Part 12

In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) Newman sought to clarify, and to sum up, thoughts that he had been developing for most of his life (thoughts which, until he wrote the Grammar of Assent, he had articulated most fully in his Oxford University Sermons). What is stressed in the Grammar of Assent, more than in the Oxford University Sermons, is the importance of the imagination in the spiritual life: the Grammar of Assent is, in many respects, a vindication of the religious imagination.

The Grammar of Assent is in two parts. The first part is concerned with the relationship between ‘assent’ and ‘apprehension’; the second part, with the relationship between ‘assent’ and ‘inference’. It is concerned with ‘assent’ in relation to ‘concrete matter’ – it ‘treat[s] of propositions only in their bearing upon concrete matter’ – and it is concerned with ‘Inference, in its relation to Assent, and only such inference as is not demonstration’.¹ One can only assent to a proposition if one ‘apprehends’ its meaning, so apprehension is involved in assent; and Newman suggests that there are two kinds of apprehension – ‘notional’ and ‘real’. ‘Notional’ apprehension is the apprehension of abstractions, ideas; ‘real’ apprehension is the apprehension of things, or images of them (in early drafts of the Grammar of Assent, Newman used the term ‘imaginative’ instead of ‘real’, in characterizing the apprehension of ‘concrete’ things).² Assent, then, involves apprehension, and this apprehension can be ‘notional’ or ‘real’. Assent, moreover, is related to ‘inference’: one assents (or one should assent) to what one has ‘reason’ to consider true. ‘Inference’ itself, Newman maintains, is ‘conditional’, in the sense that one infers something, one concludes something, on the ‘condition’ of certain premises (‘if A and B, then C’ – ‘A’ and ‘B’ are the conditions for the inference ‘C’, and to infer ‘C’ is to derive it from its conditions ‘A’ and ‘B’). Assent, by contrast, is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Inference, Newman maintains, is the proper ‘antecedent’ to assent. One should attempt to ‘prove’ what one assents to. Assent, though, is distinct from inference. There are, with regard to ‘concrete matter’, ‘degrees’ of inference – degrees in the ‘proof’, in the strength of argumentation, for a proposition – but there are no degrees of assent, which is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, a matter of taking something to be true; there are no degrees of truth.³ One might, by various arguments, recognize that one should take a certain proposition to be true; the act of assenting to that proposition is, in itself, distinct from the argumentation by which one recognizes that one ought to assent to it. As, in argumentation about ‘concrete matter’, there is only ‘such inference as is not demonstration’, as there is only an accumulation of probable arguments, a certain judgment is required, to determine whether or not a particular accumulation of probable arguments, relating to a particular case, is sufficient for one to assent to what those arguments would establish. This judgment is not something that can be determined by any ‘rule’; it is a personal acquirement. The Grammar of Assent, then, is concerned with ‘imagination’ in a couple of respects: as involved in a certain kind of ‘apprehension’, ‘real apprehension’; and as involved in ‘ratiocination’ about ‘concrete matter’ – since such ‘ratiocination’ involves apprehending different ‘aspects’ of something ‘concrete’, and it is from the image of that ‘concrete’ reality that various ‘aspects’ are abstracted (‘the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fertile is it in its aspects of them’).⁴

When Newman contrasts ‘notional’ and ‘real’ apprehension, he suggests that ‘notional’ apprehension is concerned with ideas, abstracted from the things that are experienced, and ‘real’ apprehension with images, retained from the things that are experienced. ‘All things in the exterior world are unit and individual, and are nothing else; but the mind not only contemplates those unit realities, as they exist, but has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalizations, which have no existence, no counterpart, out of it.’⁵ The ‘abstractions and generalizations’ which ‘have no existence, no counterpart, out of’ the mind, are concerned with aspects of the ‘unit and individual’ things presented in experience. It is these ‘unit and individual’ things that have ‘existence’, properly; and these things are present in, or to, the imagination.

An apprehension of things … remains on our minds by means of the faculty of memory. Memory consists in a present imagination of things that are past; memory retains the impressions and likenesses of what they were when before us; and when we make use of the proposition which refers to them, it supplies us with objects by which to interpret it. They are things still, as being the reflections of things in a mental mirror.⁶

A particular proposition may have a ‘notional’ or a ‘real’ ‘interpretation’: the one who interprets that proposition may apprehend ‘notions’ or ‘images’, when interpreting it.

A schoolboy may perfectly apprehend, and construe with spirit, the poet’s words, “Dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita Virgine Pontifex;”⁷ he has seen steep hills, flights of steps, and processions; he knows what enforced silence is; also he knows all about the Pontifex Maximus, and the Vestal Virgins; he has an abstract hold upon every word of the description, yet without the words therefore bringing before him at all the living image which they would light up in the mind of a contemporary of the poet, who had seen the fact described, or of a modern historian who had duly informed himself in the religious phenomena, and by meditation had realized the Roman ceremonial, of the age of Augustus.⁸

The ‘contemporary of the poet’ and the ‘modern historian’ contemplate a ‘living image’, a ‘concrete unit’; and it affects them as a ‘reality’ would, for it is akin to, or the ‘counterpart’ of, the ‘reflections of things in a mental mirror’ that are present in ‘memory’, the ‘reflections’ that make the ‘things still’ present that were once experienced. Newman maintains that ‘of these two modes of apprehending propositions, notional and real, real is the stronger;

I mean by stronger the more vivid and forcible. It is so to be accounted for the very reason that it is concerned with what is either real or is taken for real; for intellectual ideas cannot compete in effectiveness with the experience of concrete facts … . Not that real apprehension, as such, impels to action, any more than notional; but it excites and stimulates the affections and passions, by bringing facts home to them as motive causes.⁹

Images excite ‘the affections and passions’, and the affections and passions motivate acts. Images do not, of themselves, ‘impel to action’: it is the ‘affections’ that make one tend toward acting in certain ways; and whether certain ‘affections’ are excited in one, by an image, relates to whether one has a certain character – whether one has the sort of character to be affected by such an image.

It is not imagination that causes action; but hope and fear, likes and dislikes, appetite, passion, affection, the stirrings of selfishness and self-love. What imagination does for us is to find a means of stimulating those motive powers; and it does so by providing a supply of objects strong enough to stimulate them. The thought of honour, glory, duty, self-aggrandisement, gain, or on the other hand of Divine Goodness, future reward, eternal life, perseveringly dwelt upon, leads us along a course of action corresponding to itself, but only in case there be that in our minds which is congenial to it. However, when there is that preparation of mind, the thought does lead to the act. Hence it is that the fact of a proposition being accepted with a real assent is accidentally an earnest of that proposition being carried out in conduct, and the imagination may be said in some sense to be of a practical nature, inasmuch as it leads to practice indirectly by the action of its object upon the affections.¹⁰

If one has that in oneself ‘which is congenial’ to a certain end which one imagines, then the imagining of that end will excite the ‘motive powers’ of the passions and affections; and to have that in oneself ‘which is congenial’ to a certain end, is to have a certain sort of temperament. (To maintain that the passions and affections are ‘motive powers’ in this way, is not to maintain that to experience certain passions and affections is to be ‘impelled’ to act in accordance with them.) Images, then, excite emotion; and this might suggest that, where there is emotion, there is an image. When discussing how particular propositions might, in themselves, admit of ‘notional’ or ‘real’ apprehension, Newman observes that ‘“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,”¹¹ is a mere commonplace, a terse expression of abstractions in the mind of the poet himself, if Philippi is to be the index of his patriotism, whereas it would be the record of experiences, a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, inflaming the imagination, piercing the heart, of a Wallace or a Tell.’¹² In the case of the phrase ‘dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita Virgine Pontifex’, the ‘living image’ which the phrase might evoke would be visual, something presented to the senses – a particular scene in the ‘Roman ceremonial’. The ‘living image’ associated with ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ would not seem to be something presented to the senses, in the same way. What image would the phrase ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ evoke in the ‘imagination’ of a ‘Wallace or a Tell’? Newman suggests that the phrase, for ‘a Wallace or a Tell’, would be ‘the record of experiences, a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, piercing the heart’. The main difference between Horace, and ‘a Wallace or a Tell’, is that Horace does not act on the maxim, ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, and Wallace and Tell do. Would Newman suggest, here, that the difference arises from Horace having merely ‘abstractions’, and Wallace and Tell, images? If so, what are the images that Wallace and Tell have, which Horace does not have? Wallace and Tell certainly would seem to have, or to be moved by, sentiments, in accordance with that maxim, while Horace does not have, or is not moved by, those sentiments. If, as Newman suggests, it is images that excite sentiments, then Wallace and Tell, in having certain sentiments, would seem to have the images that excite them. Is Newman assuming that they have the images, because they have the sentiments? He observes that the maxim would be, for Wallace and Tell, a ‘record of experiences’. Yet they have had those experiences because they have been moved by the sentiments expressed in the maxim; so the maxim would have been a ‘sovereign dogma’ for them, before they had those experiences. Certainly, after they had gone through those experiences, the memory, the ‘record’ of those experiences, would make the maxim more affecting; a Wallace and a Tell understand, from experience, what it means to live pro patria, and to be willing to die pro patria, so that ‘images’ derived from their experience would be (after they had gone through the experiences, to which their ‘patriotism’ moved them) involved in their response to the maxim. What, though, of the ‘patriotism’ that moved them to have those experiences? Were they formed, by the ‘experiences’ of their upbringing, to have ‘patriotic’ characters, such that the ‘record’, the impress, of these experiences, was what made patriotism a ‘sovereign dogma’ for them? Newman could be suggesting that there is a way of living, involving certain ‘experiences’, which corresponds to the maxim ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’; to live in that way, is to understand, from experience, the ‘reality’ of what it is pro patria mori; and those who understand the ‘reality’ would assent to the maxim in a different way to those who understand only by ‘abstractions’. Wallace and Tell were moved, by patriotism, to carry out certain acts, and to have certain experiences. Those experiences would have informed their understanding of what ‘patriotism’ means. Before they had those experiences, they were, nevertheless, sufficiently patriotic as to be moved to act pro patria. This patriotism could, equally, have been a ‘record’ of certain ‘experiences’ – experiences involved in their upbringing: they may have been brought up to have a certain understanding of what their patria was; they may have had, from their upbringing, certain images or experiences with which to ‘interpret’ the term ‘patria’ – such that it meant something to them that ‘inflamed’ their ‘imagination’, that inspired their devotion. They had an understanding of what it is pro patria mori that was involved in who they were. They had, in the ‘real’ stuff of who they were – in the ‘images’ derived from the experiences that had formed them – that with which to ‘interpret’ the maxim. (Newman would seem, here, to associate ‘real apprehension’, or the ‘image’ that is apprehended, with something like ‘connatural knowledge’ – the knowledge of a certain state of character, or a certain kind of goodness, involved in having that kind of character, or that kind of goodness.)

