Scepticism Sentence Examples

scepticism
  • Ancient scepticism was frankly opposed to religious belief.

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  • But more important was the influence of philosophy, which led soon enough to a general scepticism among the upper classes.

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  • But scepticism of this kind was not universal.

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  • Like Socrates, he was not a philosopher, and did not pretend to be one; but, as the reasoned scepticism of Socrates cleared the way for the philosophy of Plato, so did Xenophanes's "abnormis sapientia" for the philosophy of Parmenides.

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  • It remained for the more robust faith of a Schliemann to show that such scepticism was all too faint-hearted, by proving that at such sites as Tiryns, Mycenae and Hissarlik evidences of a very early period of Greek civilization awaited the spade of the excavator.

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  • The extremest form of antagonism is pure scepticism or pure agnosticism, the assertion that nothing can be known.

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  • This scepticism took form in the school, most active between 1860 and 1880, known as the school of "Expectant Medicine."

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  • He published works on Leibnitz, empiricism and scepticism in Hume's philosophy, modern pessimism, Kantic criticism, English philosophy, Heraclitus of Ephesus and many other subjects.

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  • There was a new scepticism - at the very least a doctrine of limitation in human knowledge; but in its extremer forms an absolute agnosticism.

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  • Pascal had already shown how philosophical scepticism might be employed as a bulwark for faith, and Glanvill follows in the same track.

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  • Thus scepticism and relativism are superseded by a historical philosophy, and the absoluteness of truth is affirmed, but the notion of a definite truth is at the same time both negated and satirized.

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  • The completion of the second Temple (516 B.C.) has been followed by disillusionment as to the anticipated prosperity, by indifference to worship, scepticism as to providence, and moral laxity.'

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  • They are also the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the reawakening sciences of nature.

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  • But he does not follow his idea into the details of human duty, though he passes in review fatalism, mysticism, pantheism, scepticism, egotism, sentimentalism and rationalism.

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  • It is explained by Cicero as being due to his theory that the scepticism of Carneades was merely a means of attacking the Stoics on their own ground.

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  • Heathens felt in the religion of Israel an escape from their growing scepticism, and a solution to the problem of life.

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  • The Centilogium theologicum has often been cited as an example of thoroughgoing scepticism under a mask of solemn irony.

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  • But when a committee of the Royal Asiatic Society, with George Grote at its head, decided that the translations of an Assyrian text made independently by the scholars just named were at once perfectly intelligible and closely in accord with one another, scepticism was silenced, and the new science was admitted to have made good its claims. Naturally the early investigators did not fathom all the niceties of the language, and the work of grammatical investigation has gone on continuously under the auspices of a constantly growing band of workers.

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  • Until corroboration was found in the Egyptian inscriptions themselves, not only were Manetho's lists in doubt, but scepticism had been carried to the point of denying that Manetho himself had ever existed.

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  • He had before this published Some Words for God, in which, with great power and eloquence, he combated the scepticism of the day.

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  • By these and similar arguments he arrives at the fundamental principle of Scepticism, the radical and universal opposition of causes; panti logo logos antikeitai.

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  • The application of "common sense" to the problem of substance supplied a more satisfactory analytic for him than the scepticism of Hume which reached him through a study of Kant.

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  • So far as a remedy for scepticism is found at all, Kant places it, not within theoretic knowledge, but in moral or " practical " experience.

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  • The great critic of scepticism has diverged from idealism toward scepticism again, or has given his idealism a sceptical colour, mitigated - but only mitigated - by faith in the moral consciousness.

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  • Used by Kant sceptically of the limitations of reason, dialectic in Hegel becomes constructive; and scepticism itself becomes a stage in knowledge.

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  • The doubts thus cast upon the age when the Homeric poems first assumed the fixed form of writing were closely associated with the universal scepticism as to the historical accuracy of any traditions whatever regarding the early history of Greece.

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  • Their scepticism was an end in itself.

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  • Hegel offers a supposed proof that Time and Space, Matter, Nature, are ascertainable and definable 2 This is Kant's positive refutation of Hume's scepticism.

