ANALYSIS OF CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
page Chapter I. Introductory3 - § 1. The prevalent despair of solving the highest problems of knowledge not justified in an age of progress. § 2. Causes of this despair in the faulty attitude of religion, philosophy, and science. § 3. Its results—a positivist temper—"we can do without philosophy." § 4. But we can not. Philosophy as the theory of Life, and so practical. §§ 5-8. The problem of philosophy really that of all knowledge; shown both in the common origin of religion (§ 6), philosophy (§ 7), and science (§ 8), viz., Animism, and in their common end, viz., practice. § 9. Hence Positivism must admit that philosophy is desirable and important. It can only assert that it is impossible, and § 10 thereby become Agnosticism.
Chapter II. Agnosticism16 - § 1. Its two varieties, scientific and epistemological, Spencer and Kant.
§§ 2-6. Objections to both. 2. Suspense of judgment on the problems of life impossible in practice. § 3. The argument from the known to the unknowable always involves a contradiction. § 4. The impossibility of a transition from the known to the unknowable. § 5. No infinity in things to suggest an unknowable. § 6. Agnosticism must be rendered consistent by a denial of the causality of the Unknowable, which is thereby reduced to nought.
§§ 7-10. Spenserian Agnosticism. § 7. (a) Direct arguments to show the existence of the Unknowable
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