form nor shadow of representation before State or country, do we not see that there rests upon the entire race a stigma that materialist and idealist, agnostic and churchman, should each and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... But 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 ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... April fifteenth, at the residence of Mrs. Gerald, a Roman Catholic priest officiating. Lester was a poor example of the faith he occasionally professed. He was an agnostic, but because he had been reared in the church he felt that he might as well be married in it. Some fifty guests, intimate friends, had been invited. The ceremony went off with perfect smoothness. There were jubilant congratulations and showers of rice ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... is, hell, "for its existence is demanded 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
... Secretary of the Historical Society of Southern California; author of a History of Los Angeles City, and another of Los Angeles County; and another of San Diego County, and one in MSS of Orange County; also a work on State Division (in MSS) engaged in oil and mining business; agnostic in religion; ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
... orthodoxy; and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment of her Rossetti buried his poems, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... of biology, was an Agnostic—which is only a respectable synonym for an Atheist. The more he looked for God the less he could find him. Yet the corpse of this great "infidel" lies in Westminster Abbey, We need not wonder, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... 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
... Henriette. "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 mistake to offend people's ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... tempted to omit altogether the next book which I wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the solution of all difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investigation had better begin with an enquiry whether Materialism can possibly be true. I say 'can be true' rather than 'is true,' because, though dogmatic Materialists are rare, the typical Agnostic is one who is at least inclined to admit the possibility of Materialism, even when he does not, at the bottom of his mind, practically assume its truth. The man who is prepared to exclude even this one theory ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... readers who possess the rare gift of patience, for anything that may seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but that I did ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... misrepresented by the belief being ascribed to him that 'the forces operating on the globe have never acted with greater intensity than at the present day.' But his real position in this matter was a frankly 'agnostic' one. 'Bring me evidence,' he would have said, 'that changes have taken place on the globe, which cannot be accounted for by agencies still at work when operating through sufficiently long periods of time, and I will abandon my position.' But such evidence was ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... who proclaimed the prostitute the high 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 ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things—modesty in the biographer and mystery ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... opinion that in ten or twenty years Christianity might become the national religion of Japan, as the heathen temples are going into decay. If it does, Christianity will be as much benefited by it as the Japanese. The cast iron theology of the Anglo-Saxon race will not suit the Japanese. The works of agnostic scientists and liberals have already a strong hold on the Japanese. The Christianity of the past will have to be reformed and ameliorated to suit Japan. They will never appreciate the theology of the Andover creed, which has been versified ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... multitudes. "By the aid of hoben, or pious devices, the priesthood has played into the hands of popular superstition. Here, as elsewhere, there have been evolved charms, amulets, pilgrimages, and gorgeous temple services, in which the people worship not only the Buddha, who was himself an agnostic, but his disciple, and even such abstractions as Amida, which are mistaken for actual divine personages."[CC] The deities of Shinto have been more or less confused with those of popular Buddhism; ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... 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 in such terms ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after ten thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was. On Monday Penrod was virtually an agnostic. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Bentley's position as a scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his time, see Monk's Life of Bentley, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... GENTLEMAN. 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. We cannot disclaim knowledge and shirk responsibility. We must proceed on ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I dont believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that die she would trying to keep a straight face. When the ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... narrative of a strange experience lived through on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a country town, in St. Peter's at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in Goettingen. The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock is like a bit of Dickens at his best. Equally good, in another kind, is the picture of the Professor and his audience at Goettingen, with its searching and scathing irony of merciless ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as "falling asleep in the Lord." "Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... coincidence, Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the stairs on ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... the entrance to Chancery Lane, and was for nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop of Mr. James Westell, whose career as a bookseller embraces a period of over half a century, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... which for some years he boldly 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
