BOOKS.
DR. NEWMAN'S GRAMMAR OF ASSENT.*
WE hardly know why Dr. Newman has entitled this subtle and remarkable essay " an essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent." That would suggest to us that it was chiefly concerned with our modes of speech in relation to assent, and their proper interpretation, whereas in point of fact it is chiefly concerned with modes of thought in relation to belief, and their correction or justification, —our modes of speech being used solely as subordinate to, and illustrative of, those modes of thought. The whole essay is con- cerned with the scope and legitimacy of the intellectual operations subsidiary to practical beliefs, and we can hardly regard the title as anything but a superfluously modest deprecation by Dr. Newman of extravagant expectations on behalf of his readers. We may add, too, that the essay is exclusively devoted to the logic of practical beliefs,—that is, of beliefs full of complex elements, where no laws of invariable linear succession, such as those which deter- mine the order of natural phenomena,—the laws, for instance, of gravitation, and all those usually called laws of nature,— are by the nature of the case discoverable. Dr. Newman's book covers therefore very little of the ground of Mr. Mill's great work on "Logic," and can be compared with it advantageously only in relation to the field of that very unsatisfactory and dreary final book of Mr. Mill's, on the " Logic of the Moral Sciences." The whole aim of Dr. Newman is to discuss the justification of judg- ments founded on the totality of man's powers and experience, and not on strict scientific methods. The book is one impossible to summarize within newspaper limits, and of which it is not easy even to select the leading features ; but as it will necessarily be studied only by the few, and there are philosophical points in it of great originality and the highest interest to a much wider class than that of mere metaphysicians, and as the applications to reli- gious belief are of the first importance, we will attempt the latter task, difficult as it is.
The word assent,' then, as distinguished from belief,' appears to have been intentionally chosen by Dr. Newman, for it is one of his objects to show that it is the nature of the mind to assent, often on the slenderest grounds, to what is proposed to it, or to what is in the mental atmosphere in which it is educated ; and that an assent of this merely preliminary kind, though it can in no sense be called a belief, may be as absolute until it is shaken by counter- acting causes as if it had been founded on the profoundest inquiry and the strictest demonstration. Perhaps the most novel and subtle part of the theory of this book is Dr. Newman's defence, against Locke, of the position that assents once arrived at, and whether legitimately or not as far as evidence is concerned, do not bear on the face of them any quantitative reference to, any barome- trical gauge of, the amount of evidence on which they were based. Dr. Newman maintains that so far is it from being true, as Locke asserts, that we ought only to give that precise degree of assent to any proposition which the evidence, in a mathematical and scientific sense, warrants, and anxiously to guard against enter- taining what Locke calls any "surplusage of assurance" beyond, it is a law of mind to " seal up " our conclusions, whatever they be, with an act of living assent which is in its nature absolute, and often far more than the mere evidence, even where that is adequate, would warrant ;—and that wegive such assents both when the evidence is good and when it is bad,—through the necessity of the mind to foreclose questions, to start afresh from a new platform, and to multiply the store of assumptions on which it rests and acts. Thus, we build on the assumption that we shall die out of this world, and have been born into it, with a very considerable " sur- plusage of assurance" beyond what the evidence mathemati- cally warrants. It is true, of course, that in the minds of all cultivated men there are a vast number of opinions which are not assurances ; but these, Dr. Newman main- tains, are more properly to be called not doubtful assents, but assents to the doubtfulness of the events in question. Thus, he thinks it psychologically more correct to say that a physician gives his assent to the probability of his patient's recovery, than that he gives a doubtful assent to the proposition that he will recover. He recognizes in an ' assent' a sort of living act of the mind, summing up, and as it were substituting for, the mental antecedents on which it is based, a definite attitude of assumption, which, whether well founded or not, is a point of departure for the future, until circumstances compel the re-opening of the inquiry,—a new moral • An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. By John Henry Newman, ati London: Burns and Oates. 