Newman observes that the mind can retain ‘images’ not simply of the things of sense experience, but of its own ‘acts’. The memories of ‘our past mental acts of any kind’ are memories of ‘things’, and so may involve ‘real’ apprehension.

The apprehension which we have of our past mental acts of any kind, of hope, inquiry, effort, triumph, disappointment, suspicion, hatred, and a hundred others, is an apprehension of the memory of those definite acts, and therefore an apprehension of things … . Such an apprehension again is elicited by propositions embodying the notices of our history, of our pursuits and their results, of our friends, of our bereavements, of our illnesses, of our fortunes, which remain imprinted upon our memory as sharply and deeply as is any recollection of sight. Nay, and such recollections may have in them an individuality and completeness which outhves the impressions made by sensible objects. The memory of countenances and of places in times past may fade away from the mind; but the vivid image of certain anxieties or deliverances never.¹³

One can understand certain emotions, or states of mind, from having experienced those emotions, or states of mind. One can, equally, have difficulty in understanding emotions, or states of mind, that one has never experienced.

As regards the affections and passions of our nature, they are sui generis respectively, and incommensurable, and must be severally experienced in order to be apprehended really. I can understand the rabbia of a native of Southern Europe, if I am of a passionate temper myself; and the taste for speculation or betting found in great traders or on the turf, if I am fond of enterprise or games of chance; but on the other hand, not all the possible descriptions of headlong love will make me comprehend the delirium, if I never have had a fit of it; nor will ever so many sermons about the inward satisfaction of strict conscientiousness create in my mind the image of a virtuous action and its attendant sentiments, if I have been brought up to lie, thieve and indulge my appetites. Thus we meet with men of the world who cannot enter into the very idea of devotion, and think, for instance, that, from the nature of the case, a life of religious seclusion must be either one of unutterable dreariness or abandoned sensuality, because they know of no exercise of the affections but what is merely human; and with others again, who, living in the home of their own selfishness, ridicule as something fanatical and pitiable the self-sacrifices of generous high-mindedness and chivalrous honour. They cannot create images of these things, any more than children on the contrary can of vice, when they ask whereabouts and who the bad men are; for they have no personal memories, and have to content themselves with notions drawn from books or from what others tell them.¹⁴

Newman seems to understand by ‘image’ not so much a particular, sensible form, present in the ‘imagination’, as a memory of something experienced – the presence of an experienced reality (‘unit and individual’) in, or to, the ‘memory’. Anything experienced may become an ‘image’.

Who is able to infuse into me, or how shall I imbibe, a sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil, if I have not read their writings? or how shall I gain a shadow of a perception of the wit or the grace ascribed to the conversation of the French salons, being myself an untravelled John Bull?¹⁵

The ‘sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil’ involves an image derived from the experience of ‘their writings’; that experience involves an encounter with the thoughts of Cicero and Virgil – it involves a perception of the habits of thought of Cicero and Virgil, and a perception of how those habits of thought are characteristic of them. The ‘image’ here – the image of the ‘style of Cicero or Virgil’ – is not something that is contrasted with ‘thought’; for a sense of the ‘style of Cicero or Virgil’ involves a sense of the thought of Cicero or Virgil.¹⁶ ‘Imagination’ is not, then, in simple contrast to ‘intellect’ or ‘understanding’. There may be things that one understands only in, or through, having certain experiences of them; the trace of an experience, in or to the ‘memory’ or ‘imagination’, is that whereby one understands. One may have experiences of that which is spiritual or intellectual, experiences of persons, and those experiences are retained as ‘images’.

Newman associates ‘images’ with understanding in his account of how proficiency, in a particular form of knowledge, may be connected with having an ‘image’ of that with which that form of knowledge is concerned.

It will sometimes happen, that those who acquitted themselves but poorly in class, when they come into the action of life, and engage in some particular work, which they have already been learning in its theory and with little promise of proficiency, are suddenly found to have what is called an eye for that work – an eye for trade matters, or for engineering, or a special taste for literature – which no one expected from them at school, while they were engaged on notions. Minds of this stamp not only know the received rules of their profession, but enter into them, and even anticipate them, or dispense with them, or substitute other rules instead. And when new questions are opened, and arguments are drawn up on one side and the other in long array, they with a natural ease and promptness form their views and give their decision, as if they had no need to reason, from their clear apprehension of the lie and issue of the whole matter in dispute, as if it were drawn out in a map before them. These are the reformers, systematizers, inventors, in various departments of thought, speculative and practical; in education, in administration, in social and political matters, in science. Such men indeed are far from infallible; however great their powers, they sometimes fall into great errors, in their own special department, while second-rate men who go by rule come to sound and safe conclusions. Images need not be true.¹⁷

Those who can dispense with ‘received rules’ in this way, do so by consulting an image, which is as if a ‘map’ of a certain ‘matter’, with which those ‘rules’ are concerned. A certain reality is presented in or through that image; something of that reality is understood, or apprehended, in or through that image – so that to have that image is to have a sense of that reality, an ‘eye’ for it. The image is that in which, or through which, certain realities are (or seem to be) present to the mind. If the ‘rules’ of a ‘profession’ are derived by ‘abstraction’ from certain realities, so, to have a sense of those realities, is to be able to ‘enter into’ those rules more fully, ‘or substitute other rules instead’, ‘other rules’ derived from that sense of those realities. Those ‘other rules’ would, presumably, be ‘abstractions’; but the capacity to form those abstractions requires a sense of the reality, from which the abstractions are made; those ‘abstractions’ are a matter of apprehending, isolating, certain aspects of that reality, and the apprehension of that reality must, it would seem, precede the apprehension of an aspect of it. Newman observes, in this regard, that ‘real apprehension has … precedence [over notional apprehension], as being the scope and end and the test of notional; and the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fertile is it in its aspects of them, and the more practical in its definitions’.¹⁸ The origin of the ‘aspects’ is in the ‘mind’s hold upon things’. There is a sense, then, that it is in ‘real apprehension’, in imagination, that things are present to the mind, in such a way that they can be thought about. The images present in the mind are, Newman maintains, images of things, and they are ‘things still, as being the reflections of things in a mental mirror’.¹⁹ Contrasting ‘real’ and ‘notional’ apprehension, Newman observes that the ‘informations of sense and sensation are the initial basis of both of them; but in the one we take hold of objects from within them, and in the other we view them from outside of them; we perpetuate them as images in the one case, we transform them into notions in the other’.²⁰ If ‘we take hold of objects from within them’, in ‘real’ apprehension, then this would suggest that to have a ‘real apprehension’ of an object is to be ‘within’ that object, in some way: one does not merely contemplate it from ‘without’; one has a sense of it that involves a kind of participation in it, a matter of being ‘within’ it. Newman maintains that ‘the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things … the more fertile is it in its aspects of them’; that ‘fertility’, whereby the mind forms ‘abstractions’, by which it considers ‘aspects’ of ‘things’, would seem to originate in the mind being ‘within’ things, in some way.

Newman suggests that the ‘image’ involved in ‘real apprehension’ is the trace of experience, abiding in the mind. The various experiences one has had, have involved various encounters with various realities; and these realities, through these encounters, are present ‘within’ the mind. When one has experienced something, then that thing is present to one, in memory (as a ‘reflection’ in a ‘mental mirror’) when one thinks about it; and one can ‘test’ statements about that thing against the ‘reflection’ of it that one has acquired from experience.

Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical common-places, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.²¹

Newman observes, with regard to Virgil, that ‘his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, [give] utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time’.²² To have had that experience – of ‘pain and weariness, yet hope of better things’ – is to have an understanding of the ‘utterance’ of Virgil which cannot be had by those who have not had that experience.

What the experience of the world effects for the illustration of classical authors, that office the religious sense, carefully cultivated, fulfils toward Holy Scripture. To the devout and spiritual, the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions. And, again, to the disconsolate, the tempted, the perplexed, the suffering, there comes, by means of their very trials, an enlargement of thought, which enables them to see in it what they never saw before. Henceforth there is to them a reality in its teachings, which they recognize as an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine origin. Hence the practice of meditation on the Sacred Text; so highly thought of by Catholics.²³

If one has experienced something of the reality with which Scripture is concerned, then one can recognize a ‘reality in [the] teachings’ of Scripture, which is ‘an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine origin’. To experience that reality, the ‘religious sense’ must be ‘carefully cultivated’, and for Newman this ‘religious sense’ is associated with the ‘conscience’. When one has cultivated the conscience and the ‘religious sense’, one can perceive certain realities; and one can recognize that the ‘Sacred Text’ is concerned with those realities, and that there is a ‘reality in its teachings’.

Newman characterizes ‘real’ apprehension as the ‘scope and end and test’ of notional; and, in this, he seems to be suggesting that experience is the ‘test’ of theory. With regard to the ‘religious sense’, one needs to have this ‘sense’ if one is to have certain experiences – if certain realities are to be perceptible; and the ‘cultivation’ of that sense is itself something that happens in, or through, experience – to act in accordance with the conscience, and to have the experiences attendant on such a way of acting, is itself to form the conscience, and its capacities for apprehension. (Experience ‘enlarges’ the capacity for experience.) To be experienced in certain matters, is to have a ‘real apprehension’ of those matters, to have ‘images’ of them, against which one can ‘test’ statements about them, and by which one can ‘interpret’ those statements (so that one might be affected by them, as by the realities with which they concern, if one has had experience of those realities, and they can ‘excite’ certain ‘affections’ that are ‘motive powers’ of action). ‘Real apprehension’, Newman maintains, is a ‘test’ of ‘notional’; yet he equally insists that ‘images need not be true’: the image, contemplated in a particular act of ‘real apprehension’, might not correspond to reality.