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  • The critics of Aquinas - Duns Scotus and the later Nominalists - show some tendency towards rational scepticism.

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  • In Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher Berkeley gives the fullest statement of this argument, while adding more commonplace attacks on the pettiness of religious scepticism.

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  • Scepticism, with which P. Bayle had played as a historian - he amused himself, too, with praising the Manichaean solution of the riddle of the universe - became a serious power in the history of philosophy with the advent of David Hume.

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  • Nay, it may be questioned how far it is either psychologically or logically possible to turn general scepticism into a coherent doctrine.

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  • Popular scepticism - perhaps even Charles Darwin's; Huxley himself was a student of Hume - understands by agnosticism that science is certain while philosophy and theology are baseless.

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  • It seems as if one foot rested on dogmatism and one on scepticism.

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  • If this tendency is to take effect, a certain part of Kant's rational scepticism must be accepted.

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  • Giving that argument the highest place seems to involve, as already said, a dash of the same scepticism.

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  • It is not exactly an attempt to base Christian faith on rational scepticism.

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  • The latter's cheerful man-of-the-world scepticism is transfigured in Pascal to a deep distrust of human reason, in part, perhaps, from anti-Protestant motives.

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  • Besides the ELXXoi we have some lines preserved from the 'IvaaXyoi, a poem in elegiac verse, which appears to have inculcated the tenets of scepticism, and one or two fragments which cannot be with certainty assigned to either poem.

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  • But such a temper of mind is much more akin to scepticism than to mysticism; it is characteristic of those who either do not feel the need of philosophizing their beliefs, or who have failed in doing so and take refuge in sheer acceptance.

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  • From its origin in Descartes and onwards through Locke and Berkeley, modern philosophy carried with it, Reid contends, the germ of scepticism.

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  • Metrodorus is especially interesting as the teacher of Anaxarchus, the friend of Pyrrho, and, therefore, as the connecting link between atomism proper and the later scepticism.

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  • With the establishment of the belief in ethical immortality this phase of scepticism vanished from the Jewish world, not, however, without leaving behind it works of enduring value.

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  • Aquinas is on the side of rationalism, Scotus on the side of scepticism.

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  • None the less is the position in itself an untenable one and the parent of scepticism.

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  • The second part of his work consists in the attack upon the theory of causality, in which he adduces almost entirely those considerations which are the basis of modern scepticism.

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  • This is only one of many cases where the investigations of the archaeologist have proved not iconoclastic but reconstructive, tending to restore confidence in classical traditions which the scientific historians of the age of Niebuhr and George Cornewall Lewis regarded with scepticism.

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  • It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing criticism of the basis of knowledge the substance of which is summed up in his celebrated Refuta tion of Idealism,' wherein he sought to undermine Hume's scepticism by carrying it one step further and demonstrating that not only is all knowledge of self or object excluded, but the consciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself impossible except in relation to some external permanent and universally accepted world of objects.

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  • So far from establishing the truth for which dualism is itself concerned - the reality of all differences - such a theory can end only in a scepticism as to the reality of any difference.

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  • The translation was attacked in the Quarterly as favourable to scepticism, and the translators jointly replied.

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  • He is keen, positive, logical, combining with curious dashes of scepticism many genuine moral convictions and a good knowledge of the various national religions and mythologies whose relative value he is able to appreciate.

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  • In his antipathy to Christianity, which appears to him barbaric and superstitious, he gives himself up to the scepticism and satire of a man of the world through which he comes in contact with Epicurean tendencies."

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  • The predisposing circumstances which affected Montaigne were thus likely to incline him to scepticism, to ethical musings on the vanity of life and the like.

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  • This was a decidedly complicated one, and neglect of it has led some readers to adopt a more positive idea of Montaigne's scepticism than is fully justified by all the facts.

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  • Where there can be no suspicion of such "tendency" as has been noticed above there is less ground for scepticism, and it must be remembered that the earlier books contain only a portion of the material to which the compilers had access.

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  • A certain amount of scepticism prevails among the educated classes, and political motives may ' contribute to their apparent orthodoxy, but there is no open dissent from Buddhism, and those who discard its dogmas still, as a rule, venerate it as an ethical system.

