serotine (SER-uh-tin, -tyn) adjective:

Late in occurring, forming, or flowering.

noun:

A small brown bat (Eptesicus serotinus) native of Europe and Asia (named after its habit of appearing late in the evening).

[From Latin serotinus (belated), from serus (late).]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)


"We passed along, athwart the twilight peering Forward as far as ever eye could stretch Against the sunbeams serotine and lucent." Dante Alighieri; The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); 1867.




X-Bonus
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

agnosticism

Agnosticism is the position of believing that knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God is impossible. It is often put forth as a middle ground between theism and atheism. Understood this way, agnosticism is skepticism regarding all things theological. The agnostic holds that human knowledge is limited to the natural world, that the mind is incapable of knowledge of the supernatural. Understood this way, an agnostic could also be a theist or an atheist. The former is called a fideist, one who believes in God purely on faith. The latter is sometimes accused by theists of having faith in the non-existence of God, but the accusation is absurd and the expression meaningless. The agnostic atheist simply finds no compelling reason to believe in God.

The term 'agnostic' was created by T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), who took his cue from David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Huxley says that he invented the term to describe what he thought made him unique among his fellow thinkers:

"They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis" -- had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble."

'Agnostic' came to mind, he says, because the term was "suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant...." Huxley seems to have intended the term to mean that metaphysics is, more or less, bunk. In short, he seems to have agreed with Hume's conclusion at the end of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."*

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason resolved some of the main epistemological issues raised by Hume, but at the expense of rejecting the possibility of knowing anything beyond appearances of phenomena. We can't know God but the idea of God is a practical necessity, according to Kant


- The Skeptics Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll

dishabille \dis-uh-BEEL\, noun:

1. The state of being carelessly or partially dressed.
2. Casual or lounging attire.
3. An intentionally careless or casual manner.

People meant to be fully clothed lounge around in dishabille.
-- John Simon, "Tangled Up in Blue", New York Magazine, March 26, 2001

But, unlike the Black Knights, Princeton . . . was in varying states of dishabille -- some players in warmups, some in uniform, some halfway between.
-- Daily Princetonian, December 13, 2000

She was dressed, that is to say, in dishabille, wrapped in a long, warm dressing-gown.
-- Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After

She imagines the shocked faces of Josiah or her father or her mother were any of them to come around the corner and catch her in her dishabille.
-- Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

Dishabille comes from French déshabiller, "to undress," from dés-, "dis-" + habiller, "to clothe, to dress."

- Dictionary.com