In illustration of this position he returns to the instance already given-the grounds any of us have for believing that England is an island. He writes as follows:

We are all absolutely certain, beyond the possibility of doubt, that Great Britain is an island. We give to that proposition our deliberate and unconditional adhesion. There is no security on which we should be better content to stake our interests, our property, our welfare, than on the fact that we are living in an island. We have no fear of any geographical discovery which may reverse our belief. We should be amused or angry at the assertion, as a bad jest, did anyone say that we were at this time joined to the mainland in Norway or in France, though a canal was cut across the isthmus. We are as little exposed to the misgiving, 'Perhaps we are not on an island after all,' as to the question, 'Is it quite certain that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle?' It is a simple and primary truth with us, if any truth is such; to believe it is as legitimate an exercise of assent, as there are legitimate exercises of doubt or of opinion. This is the position of our minds towards our insularity; yet are the arguments producible for it (to use the common expression) in black and white commensurate with this overpowering certitude about it?

Our reasons for believing that we are circumnavigable are such as these: first, we have been so taught in our childhood, and it is so in all the maps; next, we have never heard it contradicted or questioned; on the contrary, everyone whom we have heard speak on the subject of Great Britain, every book we have read, invariably took it for granted; our whole national history, the routine transactions and current events of the country, our social and commercial system, our political relations with foreigners, imply it in one way or another. Numberless facts, or what we consider facts, rest on the truth of it; no received fact rests on its being otherwise. If there is anywhere a junction between us and the continent, where is it? and how do we know it? Is it in the north or in the south? There is a manifest reductio ad absurdum attached to the notion that we can be deceived on such a point as this.

However, negative arguments and circumstantial evidence are not all, in such a matter, which we have a right to require. They are not the highest kind of proof possible. Those who have circumnavigated the island have a right to be certain: have we ever ourselves even fallen in with anyone who has? And as to the common belief, what is the proof that we are not all of us believing it on the credit of each other? And then, when it is said that everyone believes it, and everything implies it, how much comes home to me personally of this 'everyone' and 'everything'? The question is, Why do I believe it myself? A living statesman is said to have fancied Demerara an island; his belief was an impression; have we personally more than an impression, if we view the matter argumentatively, a lifelong impression about Great Britain, like the belief, so long and so widely entertained, that the earth was immovable and the sun careered round it? I am not at all insinuating that we are not rational in our certitude; I only mean that we cannot analyse a proof satisfactorily, the result of which good sense actually guarantees to us.

12

Newman's inference from all this is that the fact that a man finds he cannot bring out to his satisfaction proofs of revelation equal to the strength of his conviction does not in itself prove that he

13 Grammar of Assent, p. 294.

ought to abate the strength of his belief. His grounds may be adequate. He may be conscious of their adequacy. Yet their details may be partly forgotten, or he may be unequal to their full analysis. What conceivable relationship has this view to any attempt to justify clinging' to 'unverified assumptions after their falsity has been exposed'?

As far as I can see the Edinburgh reviewer has not understood any one of the three points for which Newman is contending in his criticism of Locke.

But he does in part understand the doctrine of the illative sense' which is implied in this last criticism of Newman's on Locke, and calls it-not very happily-' personalism.'

The reviewer apprehends Newman's contention that the whole of a man reasons-that the process includes the use he makes of feeling and imagination, as well as of logic. It is the whole person that reasons, and decides on the outcome of his reasons, and therefore the reviewer calls the theory 'personalism.' He does not, however, take notice of an equally important part of Newman's theory, viz. that the living mind to which he appeals as final arbiter weighs all the relevant evidence, explicit as well as implicit; that it takes into consideration all its own past personal experiences, sometimes incommunicable to others, without, however, failing to weigh also the relevant external evidences which are accessible to all men alike. Newman's doctrine is, therefore, much more comprehensive than what the reviewer credits him with in his description of personalism.' Moreover, there is no justification whatever for his statement that Newman sometimes identifies 'personalism' with 'conscience' (p. 278). He treats conscience as supplying certain first principles indispensable to religious inquiry, and it thus takes an important part in the informal reasoning and assent which the reviewer calls' personalism'; but an occasional factor in the process is not the process itself.

How inadequately the reviewer has grasped Newman's account of the 'illative sense' may be seen from the following really amazing sentence which purports to be a reductio ad absurdum of Newman's view:

What kind of knowledge is it which is acquired, not by the exercise of the discursive intellect or by the evidence of our senses, but by the affirmations of our basal personality? (p. 282.)

The reviewer does not appear to see that Newman's theory rests, not on any disposition to dispense with the exercise of the discursive intellect, or with the evidence of our senses in dealing with the field of knowledge as a whole, but on his observation of the fact that more evidence is very often present

to the individual mind than the discursive intellect explicitly recognises. The explicit operations of the intellect are not to be ignored, but to be supplemented. When an experienced general draws conclusions from what his senses and his discursive intellect bring home to him as to the operations of the enemy, he takes account also, in estimating the significance of the facts and deciding what counter-move will be wisest, of the subconscious knowledge which his own long military experience has given him, and which materially aids in bringing him to a right conclusion. To the faculty which takes in, as by an instinct, all the relevant considerations of which the mind is conscious and subconscious, and draws its own conclusions from them, Newman gives the name of 'illative sense.' So little does the reviewer understand this that he proceeds naively to object that 'the legitimate province of personalism" lies in the region of general ideas, or rather in the Weltanschauung as a whole,' and not in matters to be decided by evidence. That is to say, he has simply missed the most characteristic part of Newman's theory-namely, that the mind in reasoning in concrete matters sums up instinctively the whole of the relevant evidence of which its multiform experience has made it aware. I can imagine a person possibly deriving the reviewer's bald and inadequate impression from glancing at an isolated page of the Grammar of Assent, because the subject is naturally treated bit by bit, and there are pages which deal with the mind's decision and not with its action in summing-up the evidence. But how anyone can read the argument through and preserve such an impression passes my understanding.