The fact of the distinctness of the images, which are required for real assent, is no warrant for the existence of the objects which those images represent. A proposition, be it ever so keenly apprehended, may be true or may be false. If we simply put aside all inferential information, such as is derived from testimony, from general belief, from the concurrence of the senses, from common sense, or otherwise, we have no right to consider that we have apprehended a truth, merely because of the strength of our mental impression of it. Hence the proverb, ‘Fronti nulla fides.’ An image, with the characters of perfect veracity and faithfulness, may be ever so distinct and eloquent an object presented before the mind (or, as it is sometimes called, an ‘objectum internum,’ or a ‘subject-object’); but, nevertheless, there may be no external reality in the case, corresponding to it, in spite of its impressiveness. One of the most remarkable instances of this fallacious impressiveness is the illusion which possesses the minds of able men, those especially who are exercised in physical investigations, in favour of the inviolability of the laws of nature. Philosophers of the school of Hume discard the very supposition of miracles, and scornfully refuse to hear evidence in their behalf in given instances, from their intimate experience of physical order and of the ever-recurring connexion of antecedent and consequent. Their imagination usurps the functions of reason; and they cannot bring themselves even to entertain as a hypothesis (and this is all that they are asked to do) a thought contrary to that vivid impression of which they are the victims, that the uniformity of nature, which they witness hour by hour, is equivalent to a necessary, inviolable law … . When I assent to a proposition, I ought to have some more legitimate reason for doing so, than the brilliancy of the image of which that proposition is the expression. That I have no experience of a thing happening except in one way, is a cause of the intensity of my assent, if I assent, but not a reason for my assenting. In saying this, I am not disposed to deny the presence in some men of an idiosyncratic sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions which common men cannot see, and is secured from the peril of confusing truth with make-belief; but this is genius, and beyond rule. I grant too, of course, that accidentally impressiveness does in matter of fact … constitute the motive principle of belief; for the mind is ever exposed to the danger of being carried away by the liveliness of its conceptions, to the sacrifice of good sense and conscientious caution, and the greater and the more rare are its gifts, the greater is the risk of swerving from the line of reason and duty; but here I am not speaking of transgressions of rule any more than of exceptions to it, but of the normal constitution of our minds, a nd of the natural and rightful effect of acts of the imagination upon us, and this is, not to create assent, but to intensify it.²⁴

The mind can create images: ‘We are able by an inventive faculty, or, as I may call it, the faculty of composition, to follow the descriptions of things which have never come before us, and to form, out of such passive impressions as experience has heretofore left on our minds, new images, which, though mental creations, are in no sense abstractions, and though ideal, are not notional … [but] are concrete units in the minds both of the party describing and the party informed of them.’²⁵ Newman observes, though, that the ‘faculty of composition’ is mostly restricted to the ‘sense of sight’; it is, for instance, very ‘difficult … to create or to apprehend by description images of mental facts, of which we have no direct experience.’²⁶ That the mind can create images means, nevertheless, that ‘an image, with the characters of perfect veracity and faithfulness, may be ever so distinct and eloquent an object presented before the mind … [when there is] no external reality in the case, corresponding to it, in spite of its impressiveness’.²⁷ Newman suggests that the ‘illusion’ of ‘the inviolability of the laws of nature’ arises from the distinctness of the ‘image’ of those ‘laws’, formed by experience; but, ‘that I have no experience of a thing happening except in one way, is … not a reason for my assenting’.²⁸ Newman seems to be suggesting that those who maintain the ‘inviolability’ of the ‘laws of nature’ would maintain that the ‘image’ they have, of those ‘laws’, is the ultimate truth of the matter; ‘they cannot bring themselves even to entertain as a hypothesis (and this is all that they are asked to do) a thought contrary to that vivid impression of which they are the victims, that the uniformity of nature, which they witness hour by hour, is equivalent to a necessary, inviolable law’.²⁹ They take ‘uniformity’ in the image, to be ‘equivalent’ to necessity; and so they confound something which can only be conceived of – necessity – with something that can be experienced, or presented in an ‘image’ – ‘uniformity’, regularity. The issue here, though, is not so much that they have an ‘image’ that does not correspond to an ‘external reality’; it is that they take something that can be presented in an image – ‘uniformity’ – for something that cannot – necessity. That they do this, Newman maintains, is owing to the distinctness of the ‘image’ that they have: the distinctness of the image makes for an inclination to treat the image as ultimate, and to discern in it ‘necessity’.

Newman observes that the ‘distinctness’ of an image, involved in a ‘real’ apprehension, is not, in itself, a proper ‘reason’ for assent to what that apprehension presents. What, then, of his suggestion that, as the ‘devout and spiritual’ recognize that ‘the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions’, so they recognize that there is ‘a reality in its teachings, which … [is] an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine origin’? Newman maintains that ‘we have no right to consider that we have apprehended a truth, merely because of the strength of our mental impression of it’ if ‘we simply put aside all inferential information, such as is derived from testimony, from general belief, from the concurrence of the senses, from common sense, or otherwise’.³⁰ Do those who recognize a ‘reality’ in the ‘teachings’ of the ‘Divine Word’ do so, without regard to ‘inferential information’? There might be, Newman suggests, a registering of ‘inferential information’ in, or through, images: there can be ‘in some men … an idiosyncratic sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions which common men cannot see, and is secured from the peril of confusing truth with make-belief; but this is genius, and beyond rule’.³¹ Would Newman maintain that the ‘devout and spiritual’ have something akin to this ‘genius’, whereby they can discern ‘reasons’ in the ‘impressions’ they form of what is presented by the ‘Divine Word’? He does not, in any case, maintain that they disregard ‘inferential information’; they recognize, rather, that the ‘Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions’ – that it expresses an ‘apprehension’ that has an acquaintance with certain ‘things’. If those ‘things’ are things that the ‘devout and spiritual’ register, then the ‘devout and spiritual’ will consult their own experience, the ‘testimony’ of their own experience, in ascertaining the ‘reality’ of the ‘teachings’ presented in the ‘Divine Word’. The acquaintance of the ‘devout and spiritual’ with those ‘things’, might enable them, with an ‘idiosyncratic sagacity’, to discern marks of truth, in the images of those ‘things’ presented in the ‘Divine Word’. Could they, moreover, discern these marks of truth or ‘reality’, in images of ‘things’ that they have not, perhaps could not have, experienced for themselves? If an acquaintance with these ‘things’ seems such that only a ‘divine’ apprehension could have it, and if the ‘Divine Word’ seems to manifest, to proceed from, a ‘real’ acquaintance with these things (to those who have the ‘sagacity’ to detect what a ‘real’ acquaintance looks like) then the ‘Divine Word’ would seem to express a ‘divine’ apprehension, and to have on it the marks of a ‘divine origin’. (Newman observes that the sense of what is ‘beyond human nature’, and so ‘supernatural’, involves a ‘standard’ at which ‘the powers of nature are placed’, and that different individuals will ‘place’ this standard in different ways, ‘according to [their] respective dispositions, opinions, and experiences’.)³²

Newman observes that there is a ‘sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions’. The apprehension of an ‘image’ can involve the apprehension of ‘reasons in’ that image, and these ‘reasons’, these inferences, can make for the ‘proof’ of a proposition. There can be a thinking, an inferring, that occurs in, or through, the contemplation of ‘images’; and it is this thinking which discerns ‘reasons in’ the ‘impressions’ derived from experience.

Newman maintains that ‘real assents’ are ‘of a personal character’, as they involve images derived from experiences which are particular to those who have them – and ‘such accidents are the characteristics of persons’. One cannot make a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’ – even if one is convinced, through ‘notional’ argument, of that ‘point’ – unless one has had the experiences required for such a ‘real assent’. ‘We have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special … [and] depend on personal experience.’³³ That one has the experiences, required for a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’, is not something one can ‘secure’, not something that one can make happen.

[Real assents] are of a personal character, each individual having his own, and being known by them. It is otherwise with notions; notional apprehension is in itself an ordinary act of our common nature. All of us have the power of abstraction, and can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions; and thus to co-operate in the establishment of a common measure between mind and mind. And, though for one and all of us to assent to the notions which we thus apprehend in common, is a further step, as requiring the adoption of a common stand-point of principle and judgment, yet this too depends in good measure on certain logical processes of thought, with which we are all familiar, and on facts which we all take for granted. But we cannot make sure, for ourselves or others, of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of one man is not the experience of another. Real assent, then, as the experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man … . That this or that person should have the particular experiences necessary for real assent on any point, that the Deist should become a Theist, the Erastian a Catholic, the Protectionist a Free-trader, the Conservative a Legitimist, the high Tory an out-and-out Democrat, are facts, each of which may be the result of a multitude of coincidences in one and the same individual, coincidences which we have no means of determining, and which, therefore, we may call accidents. For –

There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough hew them how we will.

Such accidents are the characteristics of persons, as differentiae and properties are the characteristics of species or natures.³⁴

If ‘all of us … can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions’, then ‘all of us’ can assent to any ‘abstraction’ – there is no ‘abstraction’, no ‘notional assent’, that is impossible to any ‘of us’. To make a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’, however, one must have had the experiences required for such an assent. If one has the requisite experiences, having assented ‘notionally’ to a certain ‘point’, one might then assent ‘really’ to it; one might convert a ‘notional’ to a ‘real’ assent. When Newman considers the changes made by ‘particular experiences’, however, he does not instance changes from ‘notional’ to ‘real’ assent: he instances changes in the substance of belief, not in its ‘apprehension’ – the ‘Deist’ becoming a ‘Theist’, the ‘Erastian’ a ‘Catholic’, and so on. Would he suggest, in this, that one cannot be a ‘Catholic’, say, without making certain ‘real assents’, so that if one cannot make those ‘real assents’, one cannot be a Catholic? If so, one cannot change from being an ‘Erastian’ to being a ‘Catholic’, without having had the experiences that would enable one to make a ‘real assent’ to Catholicism. (Becoming a Catholic would, then, involve what ‘we may call accidents’, though if a ‘Divinity shapes our ends’, then these ‘accidents’ are appointed by Providence. The sense that, through the ‘accidents’ appointed by Providence, a ‘Divinity shapes our’ minds, is present in ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica – in which he suggests that the ‘Inward Ray’ is formed by ‘trial’, ‘grief’, ‘pain’, ‘or strange eventful day’, to discern ‘truth in its wealthier scene, and nobler space’.) Would Newman suggest, moreover, that the experiences, required for a ‘real assent’ to Catholicism, are, equally, a motive for making that assent? Would he suggest that those experiences have a significance that is such that, rightly construed, they present ‘reasons’ for Catholicism? When Newman reflects on the ‘experiences’ that might make for a ‘real and personal belief’ in the ‘Divinity’ of Christ, he characterizes those experiences as ‘disposing causes’.

