The modern conception…claims to make the sciences independent by repudiating everything that transcends them, or at least by declaring it “unknowable” and refusing to take it into account, which amounts to ignoring it in practice; this negation existed as a fact for a long time before people thought of erecting it into a systematic theory under such names as “positivism” and “agnosticism,” for it may truly be said to lie at the root of modern science as a whole. It is only in the nineteenth century, however, that one finds men glorying in their ignorance (since to call oneself an “agnostic” amounts to nothing else), and claiming to deny others all knowledge of the things they themselves are ignorant of, and that stage marked a further step in the intellectual decline of the West.