For the very ground of their agnosticism is materialistic.
It is important to note that both scepticism and agnosticism agree in regarding perception as the essential factor in knowledge.
Another agnosticism places all sense qualities on a par, but would regard physics and psychology as complementary reports upon the two distinct series of phenomena in which the underlying reality expresses itself.
Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne?
To react against this abiding danger we need all through the country well instructed and thoroughly educated Catholic leaders who will be in our world of agnosticism and irreligion, the protagonists and apologists of Catholicism.
It will be the counter-ideal to the ideal of agnosticism and materialism so fostered and so prevalent in our neutral universities.
Agnosticism and Idealism alike--have, for all that has hitherto been urged in their favour, no more foundation than the supposition that a chimera lives in the moon.
Most men who confirm themselves inagnosticism are kept at that point by arrested moral activity.
Westover's agnosticismdid not, somehow, extend to Mars.
In fact, I don't know it," said Westover, and he was painfully aware of having shocked his hearers by the agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite simply and unconsciously.
These theories had also, for the most part, the common trait that they professed agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept.
Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if possible, than they had been before.
In this good sense of a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age.
Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested.
In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has administered.
Agnosticism for obvious reasons could be no system.
They learned that the claim of agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure.
Agnosticism had at first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.
Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes--a bald contradiction in terms.
But the inadequacy of Agnosticismwas to be seen not only on the intellectual side.
The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious.
If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it.
Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best intelligence of the age.
Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out.
He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more.
One wonders if she had had any knowledge of the growing agnosticism of her other son, but probably this was unlikely.
As to agnosticism being a distinctive faith, I have already shown that it cannot possibly be anything of the kind, unless perfect faith in logic is distinctive of agnostics; which, after all, it may be.
With scientific Theology, Agnosticismhas no quarrel.
Agnosticism as a religious philosophy per se rests on an almost total ignoring of history and social evolution (p.
Is the modern more or less complete suspension of judgment as to the facts of the history of regal Rome, or the real origin of the Homeric poems, anything but agnosticism in history and in literature?
It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and Theology; or rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism.
Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress at Manchester.
Scepticism, positivism, and agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means, without further explanation.
By scepticism this is treated as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, while positivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it, call real truth sour grapes, and consider phenomenal truth quite sufficient for all our 'practical' purposes.
Agnosticism can neither deny the fact successfully, nor solve the speculative difficulties which its recognition raises up.
Agnosticism is but a cautious idealism--a timid phenomenalism.
The dark mysticism of the ancient East and the agnosticism of modern times here join hands.
That this view of faith is wrong, and the result of subjective agnosticism that denies to man any positive understanding of supernatural truths, we have shown repeatedly.
Yonder, Agnosticism is strutting: no longer philosophy, but facts and reality, is its slogan.
Kant's philosophy was agnostic, and it was this agnosticism which made his use of the ethical argument possible.
But agnosticism is a cheap way of establishing a position, and is likely to suggest to the reflective that the whole setting of theodicy is at fault.
Instead of the ancient path of asceticism and virtue with agnosticism and atheism, we see the means of salvation put now, and perhaps too easily, within the control of all.
Those who maintain that there is no justification for the five-fold division hold that the agnosticism of Carneades was really latent in Plato, and became prominent owing to the necessity of refuting the Stoic criterion.
Occasionally he too mis-stated the meaning of the word he had invented, and described agnosticism as meaning ``that a man shall not say he knows or believes what he has no scientific ground for professing to know or believe.
We ought to give full consideration to its later developments, and the gradual sliding of its atheism and agnosticism into theism and polytheism.
Even now how many disbelieve or preserve an agnosticism regarding the chief dogmas of the Christian creed?
On the one hand, we find that modern agnosticism is not the result of carelessness, but of thoughtfulness.
He then asks us: "Is an honest belief in the Resurrection really inconsistent with a reverent agnosticismas to the historical circumstances out of which in the first instance that belief arose?
Whether it be that Agnosticism engenders a spirit of resignation, it is difficult to say; but the fact remains that no one accepts the ills of life more cheerfully, no one meets his death more bravely, than the average Agnostic.
From this one would gather that it was God's pleasure to hide Himself from the wise, and therefore that the increase of agnosticism alongside the spread of knowledge was all part of the Divine plan.
We are Agnostics, and, though some may preserve an agnosticism concerning the continuance of consciousness after death, we are all of us resigned to the inevitable.
But dogmatic atheism is rare compared with the sceptical type, which is identical with agnosticism (q.
But, properly and professionally scientific as it may be to give to agnosticism this turn, it is very [p.
In fully appraising agnosticism we need to consider at close range another idea of the positivist.
The difficulty as to the agnosticism of science may be presented in another way.
So viewed an instrumental agnosticism is also teleological, but not in any sense of a fixed and static telos.
In a word, science must and does recognize an unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is accordingly important among the three determining points of science's circumference.
Whatever this may mean psychologically, historically and sociologically it means that a time of agnosticism leads to all sorts of applications of science, such as those, for example, in legislation and in industry.
Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to consider and appraise.
Agnosticism confines knowledge to actual positive experience, and in its form of "positivism" to an only tentative acceptance of actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of [p.
So science is aloof, and in being aloof it disfigures and defaces reality, and the argument for agnosticism is consequently unassailable.
Is it not one of the functions of the various negatives in our human life really to save life from the narrowness of its various professional abstractions, and is not the attitude of agnosticism but one of these negations?
Agnosticism simply endows the knower--must we not even put our conclusion so?
In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely re-enforced by the support it receives from the agnosticism of the West.
This ready acceptance of Western agnosticism is a second fact that has tended to give the West the impression referred to above.
For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticismfound so easy an entrance into Japan.
It must be shown that the sensational and "positive" philosophies, ending in agnosticism as to all the great problems of life and of reality, are essentially at fault in not recognizing the nature of the mind that knows.
The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan.
It was indeed a system of ethics touched with emotion, it was religious, but it failed to become the religion it might have become because it insisted on its agnosticism and refused to worship the highest and best it knew.