In this day the belief of so many thousands in [the] Divinity [of Christ], is not therefore notional, because it is common, but may be a real and personal belief, being produced in different individual minds by various experiences and disposing causes, variously combined; such as a warm or strong imagination, great sensibility, compunction and horror at sin, frequenting the Mass and other rites of the Church, meditating on the contents of the Gospels, familiarity with hymns and religious poems, dwelling on the Evidences, parental example and instruction, religious friends, strange providences, powerful preaching. In each case the image in the mind, with the experiences out of which it is formed, would be a personal result; and, though the same in all, would in each case be so idiosyncratic in its circumstances, that it would stand by itself, a special formation, unconnected with any law; though at the same time it would necessarily be a principle of sympathy and a bond of intercourse between those whose minds had been thus variously wrought into a common assent, far stronger than could follow upon any multitude of mere notions which they unanimously held. And even when that assent is not the result of concurrent causes, if such a case is possible, but has one single origin, as the study of Scripture, careful teaching, or a religious temper, still its presence argues a special history, and a personal formation, which an abstraction does not. For an abstraction can be made at will, and may be the work of a moment; but the moral experiences which perpetuate themselves in images, must be sought after in order to be found, and encouraged and cultivated in order to be appropriated.³⁵

These experiences would seem to be ‘disposing causes’, not simply for having the ‘images’ required for a ‘real assent’, but motives for the assent itself; Newman suggests that the mind is ‘wrought into’ an assent, through these experiences.

One of the main claims that Newman makes in the Grammar of Assent is that ‘verbal reasoning’ does not present, fully, all that happens in the mind, when the mind is moved, by ‘ratiocination’, to assent to a certain ‘point’, pertaining to ‘concrete matter’. There is an ‘organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation’, which is the ‘living’ activity of the mind itself in ‘ratiocination’, and this ‘ratiocination’ cannot be fully presented in ‘verbal argumentation’; it is this ‘organon’ that is required ‘for genuine proof in concrete matter’.³⁶ His concern with ‘genuine proof in concrete matter’ relates to his sense that, in ‘concrete matter’, the only kind of ‘verbal’ proof that can be formed for a particular ‘point’ is a probable, not a demonstrative, proof. He would resist the idea – which he associates with John Locke – that one should assent to a proposition in proportion to the degree of proof one has for that proposition. He maintains that the idea that there can be ‘degrees of assent’ is mistaken – assent is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and there are, in fact, no ‘degrees’ in it. If, though, one should assent to a proposition only in accordance with the degree of proof one has for it, then would this not mean that one should not assent to any proposition, unless one has ‘demonstrative’ proof for it? Newman maintains that while ‘verbal reasoning’ can ‘only conclude probabilities … because its premisses are assumed, not proved, and … because its conclusions are abstract, and not concrete’, ‘verbal reasoning’ does not ‘represent adequately the sum-total of considerations by which an individual mind is determined in its judgment of things’ – ‘Thought is too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal, delicate, and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate, to admit of the trammels of any language, of whatever subtlety and of whatever compass.’³⁷ There is more, in the ‘delicate … circuitous … various and intricate’ activity of the mind, than can be presented in ‘the trammels’ of language. Newman does not maintain that this instinctive, ‘informal’ or ‘natural’ ratiocination attains to something more than ‘probabilities’; but he maintains that ‘certitude’ can be legitimately attained by an ‘accumulation of various probabilities’, and that ‘from probabilities we may construct legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude’; and the ‘various and intricate’ activity of the mind, might involve an apprehension of more ‘probabilities’ than can be set out in ‘verbal reasoning’.³⁸ What is more, Newman insists that a certain ‘judgement’ is required, to determine when one has enough – in the way of an ‘accumulation of various probabilities’ – to make for a ‘legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude’, and this judgment is a matter of ‘living personal reasoning’ and ‘good sense’: ‘What logic cannot do, my own living personal reasoning, my good sense, which is the healthy condition of such personal reasoning, but which cannot adequately express itself in words, does for me.’³⁹ This ‘good sense’, with respect to ‘reasoning’ – determining when a particular set of ‘probabilities’, making for a ‘point’, is such that one ought to assent to that ‘point’ – Newman terms the ‘illative sense’. It is this ‘sense’ that determines whether one has ‘proof, sufficient for certitude’: ‘great as are the services of language in enabling us to extend the compass of our inferences, to test their validity, and to communicate them to others, still the mind itself is more versatile and vigorous than any of its works, of which language is one, and it is only under its penetrating and subtle action that the margin disappears, which I have described as intervening between verbal argumentation and conclusions in the concrete’, and it is the ‘mind itself’ that ‘determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities and the reasons sufficient for a proof’.⁴⁰

Newman likens the ‘illative sense’, the ‘controlling principle in inferences’, to phronesis.

How does the mind fulfil its function of supreme direction and control, in matters of duty, social intercourse, and taste? In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the individual is supreme, and responsible to himself, nay, under circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they go, and is in consequence bound to use them. As regards moral duty, the subject is fully considered in the well-known ethical treatises of Aristotle. He calls the faculty which guides the mind in matters of conduct, by the name of phronesis, or judgment. This is the directing, controlling, and determining principle in such matters, personal and social. What it is to be virtuous, how we are to gain the just idea and standard of virtue, how we are to approximate in practice to our own standard, what is right and wrong in a particular case, for the answers in fulness and accuracy to these and similar questions, the philosopher refers us to no code of laws, to no moral treatise, because no science of life, applicable to the case of an individual, has been or can be written. Such is Aristotle’s doctrine, and it is undoubtedly true. An ethical system may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, a number of examples, suggestions, landmarks, limitations, cautions, distinctions, solutions of critical or anxious difficulties; but who is to apply them to a particular case? whither can we go, except to the living intellect, ou r own, or another’s? What is written is too vague, too negative for our need. It bids us avoid extremes; but it cannot ascertain for us, according to our personal need, the golden mean. The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them. It is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge in those special cases of duty which are personal to him. It comes of an acquired habit, though it has its first origin in nature itself, and it is formed and matured by practice and experience; and it manifests itself, not in any breadth of view, any philosophical comprehension of the mutual relations of duty toward duty, or any consistency in its teachings, but it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now, by this given person, under these given circumstances … . State or public law is inflexible, but this mental rule is not only minute and particular, but has an elasticity, which, in its application to individual cases, is, as I have said, not studious to maintain the appearance of consistency. In old times the mason’s rule which was in use at Lesbos was, according to Aristotle, not of wood or iron, but of lead, so as to allow of its adjustment to the uneven surface of the stones brought together for the work. By such the philosopher illustrates the nature of equity in contrast with law, and such is that phronesis, from which the science of morals forms its rules, and receives its complement … . Though truth is ever one and the same, and the assent of certitude is immutable, still the reasonings which carry us on to truth and certitude are many and distinct, and vary with the inquirer; and it is not with assent, but with the controlling principle in inferences that I am comparing phronesis. It is with this drift that I observe that the rule of conduct for one man is not always the rule for another, though the rule is always one and the same in the abstract, and in its principle and scope. To learn his own duty in his own case, each individual must have recourse to his own rule; and if his rule is not sufficiently developed in his intellect for his need, then he goes to some other living, present authority, to supply it for him, not to the dead letter of a treatise or a code. A living, present authority, himself or another, is his immediate guide in matters of a personal, social, or political character. In buying and selling, in contracts, in his treatment of others, in giving and receiving, in thinking, speaking, doing, and working, in toil, in danger, in his recreations and pleasures, every one of his acts, to be praiseworthy, must be in accordance with this practical sense. Thus it is, and not by science, that he perfects the virtues of justice, self-command, magnanimity, generosity, gentleness, and all others. Phronesis is the regulating principle of every one of them.⁴¹

As phronesis is to the general ‘rules’ of an ‘ethical system’ – the origin and ‘complement’ of those ‘rules’ – so the ‘illative sense’ is to the general ‘rules’ of ‘verbal reasoning’ or ‘logic’. As phronesis goes beyond the general ‘rules’, to ascertain a ‘rule’ that is ‘minute’ enough for the particular case – ascertaining the good, in the particular case – so the ‘illative sense’ goes beyond the general ‘rules’ of ‘verbal reasoning’ to ascertain, and to determine the worth of, the ‘reasonings which carry us on to truth’ in different ‘matters’. As phronesis is the ‘rule’, with which particular acts must be in ‘accordance’, to be ‘praiseworthy’, so the ‘illative sense’ is the ‘controlling principle in inferences’, in accordance with which those inferences are conducted (it ‘is a rule to itself’, it ‘appeals to no judgment beyond its own’ and it ‘attends upon the whole course of thought from antecedents to consequents, with a minute diligence and unwearied presence, which is impossible to a cumbrous apparatus of verbal reasoning’). As phronesis animates right acting – and is the principle by which the right act is ascertained, in the particular ‘case’ – so the ‘illative sense’ animates right ‘ratiocination’, ratiocination that attains to truth: ‘the validity of proof is determined, not by any scientific test, but by the illative sense’; ‘the sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matter is committed to the personal action of the ratiocinative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense, a use of the word “sense” parallel to our use of it in “good sense,” “common sense,” a “sense of beauty”.’⁴² (By ‘validity’ here, Newman means something more than ‘logical’ validity – whereby the premises of an argument entail the conclusion; he means an assessment of whether an argument (or assemblage of arguments) is sufficient to establish the truth of a proposition, such that one recognizes, in making this assessment, that one should assent to that proposition: the ‘ratiocinative mind itself’, the illative sense, ‘determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities and the reasons sufficient for a proof’.) Phronesis is not simply analogous to the ‘illative sense’; phronesis might, perhaps, be regarded as a particular form of the ‘illative sense’ – as it is a kind of judgment, pertaining to the ‘concrete’, concerning which general ‘rules’ (such as might be set out in ‘verbal reasoning’) are not sufficient. Newman observes, in a note, that ‘though Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, speaks of [phronesis] as the virtue of the [doxastikon] generally, and as being concerned generally with contingent matter (vi. 4), or what I have called the concrete, and of its function being, as regards that matter, [aletheuein toi kataphanai e apophanai] (ibid. 3), he does not treat of it in that work in its general relation to truth and the affirmation of truth, but only as it bears upon [ta prakta]’.⁴³ ‘Doxastikon’ means ‘the faculty of forming opinions’, and ‘aletheuein toi kataphanai e apophanai’, ‘the unveiling of truth by way of affirmation and denial’.⁴⁴ That is, Newman observes that while Aristotle recognizes that phronesis is a virtue of the faculty of forming opinions, and that its function is to ‘unveil’ truth, but he does not consider it ‘in its general relation to truth and the affirmation of truth’, but only in relation to ‘things to be done’. Newman suggests that Aristotle acknowledges, in his account of phronesis, that there is such a thing as a ‘virtue’ of the faculty of forming opinions, with regard to ‘concrete matter’, and that this virtue is ordered toward the ‘unveiling’ of truth; and this ‘virtue’ is what Newman is concerned with in his account of the ‘illative sense’. Aristotle, in his account of phronesis, is concerned with this virtue only with regard to the ‘unveiling’, the recognition, of ‘things to be done’ (ta prakta); but Newman is concerned with this virtue with regard to the ‘unveiling’ of truth, in ‘concrete matter’, generally – ‘in its general relation to truth’. There is a virtue of getting to the truth, a virtue of the ‘living mind’; and while phronesis is the exercise of that virtue, with respect to ‘things to be done’, the exercise of that virtue is not restricted to the discernment of ‘things to be done’ – it can be involved in the discernment of other kinds of truth with respect to ‘the concrete’.

