Unknowable Sentence Examples

He was regarded as the mediator between suffering humanity and the unknowable and inaccessible god of all being, who reigned in the ether.

This work is divided into two parts; the first intended to show that while ultimate metaphysical questions are insoluble they compel to a recognition of an inscrutable Power behind phenomena which is called the Unknowable; the second devoted to the formulation and illustration of the Law of Evolution.

This is illustrated by the difficulties inherent in the conception of Cause, Space, Time, Matter, Motion, the Infinite, and the Absolute, and by the" relativity of knowledge,"which precludes knowledge of the Unknowable, since" all thinking is relationing."Yet the Unknowable may exist, and we may even have an" indefinite knowledge "of it, positive, though vague and extralogical.

Hence both science and religion must come to recognize as the" most certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable."Thus to be buried side by side in the Unknowable constitutes their final reconciliation, as it is the refutation of irreligion which consists of" a lurking doubt whether the Incomprehensible is really incomprehensible."Such are the foundations of Spencer's metaphysic of the Unknowable, to which he resorts in all the fundamental difficulties which he subsequently encounters.

Even this, however, understates the case, seeing that a really inscrutable Unknowable would destroy all confidence in the order of nature and render all knowledge entirely precarious.

Spencer recognizes successively likenesses and unlikenesses among phenomena (the effects of the Unknowable), which are segregated into manifestations, vivid (object, nonego) or faint (subject, ego), and then into space and time, matter and motion and force, of which the last is symbolized for us by the experience of resistance, and is that out of which our ideas of matter and motion are built.

When the existence of God is denied (atheism), or His nature is declared unknowable (agnosticism), or He is identified with nature itself (pantheism), or He is so distinguished from the world that His free action is excluded from the course of nature (deism), miracle is necessarily denied.

A failure to solve the problems of metaphysics must always remain a failure, in spite of all protestations that it was inevitable; and it in no wise justifies an advance to so selfcontradictory an asylum ignorantiae as the Unknowable.

And he admits (§ 63) that if we were compelled to choose between translating mental phenomena into physical and its converse, the latter would be preferable, seeing that the ideas of matter and motion, merely symbolic of unknowable realities, are complex states of consciousness built out of units of feeling.

In his Principles of Psychology he twice quotes his point that " what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable."

Thus it turns out that the objective agency, the noumenal power, the absolute force, declared unknown and unknowable, is known after all to exist, persist, resist and cause our subjective affections or phenomena, yet not to think or to will.

It may be urged in reply that the synthetic philosophy could be made consistent by transferring the knowable resistance and persistence of the unknowable noumenon to knowable phenomena on the one hand, and on the other hand by maintaining that all phenomena from the original nebula to the rise of consciousness are only ` 0 impressions produced on consciousness through any of the senses," after all.

But he has a different theory of human nature and soul, and so does not accept the Kantian conclusion that things in themselves, in the sense of things beyond phenomena, are all unknowable.

Riehl, who in Der philosophische Kriti .cis- mus (1876, &c.) proposes the non-Kantian hypothesis that, though things in themselves are unknowable through reason alone, they are knowable by empirical intuition, and therefore also by empirical thought starting from intuition.

He describes his belief in an unknowable absolute as " carrying a step farther the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel."

Nothing could be more like Hume than his final statement that what we are conscious of is subjective affections produced by objective agencies unknown and unknowable.

He admitted, however, that Kant also asserted, beyond this single universe of a single principle, a world of unknowable things in themselves, which is a Kantian not a Hegelian world.

Truth is not the agreement of knowledge with an object beyond itself, and therefore ex hypothesi unknowable, but the agreement of our judgments with the objects of our knowledge.

Eckhart's doctrine asserts behind God a predicateless Godhead, which, though unknowable not only to man but also to itself, is, as it were, the essence or potentiality of all things.

The two leading ideas are a dislike to the Unknowable in all its forms, and a reliance on the validity of our personal experience.

The course adopted by Kant's immediate successors in German idealism was to reject the whole conception of noiimena, for the reason that what is essentially unknowable has no existence for our intelligence.

This is the case with Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable, which he advances as the result of epistemological considerations in the philosophical prolegomena to his system.

For, if He merely may redeem but must punish, then His greatest deeds on our behalf wear an aspect of caprice, or suggest unknown if not unknowable motives.

Sir William Hamilton's " philosophy of the unconditioned," and, Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the infinite " unknowable "); if it is argued that knowledge of a thing arises only from the recognition of its differences from other things (i.e.

Hutton himself frequently misrepresented the doctrine by describing it as "belief in an unknown and unknowable God"; but agnosticism as defined by Huxley meant not belief, but absence of belief, as much distinct from belief on the one hand as from disbelief on the other; it was the half-way house between the two, where all questions were "open."

Agnosticism really rests on the doctrine of the Unknowable, the assertion that concerning certain objects - among them the Deity - we never can have any "scientific" ground for belief.

But though God is transcendent and unknowable He is immanent in the world.

However, we also believe that God in his pure essence is unknowable.

He not only knows the knowable, He knows the unknowable.

However, future performance is essentially unknowable, given that it lies in the future.

Hick feels that all religions are manmade views of the utterly transcendent and otherwise unknowable God, and should be viewed as such.

Unfortunately, risks which are inherently unknowable will always be able to surprise even the most expert user of the " risk radar " .

Truth, ultimately unknowable, often matters less than perceptions of it.

Money is going in increasingly large amounts into a Black Hole of unknown and possibly unknowable size What is the Government doing?

Who wants to know the conventionally unknowable enough to devise and use a system like the Yi?

Kant held that " things-in-themselves " (beyond sensation) were in principle unknowable - only " phenomena " are knowable.

In the edition of his First Principles, published in 1900, Spencer adds a" postscript "which shows some consciousness of the contradiction involved in his knowledge of the Unknowable, and finally contends that his account of the Knowable in part ii.

But easiest of all is it to leave the relation of the unknowable "substance of Mind" to the unknowable "substance of Matter" (substance he throughout conceives as the unknowable substrate of phenomena) to the Unknowable, as he finally does.

In the second place, having declared the noumenal power, which causes phenomena, or conscious affections, to be unknowable, and having left anybody who pleased to make it a god and an object of religion, he proceeds to describe it as if it were known force, and known in two respects as persistent and as resistant force.

In affirming the " inamissibility " of grace in the regenerate (not simply in the unknowable elect) Calvin went beyond Augustine, perhaps beyond Paul, certainly beyond the Epistle to the Hebrews, resolutely loyal to the logic of his non-sacramental theory of grace.

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.

Schooling cannot only be about preparation for what is in many ways an unknowable employment future.

Surreal, fast-paced, this ruined puzzle and hauntingly dreamlike, Abe 's masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind.

It is a novel about the mysterious and unknowable essence of the creative genius, about love and about death.

Too many unknowable factors are required to make the call.

Look beyond the objects of experience to the unknowable source of all appearing things.

Unfortunately, risks which are inherently unknowable will always be able to surprise even the most expert user of the " risk radar ".

Aliens were unknowable BEMs well into science fiction's Golden Age.

Thus aliens become not unknowable, but simply foreign, and a human can come to know and understand them just as a European traveller of the eighteenth century could come to understand the native American tribes he travelled with.

His races vary considerably - the Outsiders verge on the unknowable other of earlier sci-fi, yet carry on a trade with the other sentient species.

Extra-terrestrials are often used in television as dramatic devices; the unknowable enemy.

This yields a characteristic type of pantheism, in the theory of the Unknowable which - rather paradoxically - is offered us.