“Agnosticism is a modern doctrine with you. It neither asserts nor denies the existence of a personal prayer-hearing God, a conscious personal existence after death, etc. Mr. Herbert Spencer is the father of it in this world. It teaches that the human mind is limited in the sphere of knowledge, and that we can not know what lies beyond this limit. It is alike opposed to dogmatic atheism and dogmatic theism. It is founded on the ‘relativity of all knowledge,’ that is, things can be known only under certain _conditions_, but that there _may be_ forms of existence not possessing these requisite conditions, and are, therefore beyond the boundary of the sphere of human knowledge. “We have seen that knowing implies two things--a conscious subject to receive the impression and an object to make it. For aught we know there may be forms of existences that have neither matter nor gravitation, but we can not assert this as a fact, because the data of proof and disproof are inaccessible. It is a form of existence, if it does exist, that does not excite a sensation as an object on a recipient subject. It is a well-known fact with us that all knowledge must enter the mind through the channels of the senses, and whenever and wherever we attempt to pass beyond the boundaries of the phenomenal, we are always checkmated by two alternate impossibilities of thought. “Nearly all of your foremost thinkers are agnostics. This seems to show that your foremost minds are following us right up in religious beliefs and that there is but one line of progress here as well as elsewhere. “Before we proceed any further, let us contemplate how the religious sentiments probably originated and developed, and how, under a better acquaintance with nature, they became identical with it. “We know by actual experience, from the present savages, that the savage knows little of the so-called natural laws and that he is very superstitious. We also know that with any of us all tricks which we see performed, but which we do not understand at first, lose their miraculous character in proportion as we learn how they are performed. Just so it is with natural phenomena. At first when man does not understand them, he believes them to be the acts of an arbitrary deity; but as soon as they come under what is called the dominion of law, they lose their supernatural character; they are then nothing but the uniformity of nature.