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."[82] 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.
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