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  • Therefore, in general terms, scepticism may be summarily defined as a thorough-going impeachment of man's power to know - a denial of the possibility of objective knowledge.

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  • In the history of philosophy affirmation precedes negation; dogmatism goes before scepticism.

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  • And this must be so, because the dogmatic systems are, as it were, the food of scepticism.

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  • Though scepticism as a definite school may be said to date only from the time of Pyrrho (q.v.) of Elis, the main currents of Sophistic thought were sceptical in the wider sense of that term.

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  • This attitude of indifference to real knowledge passed in the younger and less reputable generation into a corroding moral scepticism which recognized no good but pleasure and no right but might.

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  • The school has been considered with some truth to form a connecting link with the later scepticism, just as the contemporary Cynicism and Cyrenaicism may be held to be imperfect preludes to Stoicism and Epicureanism.

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  • But with these insignificant exceptions it holds true that, after the sceptical wave marked by the Sophists, scepticism does not reappear till after the exhaustion of the Socratic impulse in Aristotle.

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  • Scepticism, as a distinct school, begins with Pyrrho of Elis, who maintained that knowledge of things is impossible and that we must assume an attitude of reserve (iroXii).

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  • They thus attempted to make their scepticism universal, and to escape the reproach of basing it upon a fresh dogmatism.

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  • The happiness or satisfaction of the individual was the end which dominated this scepticism as well as the contemporary systems of Stoicism and Epicureanism, and all three philosophies place it in tranquillity or self-centred indifference.

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  • The scepticism of the New Academy (more strictly of the Middle Academy, under Arcesilaus and Carneades) differed very little from that of the Pyrrhonists.

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  • Both Zeller and Hegel remark upon the difference between the calm of ancient scepticism and the perturbed state of mind evinced by many modern sceptics.

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  • It may be doubted whether the thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism of antiquity has any exact parallel in modern times, with the single exception possibly of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.

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  • The last characteristic, however, is not enough to constitute scepticism, in the ancient sense.

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  • Scepticism, to be complete, must hold that even within experience we do not rationally conclude but are irrationally induced to believe.

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  • One form of scepticism, however, may be claimed as an exclusively modern growth, namely, philosophical scepticism Scepti- in the interests of theological faith.

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  • Their scepticism is simply of a means to the attainment of a further end.

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  • Ghazali (q.v.) in his Tahafot al-Filasifa (" The Collapse of the Philosophers ") is the advocate of complete philosophical scepticism in the interests of orthodox Mahommedanism - an orthodoxy which passed, however, in his own case into a species of mysticism.

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  • The scepticism of Joseph Glanvill, which is set forth in his two works The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) and Scepsis scientifica (1665), has more interest for Englishmen.

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  • More celebrated than any of the above was Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), whose scepticism lay more in his keen negative criticism of all systems and doctrines which came before him as literary historian than in any theoretic views of his own as to the possibility of knowledge.

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  • His scepticism is sometimes placed, as we.

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  • Hume's scepticism thus really arises from his thoroughgoing empiricism.

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  • The fact that the conclusion is in " direct and total opposition" to the apparent testimony of the senses is a fresh justification of philosophical scepticism.

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  • For, indeed, scepticism with regard to the senses is considered in the Inquiry .to be sufficiently justified by the fact that they lead us to suppose " an external universe which depends not on our perception," whereas " this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy."

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  • Scepticism with regard to reason, on the other hand, depends on an insight into the irrational character of the relation which we chiefly employ, viz.

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  • But the abstract doubt " whether after all things may not be quite other in themselves than that which by the laws of our thought they necessarily appear " is a scepticism which, though admittedly irrefutable, is as certainly groundless.

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  • No arguments can be brought against it, simply because the scepticism rests on nothing more than the empty possibility of doubting.

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  • Of a scepticism which professes to doubt the validity of every reasoning process and every operation of all our faculties it is, of course, as impossible as it would be absurd to offer any refutation.

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  • This absolute scepticism, indeed, can hardly be regarded as more than empty words; the position which they would indicate is not one which has ever existed.