... I know, that I know nothing.'' But Arcesilaus went farther and denied the possibility of even the Socratic minimum of certainty: "I cannot know even whether I know or not.'' Thus from the dogmatism of the master the Academy plunged into the extremes of agnostic criticism. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do we really get over any difficulty—do we not rather create new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... this, is one of the unexplained mysteries of life. Christian philosophers refuse to admit that an atheist can exist in the flesh. They claim that his denial is fathered by his desire and wish, that at most he only doubts, and while professing atheism, he is simply an agnostic. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... 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 ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... postulate and recognise, still remains the great problem of Philosophy—humbler perhaps and more practical, but not less profound than any vain attempt to discover to finite conception the Absolute as it is in itself. Therefore it is that the efforts of negative and agnostic criticism to dispense with the recognition of Reality as a necessary postulate of our activity are foredoomed to failure. They leave us not a solitude which we might pretend to be peace, but a seething sea of troubles urgently demanding a new attempt to reveal the unity which must ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, "Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!" as I stooped over him. I pushed him ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... But agnostic man labors in vain. He cannot escape the mysteries which surround him on every hand, like a gulf in which reason is inevitably lost so soon as it ceases ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the religious life of the time. It professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a country town, in St. Peter's at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in Goettingen. The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock is like a bit of Dickens at his best. Equally good, in another kind, is the picture of the Professor and his audience at Goettingen, with its searching and scathing irony of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a clergyman. One who reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well think that Carlyle was throughout his life an atheist, or an agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that he ever would ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... 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 ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... for they can best do the work to be done in the interest of the temporal as a basis for the spiritual advancement of humanity. The African and the Jew are the spiritual races, and to them political ascendence among the nations of the earth is not promised. It was M. Renan, the great French agnostic, who said: "The fate of the Jewish people was not to form a separate nationality; it is a race which always cherishes a dream ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble truths have been revealed to mankind through the conscience and the understanding, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... 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 ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of ...
— Reginald • Saki
... differentiated in the course of development from the simplicity of their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already reached—the position of suspending judgment ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... human being who has been born only once as totally depraved. He thinks that God never made a single creature that didn't deserve to be damned the minute He finished him. So every one who opposes Mr. Talmage is infamous. The generosity of an agnostic is meanness, his honesty is larceny and his love is hate. Talmage is a consistent follower of Calvin and Knox, and a consistent worshiper of the Jehovah of the ancient Jews. I oppose not him, but his creed, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... admirable coincidence, Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of settled gloom, I then became acutely anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic, atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely discussed the new ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... Bentham's principles, and his resolution to devote his life to their propagation, implies a development of opinion. He had entirely dropped his theology. In the early years of his London life, Mill had been only a rationalist. He had by this time become what would now be called an agnostic. He thought 'dogmatic atheism' absurd, says J. S. Mill;[6] 'but he held that we can know nothing whatever as to the origin of the world.' The occasion of the change, according to his family, was his intercourse ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... concerned with that paralyzing question, and we differ from the Hindoo only in that we affect an extravagant uncertainty, while he sincerely professes an absolute certainty. The cultured Western man pretends to dismiss the problem with a shrug; he labels himself as an agnostic or by some other vague definition, and he is fond of proclaiming his idea that he knows and can know nothing. That is a pretence. When the philosopher says that he does not know and does not care what his future may be, he speaks insincerely; he means that he ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—as agnostic countries. But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... four stages between belief and utter unbelief. There are those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the Agnostic, those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at least keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have set up a Church in his place. That is the last ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... for him! Even his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... 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 not know. The verdict that ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... sought to explain it as having emanated from one great being who is sometimes described as one with the universe and surpassing it, and at other times as being separate from it; the agnostic spirit which is the mother of philosophic thought is seen at times to be so bold as to express doubts even on the most fundamental questions of creation—"Who knows whether this world was ever created or not?" Secondly the growth of sacrifices has helped to establish the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... agnostic or materialist teachers and give a brief but perhaps not very just compendium of their doctrines. One of them was the founder of the Jains who, as a sect that has lasted to the present day with a considerable record in art and literature, merit a separate chapter. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders upon intolerance; and while ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... stereoptican lecture was given in Suez. In Mrs. March's opinion such things, unlike the deadly theatre, were harmful only when carried to excess. To keep John from carrying this one to excess—that is, from going to it with anybody else—she went with him, and they "happened"—I suppose an agnostic would say—to sit next to Dinwiddie Pettigrew. John being in a silent mood Daphne and Dinwiddie found time for much conversation. The hour fixed for the lecture was half-past seven. Promptly about half-past eight the audience began ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... reconcile with his 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 in such ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... of the worst violations of good form to behave with levity in church. To devout people the church is the place for meditation and prayer, and nothing should be allowed to disturb the restful calm that is sought within its sacred walls. A well-bred agnostic will respect the religious sentiments of other people, whatever his own beliefs or disbeliefs in matters theological. If no higher law is recognized, at least every one will regard the etiquette of the case, which requires that the demeanor ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... 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 principle in every relation of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 and reactions, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that die she would trying to keep a straight face. When ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the expense of degrading man's knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most winning personality, which his strong, gentle ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... and among scientific people, the affirmation which is the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted—not Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school of thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; he was far too scientific a man to crudely deny, far too scientific to be willing to speak positively ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of lion or of 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
... 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 ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... conditions, or to prehistoric connexions which it is as impossible for us to trace now as is the origin of mankind itself. Our standpoint as regards the origin of the Chinese race is, therefore, that of the agnostic. All we can do is to reproduce the tradition as it is found in Chinese literature. This tradition, as applying to the very earliest periods, may be nothing more than historical superstition, yet it has its historical importance. Supposing it were possible to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... fiend thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the place ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver, not a nerve stirred in his face, as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... years ago, although all theories regarding the composition of matter have been radically altered since that day? Evidently, the modern scientist is not on account of his research and speculation induced to proclaim himself as agnostic; quite the reverse, the fact that on any system of physics, zoology, psychology, the conclusions remain the same, proves that these conclusions were in the mind before the facts were investigated. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... will serve to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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
... cholera, next with trichinae, and then with Andy Johnson, all in the same year, and that was more than any country could stand. Ebon C. Ingersoll was a brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, the world's greatest agnostic. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... out of their order, I shall have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in 1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern literature. The lecturer here flies his agnostic colors from beginning to end. He treats "The Romantic School in Germany" as Voltaire treated Rousseau—with sovereign wit, superior intelligence, but scant sympathy. At the same time he penetrates ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... 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 ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... blue paper. The other was the living room, and contained a cedar piggin and gourd on a shelf; a bread tray, dishpan, a pot and two skillets on another shelf near the fireplace, two split-bottom chairs, a table, and a cat. The cat was a large, gray agnostic. He never admitted William's presence by so much as a purr or a claw, and I have noticed that the agnostic is the only creature living who can treat a preacher with so much contempt. We found him curled up on ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... person, with all the learning of the schools behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... a veterinary surgeon, was a confirmed agnostic. His young son Santosh had implored me to take an interest in his father. So far my invaluable aid had been a bit on the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... righteousness out of it. Then there is the strictly modern type of person to whom right conduct is held to have nothing to do with religious belief and who measures Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and agnostic by their acts and not at all by their dogma, and who thus relegates religion, in the ordinary use of the word, to a rather useless place in human life. Orthodoxy, piety, tolerance and skepticism represent attitudes towards organized religion: ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... to allow, and all the while impressed with a profound and sad conviction that the machine is in a bad way, and certain to smash up, whatever is done? Consequently we have just such weak documents as this encyclical letter, emanating now from an eminent agnostic scientist, now from a millionnaire "philanthropist" and now from the Pope—all conflicting with each other, the first denying that man has any more rights than a rattlesnake, the second lauding a "triumphant democracy" which has not the courage ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... 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. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I kept my ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... 