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More "Unknowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the puzzle of a difference between spirit and matter, which thing caused even the former to muddle about "God," and express disgust at "Materialism," and declare that there is "an insoluble problem," which is all in flat contradiction to pure Evolution, which does not meddle with "the Unknowable." ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the physical? Tread lightly here; you might step on holy ground. Do you use the old cry that all outside of matter belongs to the "unknown" and "unknowable?" Exchange the terms for the terms the "uncomprehended" and the "incomprehensible," and we will walk side by side. We know many things which we do not comprehend. Do we comprehend all that belongs ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... was a sum in which the unknown and unknowable quantity determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called life,—it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much resembles,—and I am half inclined to think Nature has ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Past, Present and Future unknown Events "revealed". Theory of "Mental Telegraphy" or "Telepathy" fails to meet Dreams of the unknowable Future. Dreams of unrecorded Past, how alone they can be corroborated. Queen Mary's Jewels. Story from Brierre de Boismont. Mr. Williams's Dream before Mr. Perceval's Murder. Discrepancies of Evidence. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as a previous theory, I shall be content with it until a better one ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... that is, belief in things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point—the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... contemplation we can well believe. That they might "find safety and happiness" in the knowledge of Him is also possible—if they had it. But this is just what they tell us they have not. What they deny is not a God. It is the correspondence. The very confession of the Unknowable is itself the dull recognition of an Environment beyond themselves, and for which they feel they lack the correspondence. It is this want that makes their God the Unknown God. And it is this ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... powers that with him dwell:— Inflowings that divulged not whence they came; And that secluded spirit unknowable, The mystery we make ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... more to recognize some unknown factor in evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn—heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection—play upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about the original start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... of our species has sometimes been called the paragon of paradoxes, because the intuitive working of its mind is beyond the comprehension of men's "arithmetical understanding." The Chinese ideogram denoting "the mysterious," "the unknowable," consists of two parts, one meaning "young" and the other "woman," because the physical charms and delicate thoughts of the fair sex are above the coarse mental calibre of our sex ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... of immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other words, were merely and altogether transcendent—He would also be merely and altogether unknowable, exactly as Agnosticism avers. His transcendent attributes, all that partakes of infinity, cannot—and that of necessity—become objects of immediate knowledge to finite minds; if He is to be known at all to us, He can only be so known ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sufferings, we shall not meet any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in the unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly; will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the last which the imagination can touch with its wing? Lastly, if there were nothing left of our body and our mind, ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... with a separate and infinitely high destiny marked out before it. Concentrated thought, deep emotion and lofty purpose, in view of these objects, is supremely profitable. But what is there left worthy of thought for the Vedantist Yogi when the Divine Being is the unknowable and the Yogi himself the deluded child of (Maya) illusion and (avidya) ignorance—those twin enemies to all true and worthy knowledge? It cannot be elevating to detach the mind from things worldly ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... and selling in open slave markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't answer back as you would, and right ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... contrary to all tradition, goes on his way unmoved. And why shouldn't he? He may be, and generally is, sadly in need of a woman friend, "some one to share his joys and sorrows with", but because he knows few women is no reason why he should stand afar off and adore the unknowable. "Friendly like" is what appeals to us all; and the bush-folk are only men, not monstrosities—rough, untutored men for the most part. The difficult part to understand is how any woman can choose to stand aloof and freeze, with warm-hearted men all around ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... matter of choice: they are dictated by the nature of the situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any assumptions concerning the soul. The distinction between the realist and the idealist is a matter of temperament. All that separated Huxley from Gladstone was a word; each argued from the unknowable, but disputed over the name and attributes of the inconceivable. Huxley said he did not know, which was equivalent to the dogmatic assertion that he did; Gladstone said he did know, which was a confession of ignorance denser than that ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... that he learned to despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... or three weeks he was able to be about the city with his nearly two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating, and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of the liquid ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum, the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum coincide. That ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of apparently dogmatic formulae, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on evolution in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific revolution which begot the intellectual ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... and contracts, and what not, until finally, he gets all mixed up and concludes that he never can know anything about it at all, and the dear old "one," that came to him at first as such a simple thing, is so tangled up with all creation that he gives it up as an entirely unknown and unknowable quantity, and begins to guess at it and when he comes to that point, look out! He has taken the first step in recklessness, and has begun his initial work ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... metals, plants and animals) there is no breach of continuity; that "the living response in all its diverse modifications is only a repetition of responses seen in the inorganic" and that the phenomena of response "are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the organic ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... for you to waste your time in useless speculation as to the unknowable source of your life-stream, or in seeking to trace it in the ocean. It is enough for you that it is, and that, while it runs its brief course, it