Where phronesis animates different ‘virtues’, virtuous acts, the ‘illative sense’ animates forms of knowledge or insight. Newman observes, in this regard, that there is not simply one form of phronesis; there are different kinds of phronesis, which animate different virtues: ‘There are as many kinds of phronesis as there are virtues: for the judgment, good sense, or tact which is conspicuous in a man’s conduct in one subject-matter, is not necessarily traceable in another.’⁴⁵ (In this, Newman differs from Aristotle, who is inclined to regard ‘phronesisas a general faculty, directing and perfecting all the virtues at once’.) Just as, Newman suggests, there are different kinds of phronesis, pertaining to different forms of virtue, different spheres of activity, so there may be different kinds of ‘illative sense’ for ‘determining’ different ‘sort[s] of truth’, kinds of ‘illative sense’ that are adapted to the different ‘matters’ in which different sorts of truth are to be discerned.

[In] the various callings and professions which give scope to the exercise of great talents … these talents also are matured, not by mere rule, but by personal skill and sagacity. They are as diverse as pleading and cross-examining, conducting a debate in Parliament, swaying a public meeting, and commanding an army; and here, too, I observe that, though the directing principle in each case is called by the same name, – sagacity, skill, tact, or prudence, – still there is no one ruling faculty leading to eminence in all these various lines of action in common, but men will excel in one of them, without any talent for the rest … In the case of the Fine Arts … though true and scientific rules may be given, no one would therefore deny that Phidias or Rafael had a far more subtle standard of taste and a more versatile power of embodying it in his works, than any which he could communicate to others in even a series of treatises. And here again genius is indissolubly united to one definite subject-matter; a poet is not therefore a painter, or an architect a musical composer … Again, as regards the useful arts and personal accomplishments, we use the same word ‘skill’, but proficiency in engineering or in ship-building, or again in engraving, or again in singing, in playing instruments, in acting, or in gymnastic exercises, is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science … . [It is natural, then, to ask why ratiocination should be] held to be commensurate with logical science; and why logic is made an instrumental art sufficient for determining every sort of truth, while no one would dream of making any one formula, however generalized, a working rule at once for poetry, the art of medicine, and political warfare?⁴⁶

The ‘working rule’ for getting to ‘truth’, in a particular matter, may involve a ‘more subtle standard’ than admits of being articulated fully in ‘any one formula’. (As phronesis is a ‘rule’, consisting of the insight by which ‘this’ act is determined to be the right act, in ‘this’ particular ‘case’, so ‘poetry’ or ‘the art of medicine’ involve insights that ‘this’ is the right act – the right word to use, the right treatment to be administered – and these insights are the ‘rule’ of the activities that proceed from those ‘arts’; these insights are a kind of ‘reason’, but do not admit of being set out in a ‘formula’.) The discernment of the way of ‘determining’ the truth, in a particular ‘concrete matter’, would seem, for Newman, to involve an acquaintance with that ‘matter’, an acquaintance involving more than the apprehension of ‘abstractions’ about it. Newman observes that ‘proficiency’ in an art ‘is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science’;⁴⁷ so, a ‘proficiency’ in getting to the truth about a ‘concrete matter’, would involve a certain conformity or adaptation of the mind to that ‘matter’: to have mastery in knowing about one aspect of reality, is not to have mastery in knowing about another. The ‘ratiocinative faculty, then, as found in individuals, is not a general instrument of knowledge, but has its province, or is what may be called departmental. It is not so much one faculty, as a collection of similar or analogous faculties under one name, there being really as many faculties as there are distinct subject-matters, though in the same person some of them may, if it so happen, be united.’⁴⁸

That a special preparation of mind is required for each separate department of inquiry and discussion (excepting, of course, that of abstract science) is strongly insisted upon in well-known passages of the Nicomachean ethics. Speaking of the variations which are found in the logical perfection of proof in various subject-matters, Aristotle says, ‘A well-educated man will expect exactness in every class of subject, according as the nature of the thing admits; for it is much the same mistake to put up with a mathematician using probabilities, and to require demonstration of an orator. Each man judges skillfully in those things about which he is well-informed; it is of these that he is a good judge; viz. he, in each subject-matter, is a judge, who is well-educated in that subject-matter, and he is in an absolute sense a judge, who is in all of them well-educated.’⁴⁹

A mastery of a certain ‘subject’ is a personal endowment, acquired by experience, by practice, and it involves a ‘mental insight into truth’ which is particular to the ‘subject’ itself.

Instead of trusting logical science, we must trust persons, namely, those who by long acquaintance with their subject have a right to judge. And if we wish ourselves to share in their convictions and the grounds of them, we must follow their history, and learn as they have learned. We must take up their particular subject as they took it up, beginning at the beginning, give ourselves to it, depend on practice and experience more than on reasoning, and thus gain that mental insight into truth, whatever its subject-matter may be, which our masters have gained before us. By following this course, we may make ourselves of their number, and then we rightly lean upon ourselves, directing ourselves by our own moral or intellectual judgment, not by our skill in argumentation.⁵⁰

A ‘mental insight into truth’, with regard to a particular, ‘subject-matter’, is much more a matter of ‘practice and experience’ than of ‘skill in argumentation’. If the ways of thinking by which ‘truth’ is attained, in a ‘subject-matter’, are in certain respects particular to that ‘subject-matter’, then they can only be acquired by ‘practice’ in those ways of thinking. The ‘experience’ required would seem, moreover, to be an ‘experience’ of the reality with which that ‘department’ of knowledge is concerned, an experience involving the acquisition of ‘images’ of that reality.

In his sermon on ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, preached in 1839, Newman presented a contrast between ‘reason’ and the ‘grounds and motives of action’ – ‘reason analyzes the grounds and motives of action: a reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself’.⁵¹ The ‘grounds and motives’ of action would, however, involve ratiocination, a ‘mental insight into truth’ (the ‘unveiling’ of the truth pertaining to ‘things to be done’ associated with phronesis), though this ratiocination need not take ‘explicit’ form – it need not be presented in the form of ‘verbal reasoning’. In his sermon on ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, preached in 1840, Newman distinguished between ‘conscious and unconscious reasoning’, suggesting that ‘unconscious reasoning’ was a ‘living spontaneous energy’ in the mind. If ‘unconscious reasoning’ can be made ‘conscious’, and set out in ‘an analysis’, then it would seem that it is not different, in kind, from ‘conscious … reasoning’: its form, and character, is of one kind with ‘conscious’ reasoning.⁵² Yet Newman maintains that there is more in the mind, in its ‘implicit’ or ‘unconscious’ reasoning, than can be made fully explicit: this ‘implicit’ reasoning is too ‘subtle’ and various, to transpose fully (‘no analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief, as they are presented to our thoughts’). In the Grammar of Assent, Newman observes – ‘As we cannot see ourselves, so we cannot well see intellectual motives which are so intimately ours, and which spring up from the very constitution of our minds.’⁵³

Of the great fundamental truths of religion, natural and revealed, and as regards the mass of religious men: these truths, doubtless, may be proved and defended by an array of invincible logical arguments, but such is not commonly the method in which those same logical arguments make their way into our minds. The grounds, on which we hold the divine origin of the Church, and the previous truths which are taught us by nature – the being of a God, and the immortality of the soul – are felt by most men to be recondite and impalpable, in proportion to their depth and reality. As we cannot see ourselves, so we cannot well see intellectual motives which are so intimately ours, and which spring up from the very constitution of our minds; and while we refuse to admit the notion that religion has not irrefragable arguments in its behalf, still the attempts to argue, on the part of an individual hic et nunc, will sometimes only confuse his apprehension of sacred objects, and subtracts from his devotion quite as much as it adds to his knowledge.⁵⁴

When Newman observes that the ‘truths of religion’ may be ‘proved and defended by an array of invincible logical arguments’ (though this ‘is not commonly the method in which those same logical arguments make their way into our minds’) does he mean that the ‘method’ by which their ‘arguments make their way into our minds’ is a form of ‘implicit’ reasoning? If so, would he suggest that this ‘implicit’ reasoning is, ultimately, the ‘same’ as those ‘logical arguments’, but that it differs from them in being implicit, rather than explicit? One who is moved by those arguments, in their ‘implicit’ form, may be ‘confuse[d]’ by ‘attempts to argue’ – may not be able to carry out, or to recognize, an ‘analysis’, in explicit form, of those arguments. That one who is moved by those arguments might not be able to recognize an ‘analysis’ of them, would not mean, though, that the ‘analysis’ was not an accurate and adequate representation of those arguments. Newman would not, presumably, maintain that to have certain ‘reasons’ in the mind, in ‘implicit’ form, is to be incapable of making those reasons ‘explicit’, in an ‘analysis’ of them; otherwise, no such ‘analysis’ would be possible. It could be, though, that he would maintain that however much one might set out in explicit form all the implicit ‘reasoning’ that moves one to believe what one believes, there is always more to set out; however much one might set out, in ‘explicit’ form, the reasoning that moves one to believe what one believes, there is always more that is ‘implicit’. More than that, though, his remark that ‘we cannot see ourselves’, ‘we cannot well see intellectual motives … which spring up from the very constitution of our minds’, suggests that there might be ‘intellectual motives’ which, as part of the ‘constitution of our minds’, ‘cannot’ be reflected on, because they are part of the ‘constitution’ of the mind that reflects – they constitute the ‘view’ that the mind has of things (and even of itself). Newman observes that ‘the aspect under which we view things is often intensely personal; nay, even awfully so, considering that, from the nature of the case, it does not bring home its idiosyncrasy either to ourselves or to others. Each of us looks at the world in his own way, and does not know that perhaps it is characteristically his own.’⁵⁵ That ‘each of us … does not know that perhaps [his way of looking at the world] is characteristically his own’ need not mean that ‘each of us’ cannot, of necessity, know what is ‘his own’, cannot characterize those ‘motives’, assumptions, ideas, that are involved in the ‘constitution’ of his mind. Newman does not, in fact, maintain that what is ‘implicit’, in this regard, cannot, of necessity, become ‘explicit’; he suggests, rather, that so much in the ‘constitution’ and activity of the mind is ‘implicit’, that, as a practical matter, there is too much for an ‘analysis’ of all of it.