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  • In any case, such scepticism is at all times sufficiently refuted by the imperishable and justifiable trust of reason in itself.

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  • The real function of scepticism in the history of philosophy is relative to the dogmatism which it criticizes.

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  • The progress of thought may show it to be, in truth, relative, as when the nerve of Hume's scepticism is shown to be his thoroughgoing empiricism, or when the scepticism of the Critique of Pure Reason is traced to the unwarrantable assumption of things-in-themselves.

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  • When the assumptions on which it rests are proved to be baseless, the particular scepticism is also overcome.

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  • In like manner, the apparent antinomies on which such a scepticism builds will be found to resolve themselves for a system based on a deeper insight into the nature of things.

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  • The serious thinker will always repeat the words of Kant that, in itself, scepticism is " not a permanent resting-place for human reason."

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  • Ancient scepticism is fully treated in the relative parts of Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen.

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  • Thus Cyrenaicism goes beyond the critical scepticism of the Sophists and deduces a single, universal aim for all men, namely pleasure.

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  • The scepticism which challenges the whole collection may be set aside as radically perverse and unreasonable.

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  • From one-sided Platonism issued the various forms of scepticism, the attempt to undermine the trustworthiness of empirical knowledge.

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  • Secondly, it is founded on scepticism; for it has neither interest in, nor reliance upon, empirical knowledge.

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  • It was through Neoplatonism that Augustine got rid of scepticism and the last dregs of Manichaeism.

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  • His philosophy consisted in an attempt to reconcile the doctrines of his teachers Philo of Larissa and Mnesarchus the Stoic. Against the scepticism of the former, he held that the intellect has in itself a sufficient test of truth; against Mnesarchus, that happiness, though its main factor is virtue, depends also on outward circumstances.

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  • He showed likewise an unwarranted scepticism in reference to the island of Cerne on the west coast of Africa, which without doubt the Carthaginians had long used as an emporium.

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  • In spite, however, of Gibbon's characteristic scepticism on this point, it is certain that the Constitutum was regarded as genuine both by the friends and the enemies of the papal pretensions throughout the middle ages.

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  • Philosophy seemed about to end in scepticism or in materialism.

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  • Their scepticism and extortion had tired their subjects, and the mullahs gave Yusef a "fetva" authorizing him to remove them in the interest of religion.

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  • His doctrine is a kind of utilitarianism, with a strong leaning on the speculative side to the modified literary scepticism of Cicero, for whom he had unbounded admiration.

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  • Dee and Kelly lived for some years in Poland and Bohemia in alternate wealth and poverty, according to the credulity or scepticism of those before whom they exhibited.

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  • Ernst Mach is a conspicuous instance of a confusion of physics and psychology ending in a scepticism like that of Hume.

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  • Moreover, he applies the same scepticism to cause and effect.

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  • It might have been expected that scepticism on this subject would not have had much effect.

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  • In Great Britain Mach's scepticism was welcomed by Karl Pearson to support an idealistic phenomenalism derived from Hume, and by Ward to support a noumenal idealism derived from Lotze.

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  • It was counteracted to some extent by the study at the universities of the deductive logic of Aristotle and the inductive logic of Bacon, by parts of Mill's own logic, and by the natural realism of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, which met Hume's scepticism by asserting a direct perception of the external world.

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  • The announcement to the British Association in 1894 by Rayleigh and Ramsay of a new gas in the atmosphere was received with a good deal of scepticism.

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  • His philosophical standpoint was one of scepticism in regard to external perception.

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  • Otherwise his scepticism is subordinate to orthodox belief, the fundamental dogmas of the church seeming to him intuitively evident.

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  • In 1744 we find him, in anticipation of a vacancy in the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh university, moving his friends to advance his cause with the electors; and though, as he tells us, " the accusation of heresy, deism, scepticism or theism, &c., &c., was started " against him, it had no effect, " being bore down by the contrary authority of all the good people in town."

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  • Conspicuous as a champion of orthodoxy against atheists, Jews and Protestants - without resigning this position, and still upholding practical orthodoxy - Charron suddenly stood forth as the representative of the most complete intellectual scepticism.

