Word: skepticism
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...November, 1493, that Columbus sighted Porto Rico and sailed on. A year later one of his seamen returned. The man was Ponce de Leon, an old skeptic who thought it doubtful that the best of life was yet to be if digestion was to become long and wind short. Ponce found a friend in Chief Aquebana and a fountain of wealth in the mountain gold mines. Later Ponce was expelled from the island, but the Spanish conquistadores, after standing silent a moment on a peak in Darien, made their way to Porto Rico and there was no withstanding their swords...
...Published by himself. *Whose editor, Patent Attorney Orson Desaix Munn, has an abiding skeptic interest in psychic phenomena...
...physics is humble and stammering, where the old philosophy was proud and dictatorial." To Popularizing Physicists Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World) and Sir James Hopwood Jeans (The Universe Around Us) Russell lays the blame in large part, in no uncertain terms. An almost angry skeptic on the subject of reasoning by deduction, Russell asserts: "Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do. ... Jeans's God. like Plato's, is one who has a passion for doing sums...
Rogue Herries is a tale of 18th Century Cumberland. Hero Francis Herries rake, skeptic, violent-tempered, takes his family from the comforts of Doncaster to a rude, half-savage life in his ancestral home at Rosthwaite in the Cumberland lake country. His stupid wife irritates him; to irritate her he brings along his current mistress. Soon he is known, feared, disliked by the whole countryside. The troubles of '45 (invasion of England by the Young Pretender) hardly touch him, though he and his son are in Carlisle when the town falls to Prince Charles Edward's Highlanders...
Psychoscientist Oliver Lodge's faith is at the opposite pole from Skeptic Mencken's agnosticism (see col. i), goes farther than most Christians' hope. He believes not only that human beings survive death, but that they keep their memory, are able in some cases to communicate with the friends they leave behind them. Survivalist Lodge wanted not to die, wanted some scientific indication that his wish would come true. But he started with faith. Now "I know for a fact that, as individuals we survive the death of the body...