Newman suggests that many forms of ‘implicit’ reasoning – those which he characterizes as forms of ‘natural inference’, which involve reasoning ‘not from propositions to propositions, but from things to things, from concrete to concrete, from wholes to wholes’ – are a matter of thinking with, or through, images, discerning significance in the ‘concrete’.⁵⁶

A peasant who is weather-wise may yet be simply unable to assign intelligible reasons why he thinks it will be fine tomorrow; and if he attempts to do so, he may give reasons wide of the mark; but that will not weaken his own confidence in his prediction. His mind does not proceed step by step, but he feels all at once and together the force of various combined phenomena, though he is not conscious of them. Again, there are physicians who excel in the diagnosis of complaints; though it does not follow from this, that they could defend their decision in a particular case against a brother physician who disputed it. They are guided by natural acuteness and varied experience; they have their own idiosyncratic modes of observing, generalizing, and concluding; when questioned, they can but rest on their own authority, or appeal to the future event. In a popular novel, a lawyer is introduced, who ‘would know, almost by instinct, whether an accused person was or was not guilty; and he had already perceived by instinct’ that the heroine was guilty. ‘I’ve no doubt she’s a clever woman’, he said, and at once named an attorney practising at the Old Bailey. So, again, experts and detectives, when employed to investigate mysteries, in cases whether of the civil or criminal law, discern and follow out indications which promise solution with a sagacity incomprehensible to ordinary men. A parallel gift is the intuitive perception of character possessed by certain men, while others are as destitute of it, as others again are of an ear for music. What common measure is there between the judgments of those who have this intuition, and those who have not? What but the event can settle any difference of opinion which occurs in their estimation of a third person? These are instances of a natural capacity, or of nature improved by practice and habit, enabling the mind to pass promptly from one set of facts to another, not only, I say, without conscious media, but without conscious antecedents.⁵⁷

These forms of ‘reasoning’ involve the apprehension of a certain significance in ‘various combined phenomena’, in a kind of ‘intuitive perception’; and Newman suggests that this registering of significance, in the concrete, involves a kind of ‘abstraction’, which is a ‘power of looking at things in some particular aspect’.

What is called reasoning is often only a peculiar and personal mode of abstraction, and so far, like memory, may be said to exist without antecedents. It is a power of looking at things in some particular aspect, and of determining their internal and external relations thereby. And according to the subtlety and versatility of their gift, are men able to read what comes before them justly, variously, and fruitfully. Hence, too, it is, that in our intercourse with others, in business and family matters, in social and political transactions, a word or an act on the part of another is sometimes a sudden revelation; light breaks in upon us, and our whole judgment of a course of events, or of an undertaking, is changed. We determine correctly or otherwise, as it may be; but in either case, it is by a sense proper to ourselves, for another may see the objects which we are thus using, and give them quite a different interpretation, inasmuch as he abstracts another set of general notions from those same phenomena which present themselves to us also.⁵⁸

One person apprehends ‘aspects’ of ‘phenomena’ that are different from those apprehended by another person, with each person abstracting differently. The aspect must be there, in the phenomenon, if it is to be apprehended; but the ‘variety’ of ways in which abstractions can be made is delimited, it would seem, mainly by the ‘versatility’ of the mind that abstracts. The kind of ‘abstraction’ with which Newman is concerned, here, is akin to that involved in the ‘perception’ that is a part of phronesis – the ‘intuitive reason’ by which, according to Aristotle, ‘we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’.⁵⁹ This ‘abstraction’, or perception, with regard to ‘our intercourse with others, in business and family matters, in social and political transactions’, or the like – the particular situations of day to day life – is a matter of registering what a particular, multifaceted ‘concrete’ reality means, what significance it has. Newman characterizes it as ‘the power of looking at things in some particular aspect’; the isolation of that aspect, and the registering of its meaning, is itself the ‘abstraction’. Newman maintains that there are ‘really as many faculties [of ratiocination] as there are distinct subject-matters’; the faculty of ‘looking’ in a certain way, at a certain ‘subject-matter’, is conformed to that particular subject-matter. Newman maintains, further, that ‘proficiency’ in an art ‘is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science’. How should this relationship of the mode of ‘ratiocination’ with the ‘subject-matter’, a relationship in which it is ‘one with its particular subject-matter’, be understood? The ‘subject-matter’, the ‘concrete’ reality, is thought about, and understood, through that mode of ‘ratiocination’; and it is in some sense present – to be thought about, and understood – in an ‘image’ (which is not merely a sensible form, but a kind of trace of the object, of the reality). Newman maintains that in ‘real’ or imaginative apprehension ‘we take hold of objects from within them, and … we perpetuate them as images’: the ‘image’ is connected with an act of the mind in which ‘we take hold of objects from within them’; and this act of getting ‘within’ objects, would seem to be an act in which the mind is in some way ‘one’ with them. When Newman discusses the ‘departments’ of ‘ratiocination’, he suggests that the different modes of ratiocination vary with their subject-matters, and that each is ‘one with its particular subject-matter’, and this adaptation of the mind to a ‘subject-matter’ or object, such that it has a sense of how to ‘reason’ about it, how to think about it so as to attain to truth, is ‘a sort of instinct or inspiration’; this ‘instinct’ of how to think about an object, would seem to involve a sense of that object which is somehow prior to the ‘ratiocination’ about it, since it informs and orients that ratiocination; and this ‘instinct’ would seem, then, to be connected with the act of having a ‘hold’ of an object, ‘from within’, with having an ‘image’ of it. Newman maintains that the mind is more ‘fertile’ in ‘its aspects’ of objects, the ‘fuller’ its ‘hold’ on them, in images. He associates the manifestation of ‘aspects’ of an object with an act of ‘abstraction’ that is a ‘power of looking at things in some particular aspect’. Using the metaphor of ‘looking’, one might take it that the ‘fuller’, the more complete the ‘image’ one has, of some object, the more ‘aspects’ of that object can be presented in that image: one has more to ‘look’ at, and can ‘look’ at it in different ways, registering different ‘aspects’. Using the metaphor of ‘fertility’, one might take it that when as mind is ‘fertile’ in ‘aspects’, the ‘fuller’ its images of things, so the mind is somehow impregnated by those images – the ‘fertility’ of the mind is a kind of conceiving, brought about by objects via images (the intelligibility of the objects, giving rise to the conceptions). On either account, the creativity of the mind, in forming abstractions, is conditioned by the ‘fullness’ of the image.

Newman suggest that ideas bring out ‘aspects’ of images. He suggests, equally, that generalized ideas of things arise from an activity of comparing and contrasting things, in which ‘we regard things, not as they are in themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other’ and ‘we cannot look at any one thing without keeping our eyes on a multitude of other things besides.

‘Man’ is no longer what he really is, an individual presented to us by our senses, but as we read him in the light of those comparisons and contrasts which we have made him suggest to us. He is attenuated into an aspect, or relegated to his place in a classification … . He is made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms.⁶⁰

When the mind attends to a notion, it attends to only a part of what is there in an ‘individual’ thing. The meaning that inheres in things, is not transferred, in its fullness, into the notions that the mind creates from things.

It is plain what a different sense language will bear in this system of intellectual notions from what it has when it is the representative of things: and such a use of it is not only the very foundation of all science, but may be, and is, carried out in literature and in the ordinary intercourse of man with man. And thus it comes to pass that individual propositions about the concrete almost cease to be, and are diluted or starved into abstract notions. The events of history and the characters who figure in it lose their individuality. States and governments, society and its component parts, cities, nations, even the physical face of the country, things past, and things contemporary, all that fulness of meaning which I have described as accruing to language from experience, now that experience is absent, necessarily becomes to the multitude of men nothing but a heap of notions, little more intelligible than the beauties of a prospect to the short-sighted, or the music of a great master to a listener who has no ear.⁶¹

Newman maintains that there can be a ‘real apprehension’ of religious dogmas. A ‘dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent to it is an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act. It is discerned, rested in, and appropriated as a reality, by the religious imagination; it is held as a truth, by the theological intellect.’⁶² Newman takes it that the ‘image’, involved in the belief in one God, is present in the ‘conscience’. With regard to the belief in the Trinity, Newman maintains that the doctrine of the Trinity consists of a ‘n umber of propositions’ – such as ‘the Father is the One Eternal Personal God’, ‘the Son is the One Eternal Personal God’, ‘the Father is not the Son’, and so on – and these, when combined in a ‘complex whole’, constitute a ‘mystery’, as there is an ‘apparent contrareity’ in them; but the ‘complex whole’ is a ‘notional object’, and ‘when presented to religious minds, it is received by them notionally’.⁶³ ‘Real apprehension’, with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, is in the apprehension of the ‘propositions’, of which the ‘complex whole’ consists, taken ‘one by one’. ‘It is possible for the mind to hold a number of propositions either in their combination as one whole, or one by one; one by one, with an intelligent perception indeed of all, and of the general direction of each towards the rest, yet of each separately from the rest, for its own sake only, and not in connexion and one with the rest’; ‘The dogma of the Holy Trinity, as a complex whole, or as a mystery, is not the formal object of religious apprehension and assent; but as it is a number of propositions, taken one by one.’⁶⁴ (Newman suggests, in this, that ‘real assents’ take propositions ‘one by one’, attending to each proposition for itself, ‘for its own sake’, and not attending to how it relates to other propositions, or to whether it is consistent with other propositions. These ‘real assents’ seem to be parallel to the perceptions involved in phronesis, perceptions that are concerned only with the good, ‘here and now’, in ‘this’ particular situation; the capacity for these perceptions ‘manifests itself, not in any breadth of view, any philosophical comprehension of the mutual relations of duty toward duty, or any consistency in its teachings, but it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now, by this given person, under these given circumstances’.) The different propositions, making up the doctrine of the Trinity, can be imaged separately, but not together; but Newman maintains that this is equally the case for ‘all such real apprehension as is possible to us, of God and His Attributes’. ‘Our image of Him never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each … . We know one truth about Him, and another truth, – but we cannot image both of them together; we cannot bring them before us by one act of the mind; we drop the one while we turn to take up the other.’⁶⁵ Many years earlier, in Tract 73, he had maintained that to aim at unifying the ‘truths’ making up the doctrine of the Trinity ‘by one act of the mind’ would be to aim at ‘systematizing’ – at forming a ‘system’, in the intellect, by which the separate ‘truths’ might be ‘reduce[d] … into an intelligible dependence on each other, or harmony with each other’;⁶⁶ where, in Tract 73, he had suggested that a single ‘system’ was unattainable, in the Grammar of Assent, he suggests that a single ‘image’ is unattainable. The image that can be formed of God ‘never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each’. Newman associates the apprehension of an ‘aspect’ of an image, in the Grammar of Assent, with ‘abstraction’. If, then, one can apprehend only ‘partial aspects’ of God – and to contemplate an aspect, is to contemplate a part of an ‘image’ – one cannot apprehend the whole, the unitary image, to which those ‘aspects’ belong. Newman characterizes those aspects as ‘independent each of each’, but if they are ‘independent’, then in what sense are they ‘aspects’ of one thing, a single ‘image’? If the ‘aspects’ are taken to be ‘abstractions’, then to maintain that those abstractions cannot but be ‘independent each of each’, is to maintain that they cannot be brought into a unity; where in Tract 73, Newman had characterized that unity as a ‘system’, in the Grammar of Assent, he characterizes it as an ‘image’. What is it that unifies different abstractions, bringing them into an ‘intelligible dependence’ on one another? Would the apprehension of that ‘intelligible dependence’ consist in a comprehension of the intelligibility of the reality which those abstractions concern? Whatever sort of apprehension it might be that unifies a set of ‘abstractions’ in this way, Newman, in the Grammar of Assent, associates it with the apprehension of a unitary ‘image’.

