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Updated: October 14, 2026
To 'frame clear and distinct ideas of them' is impossible. In respect to the attribute of unknowability all Gods are alike. They are all supernatural; and the merely natural cannot attach rational ideas to names assumed to stand for something above nature.
A more friendly position in reference to religion is taken by those who hold, not directly negative, but only decidedly sceptical views of the existence of God; who reduce the relative unsearchableness of God, which every religious standpoint admits, to an absolute unknowability; and who find the nature of religion either in a pious acknowledgment of this unknowability, or in a poetical substitute for the knowledge of God, i.e., comprehending the unknowable in a figure.
People will recollect Thackeray's remarks concerning the impossibility of getting to know the real domestic life of your French friends; whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the essential unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and even untitled county families of the land.