is yours to make it yield its blessings. For this you must train your hand and eye and brain—you must ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... channels of sensation. Say, for the sake of argument, that a person, savage or civilised, obtains in trance information about distant places or events, to him unknown, and, through channels of sense, unknowable. The savage will explain this by saying that the seer's soul, shadow, or spirit, wandered out of the body to the distant scene. This is, at present, an unverified theory. But still, for the sake of argument, suppose that the seer did honestly ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... unamazed to find them all deserted, and yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered like one who steps out of the light into darkness; the soul walked naked to and fro, knowing the unknowable, and conscious strangely of experience, intimate but inexpressible, of the absolute. And without surprise, in that blue sky, real with a reality that not the eye but the soul confesses, with its rack of light clouds driven by strange ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... ways of intuition, he knew his weakness in that merciless sea with no heart of warmth, that threatened the unknowable thing, vaguely but terribly guessed, namely, death. As regarded himself, he did not comprehend death. He, who had never known the time when he was not alive, could not conceive of the time when he would cease to ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... band-o-bast; so much dove-tailing and welding together of naval and military methods, signals, technical words, etc., and the worst punishment should any link in the composite chain give way. And then—taking success for granted—on the top of all this—comes the Turk; "unspeakable" he used to be, "unknowable" now. But we shall give him a startler too. If only our plans come off the Turk won't have time to turn; much less to bring into play all the clever moves foreseen for him by some whose stomachs for the fight have been satisfied by their ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... concerned, when I needed strength to bear the ills which could not be averted, or do what conscience said was right, then I should pray. And, if I had done my best in the same direction, I should trust in the Unknowable ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... was darkness, hidden in darkness,' &c. (Ri. Samh. X, 129, 3), sets forth the same view; and so does Manu (I, 5), 'This universe existed in the shape of Darkness, unperceived, destitute of distinctive marks, unattainable by reasoning, unknowable, wholly immersed as it were in deep sleep.' And, as to the text, 'from that the Lord of Maya creates everything,' we shall prove later on the unchangeableness of Brahman, and explain the scriptural ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Spencer. The question remains, 'Which is the easier, the more probable, the more reasonable theory—that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid—a mysterious Unknown and Unknowable—which is neither mind nor matter?' For my own part, I see no reason to suppose that our inability to think of anything which is neither matter nor mind but quite unlike either is a mere imperfection of ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... shadow of that final thing. He saw himself as he had been on the playing-fields of Eton; aye! and in the arms of his nurse, to and fro on the terrace of Tankerton—always in the shadow of that final thing, always piteous and ludicrous, doomed. Thank heaven the future was unknowable? It wasn't, now. To-morrow—to-day—he must die for that accursed fiend of a woman—the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... attesting miracle is superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to accept it on the faith of the miracle, for it might quite as likely ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man—naturally ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... differ widely in their professed religious creeds and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety of uniform, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... him one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call by ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... during the seventeen years since aeroplanes first took the air, seen them grow from tentative experimental structures of unknown and unknowable performance to highly scientific products, of which not only the performances (in speed, load-carrying capacity, and climb) are known, but of which the precise strength and degree of stability can be forecast with some accuracy on the drawing board. For the rest, with ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... audience with eyes staring glassily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing. He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the will of a dictator, inhuman ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... of eternal force. We should rather think of it as a revelation and an invitation than as a mere command. For what is it but the declaration that at the centre of things is throned, not a rabble of godlings, nor a stony impersonal somewhat, nor a hypothetical unknowable entity, nor a shadowy abstraction, but a living Person, who can say 'Me,' and whom we can call on as 'Thou,' and be sure that He hears? No accumulation of finite excellences, however fair, can satisfy the imagination, which feels after one Being, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the—face—bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... of natural evolution given by Darwinism and the principles of Weismann, Mendel, and De Vries, still fails to solve the mystery completely, and appeal has been made to other agencies, even to teleology and to "unknown" and "unknowable" causes as well as to circumstantial factors. A combination of Lamarckian and Darwinian factors has been proposed by Osborn, Baldwin, and Lloyd Morgan, in the theory of organic selection. The theory of orthogenesis propounded by Naegeli ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... altitudes, diameters, friction, &c. Another class considered man as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained, and ignorance was cunningly veiled in mystery. But the science will never be in the right tract of improvement, until we consider, conjointly, the mechanical operations of the fluids, the chemical agency ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... line, a silhouette of quiet rest awaiting dawn; then at a flash, the doom, the quake, the breaking down of outline, the caving in of walls, followed by the sickening collapse in which life, wealth, and innumerable beating human hearts went down into the unseen and unknowable. He saw and he heard, but his eyes clung to but one point, his ears listened for but one cry. There at the extremity of a cornice, clinging to a bending beam, was the figure again—the woman of the ice-floe and the desert. She seemed nearer now. He could see the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Holcroft,' said Coleridge, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl of about fifteen, in the Hartz Forest, in Germany, and who one day, as I was reading "The Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable," the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, "What! you read Kant? Why, I, that am a German born, don't understand him!"' This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... knowledge of that Darby More is unknowable! Here's a Carol I bought from him, an' if you wor but to hear the explanations he put to it! Why Father Hoolaghan could ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... conciliation, "you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl, about fifteen, that I met with in the Hartz forest in Germany—and who one day, as I was reading the Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable, the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, What, you read Kant? Why, I that am a German born, don't understand him!" This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction to the Tao-te-king, pp. x-xv. ("Le Livre de la Voie et de la ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... is loving; because we behold something of His power we infer that He is almighty. It is first of all a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "unknowable" to us has ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... exactly the same thing, and that there are not a few modern preachers of the doctrine of a "universe of mind-stuff." The hypothesis is "unthinkable." But the most serious thinker will agree with the Buddhist assertion that the relation of all phenomena to the unknowable is merely that of waves to sea. "Every [219] feeling and thought being but transitory," says Mr. Spencer, "an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being but transitory,—nay, the objects ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... philosophy, but might be called theology, and not legitimate theology even, but supra-theological—for all sane theology admits that man cannot know God. It is a desperate, insane suggestion that we must know the unknowable, and that if we cannot do that we can have no philosophy. Of course men who think this way know nothing of philosophy, and are beyond the reach ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation—its relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it—which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not made vocal ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly pledged herself to make a restoration of him in honour ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... vessels of Life, which are always being filled by Love and emptied by Logic. "The external world," says the Materialist—"Does not exist," says the Idealist. "'Tis immaterial if it does or not," says the Hermit. And what if the three are wrong? The Universe, knowable and unknowable, will it be affected a whit by it? If the German Professor's Chair of Logic and Philosophy were set up in the Hermitage, would anything be gained or lost? Let the I deny the stars, and they will nevertheless roll in silence above it. Let ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... like a revolt against the Talmud is due to the course of mediaeval scholasticism. While Aristotle was supreme, it was impossible for man to conceive as knowable anything unattainable by reason. But reason must always leave God as unknowable. Mysticism did not assert that God was knowable, but it substituted something else for this spiritual scepticism. Mysticism started with the conviction that God was unknowable by reason, but it held that God was nevertheless realisable in the human experience. Accepting and adopting various ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and shamanistic fraud has been slow and ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... aloud rather than speaking, "I have to do not with unknowable pasts or with mystic futures, but with the things of my own life. Ayesha waited for me through two thousand years; Atene could marry a man she hated for power's sake, and then could poison him, as perhaps she would poison me when I wearied her. I know not what ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious. Clarke knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and convulsed with an unknowable terror, faded slowly from his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months, when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, and a bottle of some choice claret stood ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... that these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie between us and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... She turned toward the door with a new fear in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. Who ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... divine metaphysics. Hence he continued to disappear from his grandmother's parlour at much the same hour as before. In the cold, desolate garret, he knelt and cried out into that which lay beyond the thought that cried, the unknowable infinite, after the God that may be known as surely as a little child knows his mysterious mother. And from behind him, the pale-blue, star-crowded sky shone upon his head, through the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... till it flashed through her that not being a man, she could not imagine what the things were that could let a man suppose it. She had never thought of that before, and it dazed her. Perhaps he had seen all along that she did care for him, that he had known it in some way unknown and forever unknowable to her; the way a man knows; and all her disguises had availed nothing against him. Then, if he had known, he had acted very deceitfully and very wrongfully, and nothing could excuse him unless there had been other signs that a girl would recognize, too. That would excuse him, ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... Ultimate Cause, or of the Absolute Cause. The infinite cannot even be apprehended, and those who undertake to learn or to speculate regarding the infinite engage in a task beyond their powers. Such knowledge is not practical. The term "God" is merely an expression for a mode of the unknowable, conveying no meaning to those who use it. The view thus expressed originated in concessions unhappily made by certain writers, as Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, who, thinking to defend revealed religion, taught that reason cannot know the Infinite, and that therefore the Infinite must reveal ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... that it allowed the second Table of the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and end of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... veranda, talk, smoke, and listen, until his companions began to discuss such abstract questions as, "What is the real driving force of life?" or to argue on the philosophy of Buddhism, or Herbert Spencer's "Descriptive Sociology" and the "Unknowable." ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says. We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, and embraced ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that perhaps it was a long time since the girl had sat in a chair like that. If she had had a chance, when things were going badly, to sit in such a chair and rest, might the river have seemed a less desirable place? She had always supposed it was big things—queer, abstract, unknowable things like forces and traits that made life and death. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible. Mr. Stephen has no trouble ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... what it is composed, and when done, we know but little more of what it really is, than we know what sulphur is made of. We know it is a colored fluid, and it is in all parts of the flesh and bone. We know it builds up heaps of flesh, but how, is the question that leads us to honor the unknowable law of life, by which it does the work of its mysterious construction of all forms found in the parts of man. In all our efforts to learn what it is, what it is made of, and what enters it as life and gives it the building powers with that intelligence it displays in building, ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... life. It is not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my BALLADS seem to have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I shall get into THAT galley any more. But I should like to know if you join the shrill chorus of the crickets. The crickets are ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the winds. Charles Knollys was gone, utterly gone; no more to be met with by his girl-wife, save as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she resolved to go—to go home. Her strength now gave way; and when her aunt left ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... of problems merely, with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away. Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and the unknowable, but not in this sense, as an element of inexactness running through all things. He thought of the unknown as the indefinable beyond to an immediate world that might be quite ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... sympathy with the unknown, and, judging by his niece's expression, the unknowable. He rearranged the teacups, and, going to the kitchen, returned in a few minutes with a pot ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... learning and understanding facts; it consists in the slow collection of a quantity of details and their condensation into portable and incontrovertible formulae. History, which is more encumbered with details than any other science, has the choice between two alternatives: to be complete and unknowable, or to be knowable and incomplete. All the other sciences have chosen the second alternative; they abridge and they condense, preferring to take the risk of mutilating and arbitrarily combining the facts to the certainty of being unable ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... we stop where Bergson has left us? Why should he banish teleology? His super-consciousness is so indeterminate that it is not allowed to hamper itself with any purpose more definite than that of self-augmentation. The course and goal of Evolution are to it unknown and unknowable. Creation, freedom, and will are great things, as Mr. Balfour remarks, but we cannot lastingly admire them unless we know their drift. It is too haphazard a universe which Bergson displays. Joy does ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... impulse, it may be, to speculate in this direction—think such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that might be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a human heart to be true, I expect to find true—in greater forms, and without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. Why should I ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great self-organized institution of mediaeval religion. Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God; study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this—to misapplication ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... There is a vague fear which springs from an unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable, unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of mind over soul, power of calm over fear avail nothing; ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... afresh that spark of child-life which still lies smouldering in the hearts of us all, no matter how poor and sorrowful our beginnings. As we read, how the old memories come back to us! Old hopes, rosy with the expectation of the indefinite and unknowable. Old misgivings and fears; old rompings and holidays and precious idle hours. We know them all, and we know how true they are. We remember in our own case the very hour and day, and how it all happened ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... incoherence and disorder in his young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which nobody is leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the unknowable truths. ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... of the ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed; that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... are not so susceptible to spiritual influences as you, Medoline; so in harmony with the unseen and unknowable as you ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... to give? Was she at all more fit than anyone else to try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so wholly from each other by the unplumbed, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... plainly, that, without a fiction of resemblance, the proper relation between Creator and creature, between God and man, is unattainable.[121] If one exists, for whom the fiction or fancy has been converted into fact—for whom the Unknowable has proved itself to contain the Knowable: the ball of fire to hold within it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the magnitude, not scorn for the extravagance, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... expedition sailed in the spring of 1498, and had not returned in October. It consisted of several ships and about three hundred men. That John and Sebastian Cabot sailed on this voyage. When it returned is not known. From the time of sailing of this expedition John Cabot vanishes into the unknowable, and from thenceforth Sebastian alone ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... then, as to this reason, I have done. Even that love of Christ that is absolutely unknowable, as to the utmost bound thereof because it is eternal, will be yet in the nature of it sweet and desirable, because we shall enjoy or be possessed of it so. This therefore, if there were no more, is enough, when known, to draw away the heart from things ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... two friends talked philosophically for some minutes about the secret, unknowable troubles, which differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, which were not perceived at first, give rise to in families, and then Roger de Salnis, who was still looking at Madame de Mascaret through his opera-glasses, said: "It is almost ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... opponent resumes. The attributes, however, of not being seen, &c., belong also to the pradhana assumed by the Sa@nkhya-sm/ri/ti, which is acknowledged to be devoid of form and other sensible qualities. For their Sm/ri/ti says, 'Undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep' (Manu I, 5). To this pradhana also the attribute of rulership belongs, as it is the cause of all effects. Therefore the internal ruler may be understood to denote the pradhana. The pradhana has, indeed, been set aside already by the Sutra I, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... wander far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... morality. That any such distinction should exist in men's minds is due to the fact that dogma is inseparably connected with religion. If you eliminate dogma, what does religion consist of but morality? Substitute the love of Humanity for the love of the Unknowable—which is the subject of worship of Mr Germsell; or of the Deity, who is the object of worship of the majority of mankind—and you obtain a stimulus to morality which will suffice for all human need. It is in this great emotion, as it seems to me, that you will find at once the religion ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... of these particles was a conception that for Anaxagoras, as for the modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is the artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the Unknowable. But nous itself is the equivalent of that universal energy of motion which science recognizes as operating between the particles of matter, and which the theologist personifies as Deity. It is Pantheistic deity as Anaxagoras conceives it; his may be called the first scientific conception ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Billy Burr? And which was Dickie Lowe? Ah! those two must be the golden-haired twins about whom Mr. Owen had told her and Charlie three years ago, now no longer the foremost in the little procession, but as unknowable apart as ever, as they preceded the tenors. And there, behind all, was Mr. Owen's familiar face! Denys knelt with all the congregation, waiting and longing to hear his deep, strong voice in the collects which began the service. But it was a curate ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... thoughts, my mind was restored to its normal condition. I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions; and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... rolled, though the sun and the moon and the stars were hid, this blind Spirit in the iron knew whither it would go, and strained to the South. Witta called it the Wise Iron, because it showed him his way across the unknowable seas.' Again Sir Richard looked keenly at the children. 