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lying back of phenomena, but maintains that all reflection on it lands us in contradictions. This
ultimate reality is utterly inscrutable. While we must accept the existence of some ultimate
Power, either personal or impersonal, we can form no conception of it. Inconsistently he
devotes a great part of his First Principles to the development of the positive content of the
Unknowable, as if it were well known indeed. Other agnostics, who were influenced by him, are
such men as Huxley, Fiske, and Clifford. We meet with agnosticism also repeatedly in modern
Humanism. Harry Elmer Barnes says: “To the writer it seems quite obvious that the agnostic
position is the only one which can be supported by any scientifically-minded and critically-
inclined person in the present state of knowledge.”[The Twilight of Christianity, p. 260.]
Besides the forms indicated in the preceding the agnostic argument has assumed several
others, of which the following are some of the most important. (1) Man knows only by analogy.
We know only that which bears some analogy to our own nature or experience: “Similia
similibus percipiuntur.” But while it is true that we learn a great deal by analogy, we also learn
by contrast. In many cases the differences are the very things that arrest our attention. The
Scholastics spoke of the via negationis by which they in thought eliminated from God the
imperfections of the creature. Moreover, we should not forget that man is made in the image
of God, and that there are important analogies between the divine nature and the nature of
man. (2) Man really knows only what he can grasp in its entirety. Briefly stated the position is
that man cannot comprehend God, who is infinite, cannot have an exhaustive knowledge of
Him, and therefore cannot know Him. But this position proceeds on the unwarranted
assumption that partial knowledge cannot be real knowledge, an assumption which would
really invalidate all our knowledge, since it always falls far short of completeness. Our
knowledge of God, though not exhaustive, may yet be very real and perfectly adequate for our
present needs. (3) All predicates of God are negative and therefore furnish no real knowledge.
Hamilton says that the Absolute and the Infinite can only be conceived as a negation of the
thinkable; which really means that we can have no conception of them at all. But though it is
true that much of what we predicate to God is negative in form, this does not mean that it may
not at the same time convey some positive idea. The aseity of God includes the positive idea of
his self-existence and self-sufficiency. Moreover, such ideas as love, spirituality, and holiness,
are positive. (4) All our knowledge is relative to the knowing subject. It is said that we know the
objects of knowledge, not as they are objectively, but only as they are related to our senses and
faculties. In the process of knowledge we distort and colour them. In a sense it is perfectly true
that all our knowledge is subjectively conditioned, but the import of the assertion under
consideration seems to be that, because we know things only through the mediation of our
senses and faculties, we do not know them as they are. But this is not true; in so far as we have
any real knowledge of things, that knowledge corresponds to the objective reality. The laws of
perception and thought are not arbitrary, but correspond to the nature of things. Without such