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  • As to man's power of attaining truth his scepticism is decided; and he plainly declares that none of our faculties enable us to distinguish truth from error.

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  • Accordingly the Pensees have always been a favourite exploring ground, not to say a favourite field of battle, to persons who take an interest in their problems. Speaking generally, their tendency is towards the combating of scepticism by a deeper scepticism, or, as Pascal himself calls it, Pyrrhonism, which occasionally goes the length of denying the possibility of any natural theology.

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  • He certainly was no mere advocate of orthodoxy; he as certainly was no mere victim of terror at scepticism; least of all was he a freethinker in disguise.

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  • Frederick himself, of course, was Italian rather than German, akin to the despots of the Renaissance in his many-sided culture, his tolerant scepticism and his policy of cruelty well applied.

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  • The obvious way of avoiding the scepticism into which rationalism is thus driven is to revise the assumptions about the nature and postulates of truth which lead to it.

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  • From this point he fell into the scepticism of Hume.

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  • Burton's anti-Celticism, and scepticism as to archaeology, make his work inadequate in the earlier parts.

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  • From scepticism he escapes by accepting the doctrine of the mystics that God can be apprehended by intuition (intuitio, speculatio), an exalted state of the intellect in which all limitations disappear.

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  • Unfortunately Buckle either could not define, or cared not to define, the general conceptions with which he worked, such as those denoted by the terms "civilization," "history," "science," "law," "scepticism," and "protective spirit"; the consequence is that his arguments are often fallacies.

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  • Agur's word, breathing the spirit of scepticism, falls into the category represented by Ecclesiastes, and we may probably set the year 200 (or possibly 150) B.C. as the lower limit of the Book of Proverbs; allowing a century for the collection and combination of the various parts, we shall have the year 300 B.C. as the date of its earliest section.

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  • The first of these attitudes taken alone is dogmatism; the second, when similarly isolated, is scepticism; the third, when unexplained by its elements, is mysticism.

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  • Thus Hegelianism reduces dogmatism, scepticism and mysticism to factors in philosophy.

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  • The word "doubt" has made historians think of intellectual difficulties - of the "theological scepticism" taught by Occam and Biel, of the disintegrating criticism of Humanism.

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  • By this critical scepticism Maimon takes up a position intermediate between Kant and Hume.

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  • Despairing of philosophy - that is to say, of physical science - the sophists were prepared to go all lengths in scepticism.

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  • In this place it is sufficient to say that, while Plato accounts no education satisfactory which has not knowledge for its basis, he emphatically prefers the scepticism of Socrates, which, despairing of knowledge, seeks right opinion, to the scepticism of the sophists, which, despairing of knowledge, abandons the attempt to better existing beliefs.

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  • Common doctrine, that is to say, common doctrine of a positive sort, they could not have, because, being sceptics, they had nothing which could be called positive doctrine; while there was a period when even their scepticism was in no wise distinctive, because they shared it with all or nearly all their contemporaries.

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  • Various as were the phases through which sophistry passed between the middle of the 5th century and the middle of the 4th, the sophists - Socrates himself being no exception - had in their declared antagonism to philosophy a common characteristic; and, if in the interval, philosophical speculation being temporarily suspended, scepticism ceased for the time to be peculiar, at the outset, when Protagoras and Gorgias broke with the physicists, and in the sequel, when Plato raised the cry of " back to Parmenides," this common characteristic was distinctive.

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  • But such scepticism is unjustifiable in view of the perfect unanimity with which, in spite of variations of detail, all Portuguese writers from the beginning of the 16th century onwards reiterated the assertion that there was a powerful rule known far and wide by that title.

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  • Democritean physics without a calculus had necessarily proved sterile of determinate concrete results, and this was more than enough to ripen the naturalism of the utilitarian school into scepticism.

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  • So too when the reflection is made that scepticism is after all a medicine that purges out itself with the disease, the disciple of Pyrrho and Aenesidemus bows and says, Precisely!

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  • Scepticism, it must be confessed, was at the least well equipped to expose the bankruptcy of the post-Aristotelian dogmatism.

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  • He takes courage from the reflection that to accept scepticism is to presume the competence of the thought that accepts.