Newman maintains that the ‘conscience’, the principle of ‘natural religion’, ‘presents’ an image of God. Newman observes that the ‘feeling of conscience’ is ‘twofold: – it is a moral sense, and a sense of duty; a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate’.⁶⁷ As a ‘judgement of the reason’, it provides ‘the elements of morals, such as may be developed by the intellect into an ethical code’.⁶⁸ As a ‘magisterial dictate’, it involves a sense of being ‘commanded’, such that ‘conscience is ever forcing on us by threats and by promises that we must follow the right and avoid the wrong’.⁶⁹ The conscience is concerned ‘with self alone and one’s own actions, and with others only indirectly and as if in association with self’ and it ‘dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them’.⁷⁰ What distinguishes ‘conscience’ from other ‘intellectual senses’ is that it involves certain ‘emotions’.

[The] various perturbations of mind which are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very considerable, – self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future, – and their contraries, when th e conscience is good, as real though less forcible, self-approval, inward peace, lightness of heart, and the like, – these emotions constitute a specific difference between conscience and our other intellectual senses, – common sense, good sense, sense of expedience, taste, sense of honour, and the like, – as indeed they would also constitute between conscience and the moral sense, supposing these two were not aspects of one and the same feeling, exercised upon one and the same subject-matter.⁷¹

Newman maintains that it is the emotions, involved in the experience of conscience, that show conscience to involve an ‘image’, an image of a person.

Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being … . If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.⁷²

Newman maintains that ‘from the perceptive power which identifies the intimations of conscience with the reverberations or echoes (so to say) of an external admonition, we proceed on to the notion of a Supreme Ruler and Judge, and then again we image Him and His attributes in those recurring intimations, out of which, as mental phenomena, our recognition of His existence was originally gained’, and ‘the notices, which He indirectly gives us through our conscience, of His own nature are such as to make us understand that He is like Himself and like nothing else’.⁷³ Newman reflects on how the ‘notices’ of the conscience may constitute an ‘image’ of God when considering a ‘child’s image of God’, the kind of image of God that a child might form: if God is taken to be the provenance of certain commands, registered in the ‘notices’ of the conscience, which are commands to do what is good, so God, as commanding what is good, is Himself good, and, indeed, God possesses all the goodness that is manifest in the various ‘shapes’ of goodness, which are commanded by Him. The child forms ‘an image of the good God, good in Himself, good relatively to the child, with whatever incompleteness; an image, before it has been reflected on, and before it is recognized by him as a notion’.⁷⁴

[The] image brought before his mental vision is the image of One who by implicit threat and promise commands certain things which he, the same child coincidently, by the same act of his mind, approves; which receive the adhesion of his moral sense and judgment, as right and good. It is the image of One who is good, inasmuch as enjoining and enforcing what is right and good, and who, in consequence, not only excites in the child hope and fear, – nay (it may be added), gratitude towards Him, as giving a law and maintaining it by reward and punishment, – but kindles in him love towards Him, as giving him a good law, and, therefore as being good Himself, for it is the property of goodness to kindle love, or rather the very object of love is goodness; and all those distinct elements of the moral law, which the typical child, whom I am supposing, more or less consciously loves and approves, – truth, purity, justice, kindness, and the like, – are but shapes and aspects of goodness. And having in his degree a sensibility towards them all, for the sake of them all he is moved to love the Lawgiver, who enjoins them upon him. And, as he can contemplate these qualities and their manifestations under the common name of goodness, he is prepared to think of them as indivisible, correlative, supplementary of each other in one and the same Personality, so that there is no aspect of goodness which God is not; and that the more, because the notion of a perfection embracing all possible excellences, both moral and intellectual, is especially congenial to the mind, and there are in fact intellectual attributes, as well as moral, included in the child’s image of God, as above represented.⁷⁵

The image of God, formed by a child, ‘as time goes on … admits of being strengthened and improved’ and ‘whether it grows brighter and stronger, or, on the other hand, is dimmed, distorted, or obliterated, depends on each of us individually, and on his circumstances’: ‘men transgress their sense of duty, and gradually lose those sentiments of shame and fear, the natural supplements of transgression, which, as I have said, are the witnesses of the Unseen Judge’; but ‘to a mind … carefully formed upon the basis of its natural conscience, the world, both of nature and of man, does but give back a reflection of those truths about the One Living God, which have been familiar to it from childhood’.⁷⁶

The ‘theology of a religious imagination’ is animated by the conscience.

Conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion. When men begin all their works with the thought of God, acting for His sake, and to fulfil His will, when they ask His blessing on themselves and their life, pray to Him for the objects they desire, and see Him in the event, whether it be according to their prayers or not, they will find everything that happens tend to confirm them in the truths about Him which live in their imagination, varied and unearthly as those truths may be. Then they are brought into His presence as that of a Living Person, and are able to hold converse with Him, and that with a directness and simplicity, with a confidence and intimacy, mutatis mutandis, which we use towards an earthly superior; so that it is doubtful whether we realize the company of our fellow-men with greater keenness than these favoured mind s are able to contemplate and adore the Unseen, Incomprehensible Creator.⁷⁷

Those who have ‘favoured minds’ of this kind, ‘see Him in the event’, interpreting ‘everything that happens’ in relation to the ‘truths about Him which live in their imagination’, and they thereby ‘confirm’ those truths. A ‘religious imagination’ forms a ‘theology’ in which it ‘interprets what it sees around it by [its] previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials’.⁷⁸ A ‘religious imagination’ of this kind ‘is able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to prove – that good is the rule, and evil the exception’, and it is ‘able to assume that, uniform as are the laws of nature, they are consistent with a particular Providence’.⁷⁹ The ‘theology’, here, is a matter of interpreting to ‘unpromising materials’ of worldly experience, so as to recognize that the uniformity and ‘law’ apparent in the ‘course of things’ is not inconsistent with the ‘present agency of the Creator’, and that the ‘particular issues’ that arise from that ‘agency’ are not inconsistent with the goodness of God.

Newman maintains that the ‘image’ of God, present in the conscience, can inform the insight that the ‘Attributes’ of God, as He is in Himself, ‘imply one another’, ‘the denial of one [being] the denial of the rest’. To show that the attributes of God – infinity, goodness, wisdom, and so on – ‘imply one another’ is, it would seem, to trace a series of ‘argumentative links’, showing that one ‘Attribute’ implies another, and that another, and so on, such that there is a ‘logical necessity’ connecting them, an ‘inevitable correlation’ – it is to present a ‘demonstration’ to the effect that ‘“God is wise, if He is eternal; He is good, if He is wise; He is just, if He is good”’, and so on. Newman maintains, though, that ‘such a method, used by a Theist in controversy against men who are unprepared personally for the question, will but issue in his retreat along a series of major propositions, farther and farther back’.⁸⁰

To feel the true force of an argument like this, we must not confine ourselves to abstractions, and merely compare notion with notion, but we must contemplate the God of our conscience as a Living Being, as one Object and Reality, under the aspect of this or that attribute. We must patiently rest in the thought of the Eternal, Omnipresent, and All-knowing, rather than of Eternity, Omnipresence, and Omniscience; and we must not hurry on and force a series of deductions, which, if they are to be realized, must distil like dew into our minds, and form themselves spontaneously there, by a calm contemplation and gradual understanding of their premisses. Ordinarily speaking, such deductions do not flow forth, except according as the Image, presented to us through conscience, on which they depend, is cherished within us with the sentiments which, supposing it be, as we know it is the truth, it necessarily claims of us, and is seen reflected, by the habit of our intellect, in the appointments and the events of the external world. And, in their manifestation to our inward sense, they are analogous to the knowledge which we at length attain of the details of a landscape, after we have selected the right stand-point, and have learned to accommodate the pupil of our eye to the varying focus necessary for seeing them; have accustomed it to the glare of light, have mentally grouped or discriminated lines and shadows and given them their due meaning, and have mastered the perspective of the whole. Or they may be compared to a landscape as drawn by the pencil (unless the illustration seem forced), in which by the skill of the artist, amid the bold outhnes of trees and rocks, when the eye has learned to take in their reverse aspects, the forms or faces of historical personages are discernible, which we catch and lose again, and then recover, and which some who look on with us are never able to catch at all.⁸¹

When Newman suggests that those who are ‘personally unprepared’ for an argument that would show, in a ‘series of deductions’, how the attributes of God ‘imply’ one another, he observes that they do not ‘feel the force’ of that argument. If feeling ‘the force’ of an argument is a matter of ‘being persuaded’ by it, and if those who are ‘personally unprepared’ for the argument that would show the attributes of God to imply one another are ‘unprepared’ because they do not have the requisite ‘images’, then this would suggest that the images are connected to what makes the argument persuasive. That which makes an argument persuasive, though, could be regarded as a matter of ‘rhetoric’ rather than ‘logic’, with ‘rhetoric’ being understood to consist in the presentation of an argument, in an effective manner, rather than in the forming of the ‘substance’ of an argument; ‘rhetoric’, on this account, is concerned with apprehending, and devising, the various forms the presentation of an argument can take, and ‘logic’, with apprehending, and constructing, the ‘substance’ of an argument. Newman seems, however, to associate the ‘contemplation’ of the image – the image of God, present in the conscience – with a kind of ‘understanding’. Discussion of the ‘Attributes’ of God with those who are ‘personally unprepared’, ‘will but issue in [a] retreat along a series of major propositions, farther and farther back’, because they do not understand certain ‘premises’; the ‘series of deductions’ about the ‘Attributes’ of God, ‘to be realized, must distil like dew into our minds, and form themselves spontaneously there, by a calm contemplation and gradual understanding of their premisses’. Newman associates the ‘gradual’ attainment of ‘understanding’ with a contemplation of God ‘as one Object and Reality, under the aspect of this or that attribute’. The ‘deductions’ constituting the argument that the ‘Attributes’ of God are in an inevitable correlation ‘depend’, Newman maintains, on an ‘Image, presented to us through conscience’. What seems to ‘depend’ on this ‘Image’ is the understanding of the ‘premises’ involved in those ‘deductions’, and the forming of the ‘deductions’ themselves (which ‘distil like dew’, and f orm themselves ‘spontaneously’, as the ‘Image’ is contemplated).

