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He was sitting in front of his fireplace one night reading, when a thought in some history recalled to his mind a paragraph somewhere in Spencer's astonishing chapters on "the unknowable" in his "Facts and Comments," and he arose to see if he could find it.
He thinks that Sir W. Hamilton has made out his case against the first, but not against the last; that the first is really 'an unmeaning and senseless abstraction, a fasciculus of negations, unknowable and inconceivable, but not the last.
Unlike the factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the inevitable, even the unknowable.
Have they not conceived of God as a group of abstract notions, or as a something that may best be described as the Unknowable, or as the Substance which is the identity of thought and extension, or as the external world itself? All have not sinned in this way, but some have, and they are not men whom we can ignore.
The slayer knows better than we, when she pierces the victim beneath the chin. Through the narrow breach in the throat the cerebral ganglions are reached and immediate death ensues. The examination of these acts of brigandage is not sufficient in view of my incorrigible habit of following every reply by another query, until the granite wall of the unknowable rises before me.
But agnostic is commonly used in a wide sense so as to include the third as well as the fourth class those who assume an unknowable, as well as those who do not know whether there is an unknowable or not. Comte and Spencer, for instance, who believed in an unknowable, are counted as agnostics.
These 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.
His mind is no longer simple enough to accept blindly dogmas and observances, and, as all becomes 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.
To every discerning and illuminated heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the Divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress. Far be it from His glory that human tongue should adequately recount His praise, or that human heart comprehend His fathomless mystery.
It's understood, I alone won't be able to manage all this. I expect help from you; and after that, whatever God may will." "Oh, well," said Simanovsky, "the work is new, not threadbare; and how can we know the unknowable perhaps you, Lichonin, will become the spiritual father of a good being. I, too, offer my services."