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  • He still preached the gospel of the people's sovereignty in civil life and the pope's supremacy in religion, but brought to his propagandism the full resources of a mind familiar with philosophy, history and literature, and indeed led the reaction against Voltairean scepticism.

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  • Christianity came as supplying a new power; it freed philosophy from scepticism by giving a definite object to its efforts and a renewed confidence in its mission.

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  • Scepticism as to the divine origin of the Koran led him to seek the true religion in an eclectic system.

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  • In the person of an emperor, Frederick II., they emerged under the more agreeable garb of liberal culture and Epicurean scepticism.

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  • But there is really nothing to justify this extreme of scepticism.

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  • His Platon's Leben and Schriften (1816) was the first of those critical inquiries into the life and works of Plato which originated in the Introductions of Schleiermacher and the historical scepticism of Niebuhr and Wolf.

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  • It is no longer necessary for serious criticism to refute the objections to its authenticity raised during the 19th century in certain quarters;12 as Macaulay said of the authenticity of Caesar's commentaries, "to doubt on that subject is the mere rage of scepticism."

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  • Since their day not only had the opposition between sense and reason broken down, but the reasoned scepticism of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus had made the impossibility of attaining truth the primary condition of well-being.

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  • A wave of eclecticism passed over all the Greek schools in the 1st century B.C. Platonism and scepticism had left undoubted traces upon the doctrine of such a reformer as Panaetius.

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  • For his philosophical opinions see Sophists and Scepticism.

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  • Varro also studied at Athens, especially under the philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, whose aim it was to lead back the Academic school from the scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades to the tenets of the early Platonists, as he understood them.

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  • Indifference, perhaps founded on religious scepticism, characterized the king during the many ecclesiastical disputes that played so large a part in his reign.

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  • William of Occam was the most prominent intellectual leader in an age which witnessed the disintegration of the old scholastic realism, the rise of the theological scepticism of the later middle ages, the great contest between pope and emperor which laid the foundations of modern theories of government, and the quarrel between the Roman curia and the Franciscans which showed the long-concealed antagonism between the theories of Hildebrand and Francis of Assisi; and he shared in all these movements.

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  • This was due to a growing scepticism, which caused him much mental unrest and which gradually gave way to mysticism.

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  • The result of this inquiry is generally intellectual scepticism in a greater or less degree, namely, that the object has no existence for the knower except a relative one, i.e.

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  • Similar doctrines have more frequently perhaps been associated with theological scepticism.

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  • It would seem, then, that Academic scepticism began with those who had been reared by Plato himself, having its origin in their acceptance of the scientific element of his teaching apart from the ontology which had been its basis.

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  • Though very far from being hampered by any dogmatic philosophical or religious system of the past, his mind, until near the end, found sufficient satisfaction in the Christian view of life to make it indifferent to the restless, inquiring spirit of the present, and disinclined to play with any more recent solution of life's problems. He had no sympathy with either scepticism or formal dogmatism, and no need to hazard rash guesses respecting man's destiny.

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  • Their chief contributions to thought were Cudworth's theory of the "plastic nature" of God, More's elaborate mysticism, Norris's appreciation of Malebranche, Glanvill's conception of scepticism as an aid to Faith, and, in a less degree, the harmony of Faith and Reason elaborated by Culverwel.

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  • Hamilton, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned.

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  • Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the Elects= sm ?

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  • Though he may technically be classed as an " extreme realist, " Duns is the forerunner of those later Nominalists, like William of Occam, who unsettled every intellectual ground of belief in order that they might resettle belief upon Church authority, not reason but rather scepticism being for them the ancilla domini.

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  • Total scepticism he would probably have regarded as unworthy of the serious attention of a wise man.

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  • This doubt found expression in the reasoned scepticism of Gorgias, and produced the famous proposition of Protagoras, that human apprehension is the only standard of existence.

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  • Yet a closer inspection shows us that when a later president of the Academy (Antiochus of Ascalon) repudiated the scepticism which for two hundred years had been accepted as the traditional Platonic doctrine, he had good grounds for claiming Plato and Aristotle as consentient authorities for the ethical position which he took up.