Newman suggests that the understanding of the ‘Attributes’ of God is a matter of contemplating ‘aspects’ of a single ‘Image, presented to us through conscience’; he maintains, equally, that ‘our image of Him never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each … . We know one truth about Him, and another truth, – but we cannot image both of them together; we cannot bring them before us by one act of the mind; we drop the one while we turn to take up the other.’ It might be, perhaps, that, while there is a single ‘Image’, it can be apprehended only in ‘partial aspects’; these aspects are ‘independent each of each’; but, if this is so, how does one know that these aspects are all aspects of one thing, a ‘single Image, presented to us through conscience’? If one apprehends an ‘aspect’ of something, one is, presumably, aware that what one apprehends an aspect, and that it is an aspect of something: in being aware that what one apprehends is an aspect of something, one is aware of the thing of which it is an aspect. One might, in the apprehension of the ‘aspect’, be attending only to that aspect; but one is aware that it is an aspect, that it is an aspect of something. What one apprehends of that thing, might be only the ‘aspects’ it presents; and it might be that one cannot apprehend those aspects all at once, together, in one ‘act’; but while each act of apprehension might be ‘independent’ of the others – in the sense that one act is not a condition for another, and none of the acts are implicated with the others – those acts are not ‘independent’ of what they apprehend, the ‘Image’. In being aware that all the aspects one apprehends, are aspects of an ‘Image’, one is aware that they belong to a unity, that of the ‘Image’, even if one cannot apprehend that unity, or apprehend that ‘Image’ as a whole. Newman suggests, then, that the ‘Attributes’ of God are registered as aspects of an ‘Image’, in a manner that is ‘analogous to the knowledge which we at length attain of the details of a landscape, after we have selected the right stand-point … and have mastered the perspective of the whole’, or analogous to the perception of ‘a landscape as drawn by the pencil … in which by the skill of the artist, amid the bold outhnes of trees and rocks, when the eye has learned to take in their reverse aspects, the forms or faces of historical personages are discernible, which we catch and lose again, and then recover, and which some who look on with us are never able to catch at all’.⁸² The different aspects cannot be apprehended simultaneously; but in apprehending them, one is aware that they are aspects of the same image. (In these cases, though, there is a sensible unity – the ‘landscape’ – which can be apprehended as a unity (even if it is not apprehended as such when its ‘details’ or its ‘reverse aspects’ are being apprehended); if the ‘Image’ of God in the conscience is, in certain respects, analogous to this sensible unity, it is, equally, different from it; yet Newman does not reflect on the ways in which the ‘Image’ of God is analogous to, and the ways in which it is not analogous to, such a sensible unity.) With regard to the ‘Attributes’ of God, Newman would suggest that these ‘Attributes’ are apprehended, not through the various arguments, in which the notion of God is developed (as, say, ‘pure act’, whose ‘simplicity’, as pure act, or ipsum esse subsistens is such that all His ‘Attributes’ are contained in something like a single quality) but in the apprehension of aspects of an ‘Image’, in which they are all somehow presented; and the unity of these attributes is registered in the apprehension of them as aspects of a single ‘Image’. This would suggest, more generally, that Newman is inclined to think of meaning, and intelligibility, as inhering in images.

Newman insists that the ‘propositions’ of theology ‘may and must be used, and can easily be used, as the expression of facts, not notions’, and ‘as ascertaining and making clear for us the truths on which the religious imagination has to rest’.⁸³ It is when the ‘religious imagination’ is active, that the doctrines of religion are taken as ‘the expression of facts’. He insists, equally, that ‘in religion the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason’.

Knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections. We feel gratitude and love, we feel indignation and dislike, when we have the informations actually put before us which are to kindle those several emotions. We love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents; we must know concerning God, before we can feel love, fear, hope, or trust towards Him. Devotion must have its objects; those objects, as being supernatural, when not represented to our senses by material symbols, must be set before the mind in propositions. The formula, which embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the worshipper. It seems a truism to say, yet it is all that I have been saying, that in religion the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason. Theology may stand as a substantive science, though it be without the life of religion; but religion cannot maintain its ground at all without theology. Sentiment, whether imaginative or emotional, falls back upon the intellect for its stay, when sense cannot be called into exercise; and it is in this way that devotion falls back upon dogma.⁸⁴

To maintain that ‘the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason’ is not to maintain that they should be under the control of ‘explicit’ reason. If the ‘formula, which embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the worshipper’, this might well be because ‘the worshipper’ already contemplates, as an ‘aspect’ of an ‘Image’ of God, that which the ‘theologian’ articulates in a ‘dogma’. Newman observes that ‘we love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents’, but this knowledge need not take an elaborated ‘notional’ form (involving, say, the articulation of a definition of what a ‘parent’ is). Many years earlier, in The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman had maintained ‘a child feels not the less affectionate reverence towards his parents, because he cannot discriminate in words, nay, or in idea, between them and others’;⁸⁵ in the Grammar of Assent, he insists that, if a child is to love ‘his parents’, as such, he must have some ‘idea’ by which they are discriminated from others; but that idea, presumably, need not take a very elaborated form: it is the idea that animates the virtue of filial piety; it is the perception (belonging, as such, to a rudimentary form of phronesis) by which ‘these’ persons ‘here and now’, are loved and respected as ‘my parents’. In a similar way, the ‘intellect’ that, ‘in religion’, animates and controls the ‘imagination and affections’, might be the intellect that apprehends the ‘numberless partial aspects’ of the ‘Image’ of God, presented in the revelation; It is from this ‘Image’ that a ‘world of thought’ arises,⁸⁶ and it is this ‘Image’ that is ‘the scope and end and the test’ of that ‘world of thought’. The central ‘Image’ of God, in Christianity, is the ‘Image’ of a person, the image of Christ; and in, or through, the encounter with that ‘Image’, there is an encounter with that person.

[Christ] departs [from the world] … but is found, through His preachers, to have imprinted the Image or idea of Himself in the minds of His subjects individually; and that Image, apprehended and worshipped in individual minds, becomes a principle of association, and a real bond of those subjects one with another, who are thus united to the body by being united to that Image; and moreover that Image, which is their moral life, when they have been already converted, is also the original instrument of their conversion. It is the Image of Him who fulfils the one great need of human nature, the Healer of its wounds, the Physician of the soul, this Image it is which both creates faith, and then rewards it.⁸⁷

The form of ‘intellect’ involved in the apprehension of this ‘Image’ is that by which persons are apprehended. It is the form of intellect that is involved in the relationships one forms with others; it is the form of ‘intellect’ involved in the ‘heart’ – that by which one understands and loves others, appreciating who they are. There is, already, implicit in a right response to the ‘Image’ of Christ, a kind of understanding – an understanding that ‘worlds of thought’ cannot express.

Notes

1 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 7.

2 See Introduction to An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. by Ian Ker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).

3 Newman aims to counter the view of John Locke, that there may be ‘degrees of assent’, in Grammar of Assent, 159–88.

4 Grammar of Assent, 34.

5 Ibid., 9.

6 Ibid., 23.

7 ‘While a priest shall climb the Capitoline with a silent maiden.’

8 Grammar of Assent, 10.

9 Ibid., 11–12.

10 Ibid., 82–3.

11 ‘It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland.’

12 Grammar of Assent, 10.

13 Ibid., 25.

14 Ibid., 29–30.

15 Ibid., 29.

16 In an essay on ‘Literature’ published in The Idea of a University, Newman maintains that ‘thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language.’ The ‘man of genius … subjects [language] to his own purposes, and moulds it according to hi s own peculiarities’ so that ‘throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations, which pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth, to all does he give utterance, in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action itself and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow: so that we might as well say that one man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself.’ The ‘thought and feeling’ of the ‘man of genius’ are ‘personal, and so his language is personal’. The Idea of a University (1852; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 276–7. For Newman, the ‘sense of the peculiarities’ of a ‘style’ involves an apprehension of the ‘personality’ that is manifest in that ‘style’.

17 Grammar of Assent, 75–6.

18 Ibid., 34.

19 Ibid., 24.

20 Ibid., 34.

21 Ibid., 78.

22 Ibid., 78–9.

23 Ibid., 79.

24 Ibid., 79–82.

25 Ibid., 27.

26 Ibid., 28.

27 Ibid., 81.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 80.

31 Ibid., 81–2.

32 Ibid., 310.

33 Ibid., 83.

34 Ibid., 83–5.

35 Ibid., 86–7.

36 Ibid., 271.

37 Ibid., 268, 284.

38 Ibid., 411.

39 Ibid., 300.

40 Ibid., 360, 411.

41 Ibid., 353–6.

42 Ibid., 345.

43 Ibid., 353n.

44 The passage of the Ethics from which Newman quotes is translated by David Ross: ‘Let it be assumed that the states by vir the of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e., art, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, intuitive reason; we do not include judgement and opinion because in these we may be mistaken.’

45 Grammar of Assent, 356–7.

46 Ibid., 357–8.

47 Ibid., 358.

48 Ibid., 339.

49 Ibid., 414.

50 Ibid., 342.

51 ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 183.

52 ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 259.

53 Grammar of Assent, 336.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 373.

56 Ibid., 330.

57 Ibid., 332–3.

58 Ibid., 337–8.

59 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 110.

60 Grammar of Assent, 31.

61 Ibid., 31–2.

62 Ibid., 98.

63 Ibid., 130, 131.

64 Ibid., 129.

65 Ibid., 131.

66 ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in Essays, Critical and Historical ii [hereafter ECH ii] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 53.

67 Grammar of Assent, 105.

68 Ibid., 106.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 107.

71 Ibid., 108.

72 Ibid., 109–10.

73 Ibid., 104.

74 Ibid., 115.

75 Ibid., 113–14.

76 Ibid., 115–16.

77 Ibid., 117–18.

78 Ibid., 117.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., 314.

81 Ibid., 314–15.

82 Ibid., 315.

83 Ibid., 120.

84 Ibid., 120–1.

85 Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 143–4.

86 ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 317.

87 Grammar of Assent, 464.

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