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, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... may not be misunderstood, I would say that the doctrine of Duty agrees perfectly with every form of religion—a man may be Roman Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Agnostic, or what he will; and, if a form aids him in the least to be sincerely honest, it would be a pity for him to be without it. Truly there are degrees in forms, and where I live in Italy I am sorry to see so many abuses or errors in them. But to know and do what is right, when ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... knew might be very speedily fatal. Straightway she said to her husband: "In two or three days I shall probably 'know'—or cease from all knowing. There will not be long to wait. Therefore bring me three books," which she named, works of authors of extreme agnostic views. Rather reluctantly he complied with her wish. She went steadily through the joyless pages, turned the last with the significant remark: "If this is all they can say, well!—" The skeleton cupboard, once opened, was speedily swept out. She quickly recovered, ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... rhythm and accent. The interesting "Song of the Harper," which is found on the same Harris Papyrus, is also fully edited and collated with the parallel texts from the Theban tombs, and compared with other writings dealing with death from the agnostic point of view. The following extracts are translated from ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... They think, but they do not know," rejoined this Hyperborean agnostic, as positively and as ignorantly as if he had ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... 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, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... mass man of 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 some ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... second century B.C. old Cato had described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting at their meal in front of the image of the Lar[378]. We may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with that revival of the cultivation ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... become—what's the last new name for a free-thinker? Oh, I keep up with the times, thanks to old Miss Redwood! She takes in the newspapers, and makes me read them to her. What is the new name? Something ending in ic. Bombastic? No, Agnostic?—that's it! I have become an Agnostic. The inevitable result of marrying an old man; if there's any blame it ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... prejudices about "this England," old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, we might ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a meal ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... 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 of it is evidence ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of course you do ... you sentimental agnostic anarchist. Nonsense! The supernatural's a bit blown upon ... till we re-discover what it means. But it's not essential. Nor is the Christian doctrine. Put a Jesuit in a corner and shut the door and he'll own that. No ... the tradition of self-sacrifice and fellowship in service ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... exist in an atmosphere of mental ambiguity and intellectual fog which blurs outlines and obscures differences. Unbeliever is preferable to some, sceptic—presumably because of its age and philosophical associations, is a greater favourite, and Agnostic is more beloved than either—the latter has indeed been pressed into the service of a more or less nebulous "religion." As it is said, "We are all Socialists nowadays," so it is said that we are unbelievers or Agnostics nowadays. But no one says we are all Atheists nowadays. Timidity can find no ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... years he boldly 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
... his quest 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 ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... Zero, "is this possible? And I so filled with tenderness and interest! Can it be, dear Somerset, that you are under the empire of these outworn scruples? or that you judge a patriot by the morality of the religious tract? I thought you were a good agnostic." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you think that the best way to show your belief in the All-Father and your love to all His children lies in refusing so much as to touch those who don't know Him, you are of course justified in shunning every atheist or agnostic in the world. But I do not think that the best way. It was not Christ's way. Therefore, I hail every possible opportunity of meeting Mr. Raeburn or his colleagues, try to find all the points we have in common, try as far as possible to meet them ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... fantastic. You know that in every sense of the word you're an agnostic. You'd laugh at any orthodox form of Christianity—and then you come out with the statement that you believe in some ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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
... Newton of biology, was an Agnostic—which is only a respectable synonym for an Atheist. The more he looked for God the less he could find him. Yet the corpse of this great "infidel" lies in Westminster Abbey, We need not wonder, therefore, that Christians ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... a weekly journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... philosophy founded by Pyrrho (4th contury B.C.). He advocated "suspension of judgment," and taught the relativity of knowledge and impossibility of proof. The school is not unlike the Agnostic school. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist or a ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... will perhaps 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 ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... half-educated people will doubtless be influenced for some time to come by Mah[a]tmaism and Yogism, just as they are moved by native seance-spirits and mesmerism. Blavatskyism (which represents no phase of Buddhism) will always find disciples among the ignorant classes, especially in an agnostic or atheistic environment, so that one should attribute the mental attitude of such minds to their lack of culture rather than to India; for if Mah[a]tmaism had not been discovered, they would still profess it under another name. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... into the hands of popular superstition. Here, as elsewhere, there have been evolved charms, amulets, pilgrimages, and gorgeous temple services, in which the people worship not only the Buddha, who was himself an agnostic, but his disciple, and even such abstractions as Amida, which are mistaken for actual divine personages."