'How think ye? Was ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable, the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the coincidentia ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one believes ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... he can always be detected, and his clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour of the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and beyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells the secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable fate—"Wyrd"—neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The peculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conception gives to the poem is ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... your smart hotel, it is so much more adorable to drop in at some charming restaurant with tables set in the open air, and to hear the band play, and to eat all sorts of delicious unknowable dishes, and to drink a beautiful golden wine called "Lachrima Christi" (the tears of Christ), and to watch ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... in Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms, takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not worth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth explaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... earth. In the secondary group, a prelude and epilogue to the main composition, on the prow of the Ship of Earth are grouped the loves, greeds, passions, griefs and spiritual cravings of man and woman, who come and go from the Unknown to the Unknowable. The great arms of Destiny, pushing and pointing, giving and taking, guide the way. Between the four panels of Life on the Earth, stand the Hermes, milestones of ancient Rome, here used as milestones upon the road of Time. Sea-creatures indicate ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... forgot my meals, and when old Madge summoned me to my tea I found my dinner lying untouched upon the table. At night I read Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant—all those who have pried into what is unknowable. They are all fruitless and empty, barren of result, but prodigal of polysyllables, reminding me of men who, while digging for gold, have turned up many worms, and then exhibit them exultantly as being what they sought. At times a restless spirit would come upon me, and I would walk ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can't answer back as you would, and right sharply ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... But, on the other hand, we are totally 'ignorant of the essence of either.'[170] We can discover the laws either of mental or moral phenomena; but a law, as he explains, means in strictness nothing but a 'general fact.'[171] It is idle, therefore, to explain the nature of the union between the two unknowable substances; we can only discover that they are united and observe the laws according to which one set of phenomena corresponds to the other. From a misunderstanding of this arise all the fallacies of scholastic ontology, 'the most idle and absurd speculation that ever employed the human faculties.'[172] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... much dove-tailing and welding together of naval and military methods, signals, technical words, etc., and the worst punishment should any link in the composite chain give way. And then—taking success for granted—on the top of all this—comes the Turk; "unspeakable" he used to be, "unknowable" now. But we shall give him a startler too. If only our plans come off the Turk won't have time to turn; much less to bring into play all the clever moves foreseen for him by some whose stomachs for the fight have been satisfied by ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... many a time inflicts horrible cruelty is too certain, and those to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for the sake of leniency in a given case. A great enemy to indifference, a great friend to indulgence, said Turgot of himself; and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... discrepancy between thought and reality has often been emphasized. There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly does present an array of conflicting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... to be, is blasphemy.' The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar [Greek: Agnosto Theo]—'To the unknown and unknowable God.'" A little later (p. 20) he says: "We should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he 'created in the image of God.' It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... almighty. It is first of all a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "unknowable" to ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Shaftesburys" of Matthew Arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction to the Tao-te-king, pp. x-xv. ("Le Livre de la Voie et de ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... be the next Governor," I said quickly. "And you will be, too," I added, again using that queer place in my brain that seems to know perfectly unknowable things and that only works in matters that ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the "Unknowable," however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader's attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which it occupies his thought will tend ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... in the town where their fathers had lived, without dreaming of country residences and smokeless air—they were content also to believe what their fathers had believed about the beginning and the end of all. There was no such thing as the unknowable in those days. The eternal mysteries were as simple as an addition sum; a child could tell you with absolute certainty where you would be and what you would be doing a million years hence, and exactly what God thought of you. Accordingly, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... might be called theology, and not legitimate theology even, but supra-theological—for all sane theology admits that man cannot know God. It is a desperate, insane suggestion that we must know the unknowable, and that if we cannot do that we can have no philosophy. Of course men who think this way know nothing of philosophy, and are ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation—its relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it—which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... parasites and flatterers who would lay siege to her—the scheming mammas and the affectionate sisters and cousins who would plot to gain her confidence! For a man who was poor, and who meant to keep his self-respect, was there any possible conclusion except that she was entirely unknowable to him? ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Universe, who has looked upon those of the Universe, who has heard those of the Universe. He is mightier than all might, upon whose incomprehensible Face no one is able to gaze. Beyond all mind does He exist in His own Form, Solitary and Unknowable. The Universal Mystery is He, the Universal Wisdom, of all things the Beginning. In Him are all Lights, all Life, and all Repose. He is the Beatitude of which all in the Universe are in need, for that they might receive Him they are. All beings of the Universe does He behold within ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... original. "My dear Mr. Holcroft," said C——, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, "you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl, about fifteen, that I met with in the Hartz forest in Germany—and who one day, as I was reading the Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable, the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, What, you read Kant? Why, I that am a German born, don't understand him!" This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out in no measured tone, "Mr. C——, you ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... must admit at least the theoretic possibility of a conflict between one of the Members of the League and one of these two Great Powers, insisting, if we will, that such a possibility is highly remote so far as the United States is concerned, and utterly unknowable so far as Russia is concerned; but ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... then it came to her that perhaps it was a long time since the girl had sat in a chair like that. If she had had a chance, when things were going badly, to sit in such a chair and rest, might the river have seemed a less desirable place? She had always supposed it was big things—queer, abstract, unknowable things like forces and traits that made life ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... choose, and since near the entrance there were other paths more inviting, Maritza concluded that they were nearing the end of the journey. For a moment on entering the defile her heart sank within her. It was like leaving the open world and the sunlight to creep into the dark unknowable, where some horrible fate might await her. Would she ever step freely into the open light of day again? Her thoughts sped backward to the tower standing above the pass and to the man she had left there. Which road had ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... the quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about unknowable trifles. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... is of metals, plants and animals) there is no breach of continuity; that "the living response in all its diverse modifications is only a repetition of responses seen in the inorganic" and that the phenomena of response "are determined, not by the play of an unknowable and arbitrary vital force, but by the working of laws that know no change, acting equally and uniformly throughout the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... original. 'My dear Mr. Holcroft,' said Coleridge, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl of about fifteen, in the Hartz Forest, in Germany, and who one day, as I was reading "The Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable," the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, "What! you read Kant? Why, I, that am a German born, don't understand him!"' This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out, in no measured tone, 'Mr. Coleridge, you ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... could have remained satisfied with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some chance to ask him directly, "But how do you feel in regard to the prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... certainly would not have understood. To feel for others what they do not feel for themselves is a distortion of sympathy which often afflicts me. Her discomfort was purely childish, a sudden fear of the dark night, the dark world, the ways of fortune so dark and unknowable. No self-questioning and no sting of conscience had any part in it. She had been happy, and she wanted to go on being happy; but now she was afraid she was going to be unhappy, and she shrank from unhappiness as from a toothache. I took ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... the dry-goods department of the P. C. Company, and returned with the Kid to make Madeline's acquaintance. After that came a period such as the cabin had never seen before, and what with cutting, and fitting, and basting, and stitching, and numerous other wonderful and unknowable things, the male conspirators were more often banished the premises than not. At such times the Opera House opened its double ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... sleeves, as Buffon says. We have a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found itself fit for the world, and embraced it all. Nothing ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... that Occultism differs from Magic and other secret Sciences as the glorious Sun does from a rush-light, as the immutable and immortal Spirit of Man—the reflection of the absolute, causeless, and unknowable all,—differs from the mortal clay—the ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and shamanistic ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... you realize its peculiarity. Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities. Spencer tossed all his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back on them forever. His books seem to have expressed all that there was ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... called agnosticism or positivism. It accepts the Protagorean doctrine only in the sense of attributing to human knowledge as a whole an incapacity for exceeding the range of perception. Beyond this realm of natural science, where theories can be sensibly verified, lies the unknowable realm, more real, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... blind fate or unknowable force. Personality is denied, and it is asserted that this great force neither sees, cares nor even knows what men do or ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... against the supposition that the vapour-engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this whole world, or in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only! ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... whatever about, and it is no use discussing this matter now. I shall only add one word: the real living spirit of a human being is as free as Brahma; and even more than this for us, for, according to our religion and our philosophy, our spirit is Brahma himself, higher than whom there is only the unknowable, the all-pervading, the omnipotent essence of Parabrahm. The living spirit of man cannot be ordered about like the spirits of the spiritualists, it cannot be made a slave of... However, it is getting so late that we had better go to bed. Let us ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... a doctrine because it was totally impossible that I should know whether it was true or not, or indeed attach any real meaning to it whatever. The highest altar, as Sir W. Hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable God. Others, seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to find in that the Christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment of the highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... was something beyond the water—something dim, mysterious, unknowable. It might be the "Islands of the Blest"; it might be the "sacred isle." One thing he asserted firmly: "Atlas upholds the broad Heaven ... standing on earth's verge with head and unwearied hands," while the clear-voiced Hesperides guarded their beautiful golden ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... in sympathy with the unknown, and, judging by his niece's expression, the unknowable. He rearranged the teacups, and, going to the kitchen, returned in a few minutes with a ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... their fellow-men. And so the world goes sorrowfully on, hating, cheating, grasping, abusing; still wondering dully why men droop and stumble, why they consume with disease, and, with the despairing conviction that God is unknowable, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sense-impressions we project as it were outwards and term the real world outside ourselves. But the things-in-themselves which the sense-impressions symbolize, the 'reality,' as the metaphysicians wish to call it, at the other end of the nerve, remains unknown and is unknowable. Reality of the external world lies for science and for us in combinations of form and color and touch—sense-impressions as widely divergent from the thing 'at the other end of the nerve' as the sound ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... the nature of the situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... to hold that intelligence is something secondary not primordial. Man, who is richly endowed with it on earth, knows really nothing, never can know anything, about the origin and reason of things. They are absolutely unknowable. He finds abyss yawning under abyss, height towering above height, and dark mysteries ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs the ultimate and antecedent causation the Unknowable. The philosophy of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... a, the sphere of immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other words, were merely and altogether transcendent—He would also be merely and altogether unknowable, exactly as Agnosticism avers. His transcendent attributes, all that partakes of infinity, cannot—and that of necessity—become objects of immediate knowledge to finite minds; if He is to be known at all to us, He can only be so known by being manifested through His presence within, or action ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... attest its goodness, so that the attesting miracle is superfluous. If it is bad, it is rejected in spite of a miracle to attest its authority, so that the attesting miracle is deceptive. The only use of a miracle might be to attest a revelation of otherwise unknowable facts, which had nothing to do with any moral teaching; and seeing that such revelation could not be investigated, as it dealt with the unknowable, it would be highly dangerous—and, perhaps, blasphemous—to ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... child-life which still lies smouldering in the hearts of us all, no matter how poor and sorrowful our beginnings. As we read, how the old memories come back to us! Old hopes, rosy with the expectation of the indefinite and unknowable. Old misgivings and fears; old rompings and holidays and precious idle hours. We know them all, and we know how true they are. We remember in our own case the very hour and day, and how it all happened and why, and what came of it,—joys and sorrows as real ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man has cut loose from leading-strings; he stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day's work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, or whatever it shall be called, has appointed. Observation tells me that modern man at large, far from inclining towards the new, personal, elder-brotherly God of Mr. Wells, has turned his face the other way. He confronts life ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... first and second verses of the book. But the critics who are correcting our Bible for us (?) inform us that their same literary discovery holds good here—that this part of the book was not written by Isaiah. They assume to hand over this part of the book, knowingly, to the "Great Unknown" and unknowable prophets. The testimony of Luke contradicts the critics. He gives Isaiah full credit as the author of the statement. The reader will doubtless accept the fact that the inspired writer, the author of Luke's gospel, obtained his information at first ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... inquire as to whether this idea be conscious or not? Such speculation can have value only if our anxiety be to determine whether we should more rightly admire the bees that have the idea, or nature that has planted it in them. Wherever it lodge, in the vast unknowable body or in the tiny ones that we see, it merits our deepest attention; nor may it be out of place here to observe that it is the habit we have of subordinating our wonder to accidents of origin or place, that so often causes us to lose the chance of deep admiration; which of all things in the world ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial rewards ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into the Universal Spirit ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... personality were all, and a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave; then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... of "faith," that is, belief in things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... conceived as a being with a separate and infinitely high destiny marked out before it. Concentrated thought, deep emotion and lofty purpose, in view of these objects, is supremely profitable. But what is there left worthy of thought for the Vedantist Yogi when the Divine Being is the unknowable and the Yogi himself the deluded child of (Maya) illusion and (avidya) ignorance—those twin enemies to all true and worthy knowledge? It cannot be elevating to detach the mind from things worldly and ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure. I wake up in the best spirits, with an inclination to sing in my throat. Why? I go down by the side of the water, and suddenly, after walking a short distance, I return home wretched, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... angel is not above being taught even by a creature of earth. And in Fan there is one thing lacking, angel though she be, and this I shall point out to her. I can find no mysticism in her: what she knows she knows, and with the unknowable, which may yet be known, she concerns herself not. Who shall say of the seed I scatter that it will not germinate in this fair garden without weeds and tares, and strike root and blossom at last? For why should she not be ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... aside external circumstances of life, what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as it were, striking light from the most ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... can penetrate into that world. Still, the farther we follow Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us. Yet it never actually disappears. There would seem to be inevitable a sort of kernel of matter or prick of sense about which all our thoughts are generated. Yet this residue is a vanishing quantity. This seemed to Fichte to be a self-contradiction ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... diagram, we must postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of potential, but in itself inert and indeterminate. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... know of what it is composed, and when done, we know but little more of what it really is, than we know what sulphur is made of. We know it is a colored fluid, and it is in all parts of the flesh and bone. We know it builds up heaps of flesh, but how, is the question that leads us to honor the unknowable law of life, by which it does the work of its mysterious construction of all forms found in the parts of man. In all our efforts to learn what it is, what it is made of, and what enters it as life and gives it the building powers with ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... generally feel toward God, when he contemplates his "Conscious Principle," or his "Idea," or the "Substance" which he conceives as the identity of thought and extension, or, for that matter, "Mind-Stuff" or the "Unknowable." That other men may not see that he has anything in particular to be inspired about, or that he can hope for anything in particular for himself or for other men, does not rob him of his inspiration, and that may affect his ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist! Beautiful to the poet's vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing beautiful ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... anxieties. That is the danger of all sensitive people. You can't attain to proved certainties in this life—at least, you can't at present. I don't say that there are not certainties—indeed, I think that it is all certainty, and that we mustn't confuse the unknown with the unknowable. As you go on, if you are fair-minded and sympathetic, you will get intuitions; you will discover gradually exactly what you are worth, and what you can do, and how you can do it best. But don't expect to know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful temptation of saying, 'So many good, fine, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... heard in the streets. The artist had not to draw pain but to draw despair; and while the pain is old enough the particular despair is modern. The victim racked for a creed could at least cry "I am converted." But here even the terms of surrender are unknowable; and she can only ask ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... thus became flooded with water, like one vast sea, and all mobile creatures were hushed in death, and the sun and the moon and the winds were all destroyed, and the Universe was devoid of planets and stars, the Supreme Being called Narayana, unknowable by the senses, adorned with a thousand heads and as many eyes and legs, became desirous of rest. And the serpent Sesha, looking terrible with his thousand hoods, and shining with the splendour of ten thousand suns, and white as the Kunda flower or the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... betrayed into contradictions and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He is not? It seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads on 'the threshold of ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... scrutiny of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany Count ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in this world, is, know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself;' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... The mantra, 'There was darkness, hidden in darkness,' &c. (Ri. Samh. X, 129, 3), sets forth the same view; and so does Manu (I, 5), 'This universe existed in the shape of Darkness, unperceived, destitute of distinctive marks, unattainable by reasoning, unknowable, wholly immersed as it were in deep sleep.' And, as to the text, 'from that the Lord of Maya creates everything,' we shall prove later on the unchangeableness of Brahman, and explain the scriptural texts ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... dawn; then at a flash, the doom, the quake, the breaking down of outline, the caving in of walls, followed by the sickening collapse in which life, wealth, and innumerable beating human hearts went down into the unseen and unknowable. He saw and he heard, but his eyes clung to but one point, his ears listened for but one cry. There at the extremity of a cornice, clinging to a bending beam, was the figure again—the woman of the ice-floe and the desert. She seemed nearer now. He could see the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... save Rome. The Christians wanted to be free of it, because they felt its weight; the Pagans wanted to keep it, because they found it warm and comfortable. Symmachus sees nothing higher or better than custom; the secret of the universe, says he, is unknowable; there is no inner life. —He was confuted by a much more alive and less estimable man: Ambrose, bishop of Milan,—with whom, also, both he and Ausonius were on friendly terms. Ambrose's argument, too, is illuminating: like the King of Hearts', it was in the main that "you were not ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... said, thinking aloud rather than speaking, "I have to do not with unknowable pasts or with mystic futures, but with the things of my own life. Ayesha waited for me through two thousand years; Atene could marry a man she hated for power's sake, and then could poison him, as perhaps she would poison me when I wearied her. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... reason causes us to assume to exist is Being Unmanifest—God the Father—who cannot be known through the senses—whose existence is made known to us only through Pure Reason, or through the workings of the Spirit within us. In the material sense "God is Unknowable"—but in the higher sense He may be known to the Spirit of Man, and His existence may be known and proven by the exercise of the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... unhesitating, absolute statements. He who mastered words so completely that he learned to despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... asks that these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie between us and it hide their secret ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... smelled. There was a thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew—as if he knew—what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in her ear, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... still finds many conflicting opinions. This being true, you will deal leniently with me for the opinion I hold as to their analgesic action. Of course it will be objected to, for the unseen is, to a great extent, unknowable. Enough for my argument, however; it seems to suit the case very well without looking for another; and while it was based on the phenomenon resulting from many trials, and not the trials upon it as a previous ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... Emerson understood or misunderstood Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we need not be disturbed for his learning. It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us. The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that there is some ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... sure, Twiggs had come riding like the devil's imps with some new warning from Cynthia. How could such planning fail? And failed it had not but for the honour of this gentleman, or perhaps some design of the Unknowable behind the machinery of ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... understand that there are things knowable and things unknowable. He came to see that truest wisdom is in this: for one to spend well his strength on the knowable things and refuse to dissipate his intellectual vigor upon the unknowable. Not until he began really to know things was he conscious in any saving degree of ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
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