[ad. med.L. acatalēpsia, a. Gr. ἀκαταληψία incomprehensibleness, f. ἀ not + κατά thoroughly + λῆψις a seizing.] Incomprehensibility:—a term of the Skeptic philosophers; the correlative of Agnosticism, which is said of the mental faculty, while Acatalepsy is the property of the unknowable object.
1605. Bacon, Adv. of Learning (1640), Pref. 37. Those very schooles of Philosophers, who downe-right maintained Acatalepsie or Incomprehensibility.
1676. in Phil. Trans., XI. 791. The Academicks, who professing an Acatalepsy, affirmed this one thing only to be certain, Nihil certi sciri posse.
1847. Lewes, Hist. Philos. (1871), I. 369. Arcesilaus could from Plato’s works deduce his own theory of the incomprehensibility of all things: the acatalepsy.