[CC] The deities of Shinto have been more or less confused with those of popular Buddhism; in some ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... 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 ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Perfection. The function of evil in the economy of the universe is an inscrutable mystery, about which speculative Mysticism merely asserts that the solution cannot be that of the Manicheans. It is only the Agnostic[185] who will here offer the dilemma of Dualism or Pantheism, and try to force the mystic to accept ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... contre la France is of the utmost importance to an understanding of the masonic danger, for here there can be no question of Catholic prejudice or of imaginary accusations made by a stranger to Masonry. M. Copin Albancelli entered the Grand Orient as an agnostic and has never returned to the bosom of the Church; yet as a Frenchman, a patriot, and a believer in law, morality, and Christian ethics he found himself obliged, after six years' experience in the lodges and after attaining the degree of Rose-Croix, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... fairly vibrates. At first, when she began to recover, I was conscious only of the vitality—but lately I feel the other quality. It isn't exactly the old Puritan fatalism, or even the Greek, it's oddly modern, too, almost agnostic, I should say,—a calm acceptance of the hazards of life, of nature, of sun and rain and storm alike—very different from the cheap optimism one finds everywhere now. She isn't exactly resigned—I don't say that—I know she can be rebellious. And she's grateful for the sun, yet she seems ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... neighbour. "He was a miser—a recluse—a misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end to Olivia's quaint surmises, but she could only be certain of two facts—that the mysterious Mr. Gaythorne was methodical by nature, and whatever might be the weather always took his exercise ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... just as Mr. Shaw is an opportunist in politics. Dickens's waiter is ready to stand up seriously for "the true principles of waitering," just as Dickens was ready to stand up for the true principles of Liberalism. Mr. Shaw's waiter is agnostic; his motto is "You never can tell." Dickens's waiter is a dogmatist; his motto is "You can tell; I will tell you." And the true old-fashioned English waiter had really this grave and even moral attitude; he was the servant of the customers as a priest is the servant of the ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... mind, and learn how to control it and your sense perceptions. Then you will no longer mistrust your results as possibly imperfect, but you will have attained to some closer contact with Truth." To both the Agnostic and the indifferent, the study of Theosophy will bring a consciousness of the responsibility towards others, which is the basis of our universal brotherhood. It will tend to remove the personal element which has hitherto done so much to cloud and obscure one's ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... 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 and He causeth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... respectable member of a civilized society, who proclaimed the prostitute the high 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 ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... me that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and more tenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood why in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglican ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert as Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name of John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On the other hand, I once saw him receive a message ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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, that he frightened ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... and that they are quite sure that the successful solution of these problems is the best and highest contribution that they can make to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... little longer than John Bull's. He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for saying the conventional thing ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... savior. He offered no reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his place, and who, so ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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: ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... but his habits were eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... attended the Bible-class with fervour and aired his heresies with uncommon gusto, if he took with equal geniality Colonel Warren's staid remonstrance and Mac's fiery objurgation, Sunday morning invariably found him more "agnostic" than ever, stoutly declining to recognise the necessity for "service." For this was an occasion when you couldn't argue or floor anybody, or hope to make Mac "hoppin' mad," or have the smallest kind of a shindy. The Colonel read the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... individually derived from experience. This is the position scientists as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. They are entirely consistent, therefore, when they arrive ultimately at the agnostic position, and contend that our knowledge must necessarily be confined to the world of experience, and that nothing can be known of the world beyond. But they are fundamentally wrong in overestimating the place of the sense organs, and forgetting that while these have ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... I know, of course, that they make the most unreasonable demands on you. But they have been telegraphing all over the place for another speaker: and they can get nobody but the President of the Agnostic League. ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... she said in a strong, clear whisper—for 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
... headway made by Christianity in Japan in view of the labour and money devoted by different religious bodies to its propagation for many years past. There is, let me add, no marked hostility to Christianity in Japan—only indifference. The educated Japanese of to-day is, I believe, for the most part an agnostic, and he views Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity alike, except in so far as he regards the first two as more or less national and the last ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... author of a History of Los Angeles City, and another of Los Angeles County; and another of San Diego County, and one in MSS of Orange County; also a work on State Division (in MSS) engaged in oil and mining business; agnostic in ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