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  • The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics had little effect on their ethical teach ing, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of Plato and Aristotle.

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  • Scepticism seems to be the only possible result of such a position.

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  • A comparison of these tropes with the ten tropes enumerated in the article Aenesidemus shows that scepticism has made an advance into the more abtruse questions of metaphysics.

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  • His reasons are those of modern scepticism, the reasons which by their very nature are not susceptible of disproof.

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  • It is "the religious consciousness of the unity of the intellectual and physical world in God" which is to overcome the scepticism of the critical philosophy.

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  • Schleiermacher's doctrine of knowledge accepts the fundamental principle of Kant that knowledge is bounded by experience, but it seeks to remove Kant's scepticism as to knowledge of the Ding an sich, or Sein, as Schleiermacher's term is.

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  • For the paradox of predication, which he had used to disprove the existence of plurality, was virtually a denial of all speech and all thought, and thus led to a more comprehensive scepticism than that which sprang from the contemporary theories of sensation.

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  • To Ghazali (q.v.) it seemed that the study of secular philosophy had resulted in a general indifference to religion, and that the Ghazal, scepticism scepticism which concealed itself under a pretence of piety was destroying the life and purity of the nation.

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  • He assails them on twenty points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own.

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  • The science, falsely so called, of the several theological schools, their groundless distinctions and sophistical demonstrations, he regarded as the great source of heresy and scepticism.

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  • At the moment when it seemed as if everything had been made that could be made out of the fragments of Aristotle, and the compilations of Capella, Cassiodorus and others, and when mysticism and scepticism seemed the only resources left for the mind, the horizon of knowledge was suddenly widened by the acquisition of a complete Aristotle.

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  • As a metaphysician he starts from what he terms "the higher scepticism" of the Hume-Kantian sphere of thought, the beginnings of which he discerns in Locke's perplexity about the idea of substance.

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  • By this scepticism the real validity of even the forms of experience is called in question on account of the contradictions they are found to involve.

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  • But first we must analyse this notion of reality itself, to which our scepticism had already led us, for, though we could doubt whether "the given" is what it appears, we cannot doubt that it is something; the conception of the real thus consists of the two conceptions of being and quality.

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  • He immersed himself "over head and ears in the study of philosophy," and fell for a time into a scepticism, from which he was delivered by a study of the "Platonic writers."

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  • He died on the 16th of September 1824, worn out in body, but still retaining flashes of his former clear insight and scepticism.

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  • In his own case these views did not lead to scepticism, because he had always possessed the necessary interior conviction; and in writing Tract 85 his only doubt would have been where the true Church is to be found.

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  • Renan began to perceive the essential contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith that he professed, but an appetite for truths that can be verified restrained his scepticism.

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  • This drastic scepticism is the first and the most thorough exposition of agnosticism in the history of thought.

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  • The real meaning of Lotze's teaching is reached only by patient study, and those who in a larger or narrower sense call themselves his followers will probably feel themselves indebted to him more for the general direction he has given to their thoughts, for the tone he has imparted to their inner life, for the seriousness with which he has taught them to consider even small affairs and practical duties, and for the indestructible confidence with which his philosophy permits them to disregard the materialism of science, the scepticism of shallow culture, the disquieting results of philosophical and historical criticism.

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  • Define more carefully than Locke did, with his blunder about "ideas," the process of perception, and you cut up scepticism by the roots !

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  • Kant's reliance on the moral argument alone goes with his scepticism.

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  • He argued from past history that 2 Kautzsch, in his profoundly learned article on the " Religion of Israel," to which frequent reference has been made, exhibits (pp. 669-671) an excess of scepticism, in our opinion, towards the views propounded by Gunkel in 1895 (Schopfung and Chaos) respecting the intimate connexion between the early Hebrew cosmogonic ideas and those of Babylonia.

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  • That his conversion was sincere at the time, that it marked a real if but a transitory phase of genuine religious conviction, we have no reason to doubt, notwithstanding the scepticism he has himself expressed.

