have
ventured to urge is that they must not expect us to speak of ourselves
by that title.

The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems
the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary
according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual
Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable."
[54] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I
know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my
faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is
exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may
have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.
Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of
uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the part of
realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and
Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality
or immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of
Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming
to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for
twenty-five centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give
their minds to these topics. Generation after generation, philosophy has
been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore
it was at the top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is
written in innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will
discover that the stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume
saw this; Kant saw it; since their time, more and more eyes have been
cleansed of the films which prevented them from seeing it; until now the
weight and number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal
mystifications has begun to tell in practical life.

It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and
Theology; or, rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and
Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and
Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[55] as to the
truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific
Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic,
knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on
those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing
more urgently than that the scie