... consistent agnostic, and a believer in the slow evolution of morals, in his "Science of Ethics,"[1] naturally holds, like Herbert Spencer, to the gradual development of the custom of truthfulness, as a necessity of society.[2] The moral ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... who hates; of an Actus purus who is called jealous, wrathful 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 ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... serve to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... jungle; and the two Americans would sit and look at her as if they half believed her a creature from another world. Sometimes Harris would draw her into conversation on topics pertaining to philosophy and religion, for he had early seen her bent and, agnostic that he was, delighted to hear her express her views, which to him were so childishly impossible. But as often he would voluntarily retire from the conflict, sometimes shaking his head dubiously, sometimes muttering his impatience with a mere child whose logic he, despite his collegiate training, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... doubtless be influenced for some time to come by Mah[a]tmaism and Yogism, just as they are moved by native seance-spirits and mesmerism. Blavatskyism (which represents no phase of Buddhism) will always find disciples among the ignorant classes, especially in an agnostic or atheistic environment, so that one should attribute the mental attitude of such minds to their lack of culture rather than to India; for if Mah[a]tmaism had not been discovered, they would still profess it under another name. Buddhism, too, apart from Hartmann, may be said to have some ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... practice; and 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 have esteemed ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... Acknowledge, admit, confess, own, avow. Active, agile, nimble, brisk, sprightly, spry, bustling. Advise, counsel, admonish, caution, warn. Affecting, moving, touching, pathetic. Agnostic, skeptic, infidel, unbeliever, disbeliever. Amuse, entertain, divert. Announce, proclaim, promulgate, report, advertise, publish, bruit, blazon, trumpet, herald. Antipathy, aversion, repugnance, disgust, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... born only once as totally depraved. He thinks that God never made a single creature that didn't deserve to be damned the minute He finished him. So every one who opposes Mr. Talmage is infamous. The generosity of an agnostic is meanness, his honesty is larceny and his love is hate. Talmage is a consistent follower of Calvin and Knox, and a consistent worshiper of the Jehovah of the ancient Jews. I oppose not him, but his creed, because it tends to crush out ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... hate him, still he thinks enough of himself to keep him comfortable. His conceit is marvellous, nothing equals it except perhaps that of the individual rife among us which the Saturday Review once aptly described as "the suburban agnostic"; and the "missionary man" is very much like the suburban agnostic in his religious method. After a period of mission-school life he returns to his country-fashion, and deals with the fetish connected with it very much in the same way as the suburban agnostic ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... will banish Social 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 ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one's own most ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... 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 not know. The verdict that the natural man receiveth not ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Fotheringham himself—deceased some three years before this date—had paid heavily for his mistake; especially through the endless disputes which had arisen between his children and his second wife—partly on questions of religion, partly on this matter of the Army. Mrs. Fotheringham was an agnostic; her stepsons, the children of a devout mother, were churchmen. Influenced, moreover, by a small coterie, in which, to the dismay of her elderly husband, she had passed most of her early married years, she detested the Army ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... opinions, directly, even to him. But the books she ordered from Paris, or Germany, and every now and then the things she let fall about them, were enough for any shrewd observer. It was here too, perhaps, that she and Arthur were in closest sympathy; and every one knew that Arthur, poor old boy, was an agnostic. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from going all the way with you, and taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery gives to living;—thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to thee ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... about Mr. Booth personally, for I know nothing. On that subject, as on several others, I profess myself an agnostic. But, if he is, as he may be, a saint actuated by the purest of motives, he is not the first saint who, as you have said, has shown himself "in the ardour of prosecuting a well-meant object" to be capable of overlooking "the plain maxims of every-day morality." If I were a Salvationist soldier, I ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... strongly tempted to omit altogether the next book which I wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough of Despond ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sceptical and agnostic days it may sound a little strange, and perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... "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 ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... 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 decadent. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... the world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... precede the period of unanimity.—TORRENS, Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, p. xiii. Even the spread of an error is part of the wide-world process by which we stumble into mere approximations to truth.—L. STEPHEN, Apology of an Agnostic, 81. Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.—S. SMITH, Moral Philosophy, 7. The admission of the few errors of Newton himself is at least of as much ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... 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 fatalist or ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... fear of lion or of 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 stick of dynamite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... 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.
