1 8 AGNOSTICISM. 



cording as they possess a powerful patron or are 

 thrown on their own resources, so life must be 

 ordered either on the assumption or on the neglect 

 of its indefinite prolongation and divine care. 



And the agnostic writers themselves afford this 

 practical contradiction to their theories, though their 

 idiosyncrasies lead them to adopt different sides 

 of the alternative. Thus Mr. Spencer's Agnosticism 

 practically denies the existence of God and the 

 immortality of the soul. In spite of all his theoretical 

 protests that he has merely referred them to the 

 Unknowable. Kant, on the other hand, in a manner 

 which would be comical, if it were not concerned 

 with such serious issues, and which has brought upon 

 him much ridicule, deliberately refutes his theor- 

 etical agnosticism. He avowedly rehabilitates, by 

 means of the Practical Reason, the dogmas he had 

 invalidated by the Theoretic Reason. Hence he 

 avows his personal belief in a God whose existence 

 he had shown to be indemonstrable, in a future 

 life for which he had asserted there could be no 

 evidence, and in a freedom which he had admitted 

 to contradict all causation in Time. The one 

 thought which seems never to have suggested itself 

 to him is, that the Power which was capable of 

 playing such pranks upon its creatures, capable of 

 devising a Theoretic Reason, destined by the es- 

 sential constitution of its nature to irreconcilable 

 conflict with the practical necessities of life, was 

 hardly a fit object of our reverence or trust. 



The fact is, that this demand for an impossible 

 suspense of judgment is based upon a confusion of 

 scientific and philosophic certainty. In science, 

 certainty = great probability, and impossibility = an 

 off chance ; and hence in pure (as opposed to ab- 



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