Agnosticism And Other Essays
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II. AGNOSTICISM. Rationalism owes a debt of gratitude to him who coined the word "agnostic." Previously there had been only " infidel" and " atheist," and one or two other similar terms, all irate bayonets pointed at the very teeth of orthodoxy. They were words, too, that had attained a kind of rowdy, buccaneering prominence ; they appeared to prowl, like verbal guerillas, upon the outskirts of accepted vocabularies. Besides, they failed clearly to express, in many cases, the mental attitudes of those to whom they were applied. A good many , sensible and moral people abode in the world who felt as averse to denying the existence of a deity as they did to affirming it. They resembled, to a certain degree, the chancellor in Tennyson's " Sleeping Beauty," who diplomatically " Dallied with his golden chai
...n and smiling put the question by." Still, about the real agnostic spirit there is much more sincerity than diplomacy. It means, in its finest sense, a courageous envisaging of the awful problems of life and death, and an admission of their total insolubility. It might almost, in particular temperaments and personalities, be said to have become a sort of new religion by itself, simpler than that of Comte, with his complex and deliberated apings of Christian forms, and yet capable in some respects of being classed with Positivism. At the same time, a very large majority of agnostics are quite without the reverential sense. " I do not know" precludes in them all tendency to "divine" or to "feel." Nor should they be blamed for this indifference, reluctance, or whatever it may be called. Emotion and reason have an arctic and antarctic divergence. The average type of agnostic has reached his present position through the help of reason, and therefore he cannot be expected...
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