... to remember at the outset that the poet's own view is neither that of Blougram nor of the literary man Gigadibs, with whom Blougram talks over his wine. Gigadibs is an agnostic and cannot understand how a man of Blougram's fine intellectual and artistic perceptions is able so implicitly to believe in Catholic doctrine. Blougram's apology for himself amounts to this,—that he does not believe with absolute certainty ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... A. J. Balfour was a very young man he published A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. Nobody read it, but a great many talked about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring, "How sad that Lord Salisbury's nephew should be an Agnostic!" When Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced, and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... resolution to devote his life to their propagation, implies a development of opinion. He had entirely dropped his theology. In the early years of his London life, Mill had been only a rationalist. He had by this time become what would now be called an agnostic. He thought 'dogmatic atheism' absurd, says J. S. Mill;[6] 'but he held that we can know nothing whatever as to the origin of the world.' The occasion of the change, according to his family, was his intercourse with General Miranda, who was ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... silliness; in literature, an intemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue; chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes and then went hypocritically and stupidly to ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... labour and money devoted by different religious bodies to its propagation for many years past. There is, let me add, no marked hostility to Christianity in Japan—only indifference. The educated Japanese of to-day is, I believe, for the most part an agnostic, and he views Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity alike, except in so far as he regards the first two as more or less national and the ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... half—called to account by the laws of the land and held in strict obedience to them without the slightest voice in their making, with neither form nor shadow of representation before State or country, do we not see that there rests upon the entire race a stigma that materialist and idealist, agnostic and churchman, should each and all hasten ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... with Gideon. He's a Gentile by religion, by the way; an ordinary agnostic. Aunt Cynthia, don't go on spreading that nonsense, if you don't mind. You might contradict it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... both the clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I dont believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, "It is true; and it is ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, would be uncongenial in ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do we really get over any difficulty—do we not rather create new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... 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 ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had lost his faith, and ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... 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
... the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams: are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... think, but they do not know," rejoined this Hyperborean agnostic, as positively and as ignorantly as if he had been a ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Alexandrian Jews, as represented by Philo, the fundamental axiom of later Jewish, as of Christian monotheism, that the Deity is infinitely perfect and infinitely good, worked itself out into its logical consequence—agnostic theism. Philo will allow of no point of contact between God and a world in which evil exists. For him God has no relation to space or to time, and, as infinite, suffers no predicate beyond that of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to Him ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 peace nor truce. The cleric asserts that it is morally ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... join the brotherhood. If a couple stood next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave offspring—I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful remedy ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morning Penrod's faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after ten thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was. On Monday Penrod was virtually an agnostic. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... of human affairs 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 ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... What he says is, that the word God conveys no meaning to him. If you think that the best way to show your belief in the All-Father and your love to all His children lies in refusing so much as to touch those who don't know Him, you are of course justified in shunning every atheist or agnostic in the world. But I do not think that the best way. It was not Christ's way. Therefore, I hail every possible opportunity of meeting Mr. Raeburn or his colleagues, try to find all the points we have in common, try as far as possible to meet ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... after the doleful mutterings of some of the other Scherzi. There is the same "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... woman who was moved by the enthusiasm of humanity put on robe or veil and swore celibacy and obedience, can really be practised quite as well without religious vows, peculiar dress, articles of religion, papal allegiance, or anything of the kind. The doubter, the agnostic, the atheist, may as truly sacrifice himself and give up his life for humanity as the most saintly of the faithful. There was an enthusiast fifteen years ago who cheerfully endured prison and exile, poverty and persecution, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... mention six agnostic or materialist teachers and give a brief but perhaps not very just compendium of their doctrines. One of them was the founder of the Jains who, as a sect that has lasted to the present day with a considerable record in art and literature, merit a separate ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... (advaitha) lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This Being which is devoid of qualities (nirguna), because incomprehensible to man, can be of no comfort to him. In this respect the Hindu is an agnostic of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... the various churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development from the simplicity of their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already reached—the position of suspending judgment ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... 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 thus he may become an atheist. ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... not 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 Kingdom ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... wrathful 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, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... 