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a philosophical theory that denies the possibility of man's achieving authentic knowledge of the objective world. Some agnostics, while recognising the objective existence of the world, deny its knowability, others regard the very fact of the world's objective, existence as something unknowable. They maintain that knowledge is subjective by its very nature and that we are in principle unable to reach beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness and cannot know whether anything else except the phenomena of consciousness exists. From the standpoint of agnosticism the question of how a thing is reflected by us differs fundamentally from the question of how it exists in itself. A person moved by the desire for knowledge, says, "I do not know what this is but I hope to find out". The agnostic, on the other hand, says, "I do not know what this is and I shall never know". Most consistent and conscious materialists defend and seek to prove the principle of the knowability of the world, but some fall back on agnosticism.

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