agnosticn.adj.

1869 Spectator 29 May 642/1 All these considerations, and the great controversies which suggest them, are in the highest degree cultivating, and will be admitted to be so even by those Agnostics who think them profitless of any practical result.

1874 St. G. Mivart in H. E. Manning Ess. Relig. & Lit. 3rd Ser. 205 Our modern Sophists—the Agnostics,—those who deny we have any knowledge, save of phenomena.

1880 Bp. Fraser in Manch. Guardian 25 Nov. The Agnostic neither denied nor affirmed God. He simply put Him on one side.

1908 G. B. Shaw Sanity of Art 57 ‘Positivists’ or ‘Dont Knowists’ (Agnostics).

1951 L. P. Hartley My Fellow Devils x. 89 Daddy's an old-fashioned agnostic and I suppose I take after him.

2010 New Yorker 6 Sept. 63/2 He was an agnostic when he went off to the University of Virginia, and by the time he was studying physical chemistry as a graduate student, at Yale, he'd become what he calls a ‘fundamentalist’ atheist.

1885 Western Druggist 15 Dec. 359/2 Judge Chipman is clearly an agnostic on the subject of pills.

1893 Trans. Amer. Ophthalmol. Soc. 29th Ann. Meeting 263 As to myopia being the result of civilization, I am an agnostic on that point.

1909 Westm. Gaz. 16 Apr. 7/3 On this question of a preferential tariff, Mr. Mayhew had no hesitation in confessing himself an agnostic.

1921 J. E. Mercer Alchemy i. v. 61 As regards alchemy, he was an agnostic. On the one hand, he would not venture to set bounds to the possible in nature; on the other hand, he could not yield assent.

1991 N.Y. Times Mag. 3 Feb. 30/2 Some greenhouse agnostics have used the report's conclusions to argue that solar activity could mitigate the effects of greenhouse-gas accumulation.

2002 Chicago Tribune (Midwest ed.) 10 Nov. x. 14/1 A slightly muddled ‘death-penalty agnostic’, someone who vacillated between opposition to execution and thinking it a sad necessity in horrific cases.

1870 Spectator 1 Oct. 1170/1 Are not his favourite 'agnostic' creeds..absolutely hostile to that enthusiasm of love to God and faith in God which are the simplest and most universal elements of a 'religious spirit'?

1876 Fortn. Rev. 1 June 846 The race collectively is agnostic, whatever may be the case with individuals.

1876 J. Tulloch Agnosticism in Weekly Scotsman 18 Nov. The same agnostic principle which prevailed in our schools of philosophy had extended itself to religion and theology. Beyond what man can know by his senses or feel by his higher affections, nothing, as was alleged, could be truly known.

1880 G. C. M. Birdwood Indian Arts I. 4 The agnostic teaching of the Sankhya school is the common basis of all systems of Indian philosophy.

1925 G. K. Chesterton Everlasting Man Introd. 4 It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace.

1970 S. Kucherov Organs Soviet Admin. Justice iii. xix. 604 Under the influence of agnostic philosophy, the great majority of legal writers in the West..were of the opinion that the court is not in a position to discover the absolute truth.

2003 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 12 June 34/3 Many largely agnostic middle-class men and women in the West look to Buddhist meditation as a substitute for psychotherapy.

1907 Boston Med. & Surg. Jrnl. 23 May 607/1 Freud also recognized that there were disturbances in the recognition of objects, to which he gave the name of agnosis, and considered that it was possible that agnostic disturbances..might produce a disturbance of speech when the incentive to spontaneous speech arose from the association of the object.

1929 Brit. Med. Jrnl. 17 Aug. 290/1 It can hardly be confused with agnostic or ideational apraxia, which results from a lesion further back in the hemisphere.

1941 J. M. Nielsen Clin. Neurol. x. 274 Agnostic alexia is due to loss of power of visual recognition of the symbols of language.

2009 J. M. Tonkonogy & A. E. Puente Localization Clin. Syndromes Neuropsychol. & Neurosci. vi. 301 Luria attempted to incorporate agnostic disturbances into the understanding and classification of apraxia.