1865, evidently upon the model of Revue des Deux Mondes, which had been published at Paris since 1831. Like the great French periodical, it was issued fortnightly (at first) and printed signed articles. It was Liberal in politics, agnostic in religion and abreast of the times in science. The publishers, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, secured an experienced editor in George Henry Lewes, who had contributed extensively to most of the reviews then in progress. The success of the new review was assured by the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 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, where is Agnes?" ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... full-grown male person, with all the learning of the schools behind him, should relapse at last into these childish and exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though he had more than once suspected it when he heard ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... was a confirmed agnostic. His young son Santosh had implored me to take an interest in his father. So far my invaluable aid had been a bit ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... little interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But, in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand. One could not easily imagine Shakespeare ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of philosophy founded by Pyrrho (4th contury B.C.). He advocated "suspension of judgment," and taught the relativity of knowledge and impossibility of proof. The school is not unlike the Agnostic school. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... 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 ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... 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 Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Valdes in the less measure of Marta y Maria, and La Hermana de San Sulpicio and even with the romanticist Valera in Pepita Jimenez. But it may be said that while Ibanez does not go any farther than Galdos, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... accent. The interesting "Song of the Harper," which is found on the same Harris Papyrus, is also fully edited and collated with the parallel texts from the Theban tombs, and compared with other writings dealing with death from the agnostic point of view. The following extracts are translated from ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... 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
... a Catholic. His mother was an American Catholic, rather strict and narrow. His brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the brothers, K——, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's sake, was so intense, nervous, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... is a danger to the nation, needing the right use of platform; in literature—well, we all know bourgeois, but who has done justice to the artist who gets on a platform to talk about the bourgeois?—in religion, the poseur is more likely to make agnostics than all the Rationalist Press; and the agnostic poseur in turn is very funny. Now all these are an affliction, a collection of absurdities of which we must cure the nation. If we cannot cure the nation of absurdity we cannot set her free. Let it be our rule to combine gaiety with gravity and we will acquire a saving sense ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... 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 ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... 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 ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... village; but the moment he discovered that the teaching about Jehovah was opposed to their Heathen customs, he sternly forbade us. One day, during my address, he blossomed out into a full-fledged and pronounced Agnostic (with as much reason at his back as the European ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... is at 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 that sustained Washington, and on ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... nearly thirty years an exceedingly pleasant rendezvous of book-collectors, and whose proprietor was one of the most genial of bibliopoles. The third is Edward Truelove, of 256, High Holborn, the well-known agnostic bookseller, who removed here from the Strand, and who had been in business over forty years. Mr. Truelove retired two or three years since. Further up the road, in New Oxford Street, we find the shop ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... the meaning of the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that die she would trying to ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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
... well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of a dressmaker ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... 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, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Anna's departure, the Marsh began to take on a new tone. The boys were gentlemen; Tom had a rare nature and had risen high. Fred was sensitive and fond of reading, he pondered Ruskin and then the Agnostic writings. Like all the Brangwens, he was very much a thing to himself, though fond of people, and indulgent to them, having an exaggerated respect ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for saying the conventional thing on every conceivable ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the clear-cut confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one gets from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a witness in a police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral questions an agnostic. I do not think any general propositions partaking largely of the nature of fact can be known about these things. There is nothing possessing the general validity of fact to be ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... hints a doubt as to the veracity and sincerity of Socrates. He is quite sure that Socrates was fully persuaded of the reality of his attendant genius, and favours the view that this belief may have been well founded. He takes an agnostic position,[234] confining his positive statement to an assertion of his own inability to realize the presence of any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the De Subtilitate he tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of the demons spoken of by the retailers of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... except at the expense of degrading man's knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... "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 ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... weekly journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little for ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... sure to lose. Eleven out of every twelve jurymen in this state would mulct an Agnostic rather than give ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble truths have been ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... profound 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 ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... be truly Liberal. Old prejudices about "this England," old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Jock: 'When ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... At first, when she began to recover, I was conscious only of the vitality—but lately I feel the other quality. It isn't exactly the old Puritan fatalism, or even the Greek, it's oddly modern, too, almost agnostic, I should say,—a calm acceptance of the hazards of life, of nature, of sun and rain and storm alike—very different from the cheap optimism one finds everywhere now. She isn't exactly resigned—I don't say that—I know she can be rebellious. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
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