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Go out into the world, you who may love me, and say, "This flower is he, this sunset cloud is he; this wind is his breath, this song is his spirit." What is my faith, the faith in which I die? It is the faith of modern thought; it is the faith of the ages. It is a spiritual Pantheism, an impassioned Agnosticism. A Presence am I; what is my source I know not, nor can I ever know.
And one future majesty was rocked upside down by another until the royal face of the younger queen was purple and her voice was still. Mary found it more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism, and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a series of theological and economical questions which surprised her father and made her mother's head reel.
Maurice smiled, looking up impulsively. "I can't see why you lay so much stress on Puritanism," he said. "What has Puritanism resulted in? Its whole struggle has come to an end in doubt and agnosticism and flippancy. Intellectual curiosity has taken the place of spiritual stress; ethical casuistry or theological amusements seem to me to stand instead of religious conviction." Mrs.
For this I am to blame, likewise for omitting certain explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part supply. This seems the commonest mistake. Scepticism, positivism, and agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means, without further explanation.
Agnosticism and materialism were in the air, and remained the dominant features for quite a number of years. There were those who deplored the loss of their faith such as it had been. Huxley obviously did; and Romanes, who afterwards returned to the Church of England, confessedly did. Such persons, and there were many of them, honestly were unable to believe, and said so.
He had begged that until she was firm in her agnosticism she should not expose herself to influences which could but result in mental distress, and without any practical issue unless to separate them. She had escaped once; next time he might find it more difficult to win her back. How kind he was. He had not said a word about his own suffering.
This sort of agnosticism appears in Greece as early as the fifth century B.C., when Protagoras's view that "man is the measure of all things" makes extrahuman Powers superfluous. Epicurus reached a similar practical atheism apparently from a scientific view of the construction of the world.
Biology for the young readily degenerates into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-for-the-best claptrap about adaptation, but a sure remedy is the strong tonic of agnosticism, teaching one of the best lessons science has to offer, the resolute rejection of authority.
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. In point of fact, nothing could be farther from all this than what pragmatism has to say of truth. Its thesis is an altogether previous one.
I find not only my Protestant sympathies in the "Confessions" but a proud agnosticism, and an exalted individualism which in certain passages leads the reader to the sundered rocks about the cave of Zarathoustra. My book was written before I heard that splendid name, before Zarathoustra was written; and the doctrine, though hardly formulated, is in the "Confessions," as Darwin is in Wallace.
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