6.66

The reviewer remarks that personalism" is beyond question a self-sufficient, independent, individualistic doctrine.' I should go further. If personalism were regarded by anyone, as the reviewer supposes it to be regarded by Newman, as a method of reasoning independent of the careful scrutiny of really relevant evidence, as a magical power which can decide without weighing proofs pro and con I whether Christ was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth or whether Nestorius was a heretic (p. 282), I should call it the theory of a fool. Or again, if the doctrine of personalism' ignored (as he supposes) the co-operation of one mind with another in the search for truth, it would be equally absurd. But to make either supposition in the case of Newman is simply to ignore a side of his teaching quite as prominent as that which the reviewer notices. His position is, as I have already pointed out, that knowledge and accuracy in the field of facts is attained to entirely by the co-operation of many minds.

No doubt he does hold that there are some conclusions which VOL. LXXII-No. 425

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a given man may reach with certainty without examining evidence which may be brought against them-even though that evidence may appear to others very strong. This arises from the nature of the cases in point. The man in question has evidence which the others have not: and this evidence is by itself decisive. He gives the instance of evidence for a serious. charge brought against a friend intimately known to us. The circumstantial evidence against our friend may appear very cogent to the world at large to which he is unknown, yet to us who know him intimately the certainty may remain (even before examining the evidence) that the charge is false, as being simply incompatible with his character. A charge of gross fraud against Mr. Pickwick, or of a theft and brutal murder against William Dobbin, would rightly be dismissed with confidence by their friends, however suspicious the circumstances might appear to the world at large. Circumstantial evidence of the charge almost conclusive to the world that does not know them personally would have no weight against our personal knowledge.

Again, such personal knowledge may be common to many. Most educated people know enough to make them certain that India really exists and may decline to weigh evidence brought against its existence by a crank, before they have succeeded in marshalling sufficient proofs to justify their certainty, without incurring the charge of being indifferent to the value of the discursive reason or of dispensing with evidence.

How far the sphere of such personal knowledge extends, and how far the sphere of knowledge extends in which the co-operation of minds and the scrutiny of all alleged evidence is essential, is a further question on which it would be impossible to give in a few lines the outcome of Newman's treatment, which runs to hundreds of pages. The general conclusions on matters of religion which Newman holds to be justifiable by his principles are given in the last chapter of the Grammar of Assent. My main object here is to point out that the reviewer has entirely ignored elements in Newman's teaching quite as prominent and important as those which he in part recognises, and has turned Newman's very careful, though tentative, process of psychological investigation into an ingenious defence of credulity based on theoretic scepticism. If Newman had held the crude theories expounded in the Edinburgh Review he certainly would not have been a thinker of exceptionally acute intelligence, but rather the reverse. His analysis of reasoning on religion and his theory of assent speak a language which his critic has simply not understood, though he is quite unsuspicious of the fact. The word 'reason' is more than once used by him and by his critic in entirely different senses. But the reviewer is too hot and angry to notice this, and plods on. In reading his remarks, so con

temptuous and so ludicrous in their failure to enter into the mind of the man he abuses, the present writer was forcibly reminded of the hearty contempt of the British soldier, in the days of the wars with Boney,' for the Frenchman and all his ways. Those damned Frenchies, not content with jabbering in an absurd lingo, call things by their wrong names. Everyone knows that a "shoe " is a "shoe," but these French frogs will call a cabbage a "shoe " !'

I ought, however, to notice the one point on which it may fairly be argued that Newman's view of reason was for a long time open to the charge of scepticism-namely, his language on first principles. He was so impressed by the intellectual weakness of cutting the Gordian knot of philosophical difficulty by claiming a number of favourite principles as 'self-evident,' that for a long time he was apt to speak of all first principles as ' assumptions.' To the end he deprecated being over-ready to call truths' self-evident.' As he humorously put it, people called them self-evident because they were evident in no other way.' When, however, Professor Fairbairn pressed home against him in his extreme old age the charge of a sceptical view of the human reason he repaired this omission. It would have been to contradict his lifelong use of language to employ the term 'reason,' as Hamilton does, for the locus principiorum, or faculty of first principles. But he expressly admitted in his reply to Dr. Fairbairn that the mind has such a faculty. That faculty extends, he points out, beyond the region of religious first principles, with which he had already dealt in his treatment of the Conscience and Moral Sense. It includes intuitions, and this is what Aristotle calls vous.13

The reviewer, in the only passage in which he gives an idea of part of Newman's theory which he is good enough to regard as not in itself unreasonable,' deprecates the monstrous superstitions' it is used by him to justify. He is evidently under the same impression as Dr. Abbott, that the Grammar of Assent is concerned with establishing principles which may enable Newman to believe miracles which the reviewer would consider preposterous. And possibly this accounts for the extreme suspiciousness with which he regards Newman's words. He touches them gingerly and will not stay too near them lest he may be infected.

I cannot imagine anyone who reads the Grammar of Assent carefully entertaining such an idea of its object. The book is a sequel to the University Sermons, and Newman expressly tells us in the Apologia that those sermons were the beginning of 'an inquiry into the ultimate basis of religious faith prior to the

13 Life of Newman, ii. p. 508, foot-note.