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  • Reid thus takes Hume's scepticism as, on its own showing, a reductio ad impossibile (see Hume, ad fin.) of accepted philosophical principles, and refuses, accordingly, to separate Hume from his intellectual progenitors.

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  • The fortunes of the book are not known in detail, but it is clear that its merciless criticism of life and its literary charm made it popular, while its scepticism excited the apprehensions of pious conservatives.

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  • The members and sympathizers of the party of reform who styled themselves " Young Turks," working largely from the European centres and from the different points in the Turkish Empire to which the sultan had exiled them for the purpose of repression - their relentless persecution by the sultan thus proving to be his own undoing - spread a powerful propaganda throughout the Turkish Empire against the old regime, in the face of that persecution and of the open and characteristic scepticism, and indeed of the hostile action, of some of the European powers.

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  • In Rome philosophy never became more than a secondary pursuit; naturally, therefore, the Roman thinkers were for the most part eclectic. Of this tendency Cicero is the most striking illustration - his philosophical works consisting of an aggregation, with little or no blending, of doctrines borrowed from Stoicism, Peripateticism, and the scepticism of the Middle Academy.

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  • But the antinomies, as they appeared in Abelard's treatise, without their solutions, could not but seem to insinuate a deep-laid scepticism with regard to authority.

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  • The main tendency of this destructive scepticism is essentially the same from its first crystallization by Aenesidemus down to the most advanced sceptics of to-day (see Scepticism).

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  • This view was held by the sceptics of the New Academy (see Scepticism and Carneades).

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  • His criticism is apt to assume a tone of moral censure when he has to deal with certain extremes of human thought - scepticism in philosophy, atheism in religion and democracy in politics.

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  • In a different direction and on a larger scale, Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned may be quoted as an example of the same religious scepticism (see Hamilton, Sir William).

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  • If this dream or prejudice be exploded, then the scepticism originating in it - and a large proportion of recent sceptical thought does so originate - loses its raison d'etre.

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  • Scepticism is deprived of its persistent argument if it is seen that, while our individual experiences are to be judged by their coherence with the context of experience in general, experience as a whole does not admit of being judged by reference to anything beyond itself.

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  • The third is the type of completed empiricism or scepticism, holding that no argument, either from reason or experience, can transcend experience, and consequently that no proof of God's existence is at all possible.

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  • But, while the necessities of antagonism to papal Rome made it assume at first the form of narrow and sectarian opposition, it marked in fact a vital struggle of the intellect towards truth and freedom, involving future results of scepticism and rationalistic audacity from which its earlier champions would have shrunk.

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  • The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy.

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  • The attitude itself is as old as Scepticism; but the expressions "agnostic" and "agnosticism" were applied by Huxley to sum up his deductions from those contemporary developments of metaphysics with which the names of Hamilton ("the Unconditioned") and Herbert Spencer ("the Unknowable") were associated; and it is important, therefore, to fix precisely his own intellectual standpoint in the matter.

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  • As a nickname the term "agnostic" was soon misused to cover any and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker - following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt" - classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical evidences for Christianity.

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  • The Scottish philosophy of Thomas Reid and his successors believed that David Hume's scepticism was no more than the genuine outcome of Locke's sensationalist appeal to experience when ripened or forced on by the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley - God and the soul alone; not God, world and soul.

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  • The fact - assumed without any attempt at justification by argument - that, in spite of the multitude of logical reasons for scepticism, we do know, truth and beauty, makes Balfour a theist.

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  • Among the drawbacks of this temper, which on the whole made for progress, was the rise of a school of excessive scepticism, which, forgetting the value of the accumulated stores of empiricism, despised those degrees of moral certainty that, in so complex a study and so tentative a practice as medicine, must be our portion for the present, and even for a long future, however great the triumphs of medicine may become.

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  • His philosophy consisted of four main parts, the reasons for scepticism and doubt, the attack on causality and truth, a physical theory and a theory of morality.

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  • Newman, whose mind Martineau said was " critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision," and whose faith is " an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives the veto not of his reason but of his will," 6 as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy.

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  • Yet the feat pronounced impossible by mid-century scepticism was accomplished by contemporary scholarship, amidst the clamour of opposition and incredulity.

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