1870. stratification, as it were, liable, no doubt, to be broken through again by interior mental forces, but, unless so broken through, constituting part of the surface on which we move and build. And by this mental act of assent foreclosing the moral ante- cedents which induce it, the mind naturally and habitually, if we understand Dr. Newman rightly, adds a " surplus- age of assurance" beyond what even the highest moral evi- dence, scientifically speaking, warrants, and this even though the assurance be a wrong assurance. What we are not quite clear of, is Dr. Newman's view as to the amount of intellectual credit, so to speak, which should be attached to this' surplusage of assurance' We understand his view to be that this curious self-assuring power is like all other natural powers, given for a legitimate, and liable to an illegitimate use,—that when used illegitimately, and proved by the event to have been so used, its tendency is to shake all confidence in our moral conclusions, and so inflict a sort of just retribution upon us ; but that, when used legitima- tely and with a due sense of responsibility, it is but a kind of divine seal set upon our certitudes, and intended to deliver our practical life from the pangs of a continual suspense. At least, this is the interpretation we put upon the following passage (pp. 406-7) :—" Since a good Providence watches over us, He blesses such means of argument as it has pleased Him to give us, in the nature of man and of the world, if we use them duly for those ends for which He has given them ; and as in mathematics we are justified by the dictate of nature in withhold- ing our assent from a conclusion of which we have not yet a strict logical demonstration, so by a like dictate we are not justified, in the case of concrete reasoning and especially of religious inquiry, in waiting till such logical demonstration is ours, but, on the con- trary, are bound in conscience to seek truth, and to look for certainty by modes of proof which, when reduced to the shape of formal propositions, fail to satisfy the severe requisitions of science." So much as regards assents accompanied by assurance, i.e., by conscious conviction, whether founded on good or bad grounds ; but we must add that Dr. Newman regards assents not founded on any sort of conscious inquiry at all, but breathed in as it were in the moral atmosphere of prejudice or truth in which we are educated, with somewhat more favour than most philosophical thinkers. At least, he says, in a remarkable passage near the end of the philosophical part of his discussion (p. 371) :—" Of the two, I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt of everything. This, indeed, seems the true way of learning. In that case, we soon discover and discard what is contradictory ; and error having always some portion of truth in it, and the truth having a reality which error ha.% not, we may expect that where there is an honest purpose and fair talents we shall somehow make our way forward, the error falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and occupying it." This sentence, taken in connection with the view we have explained as to the 'surplusage of assurance' which crowns the practical use of all fairly estimated moral probabili- ties, may be regarded as the key to Dr. Newman's view of the true practical logic of life. He holds that, just as the intel- lectual provision for crystallizing evidence into moral certainties that furnish us with a new intellectual plane on which to act, is a testimony to the adaptation of human nature in general for reaching faith through probabilities, so the apparatus of special assents with which each man starts in life, and the special intellectual provisions to be found in every one's nature for an individual manipulation of them, are testimonies to the necessarily individual nature of the moral logic by which each man's way, if faithfully pursued, will be separately brought to converge to the common goal of truth. The general 'surplusage of assurance' which follows the /nipper use of moral probabilities, will be gained by one man from the manipulation of the moral probabilities with which he is best fitted to deal, by another from the manipulation of a quite differ- ent class of moral probabilities for the proper appreciation of which there are special provisions in his own nature,—but, by all who use them properly, with a general convergence to the same end. In all sincere and rightly disposed minds a process goes on which results in the expulsion of error by the gradual deepening, vivification, and development of those assents which are most deeply rooted in human nature, and especially in the particular haracter of each individual seeker,—who can, of course, only start from his own ground, and use only his own special calculustfor the expulsion of error and the apprehension of truth.
Dr. Newman begins his proof of the necessarily subjective and personal character of each man's own logical calculus, by pointing out that though the force of all purely abstract reasoning is
the same for every mind alike, directly you get to the reasoning of practical life there is the widest difference between the meaning which different men attach even to the same terms. No one can deny the cogency of the reasoning, Every z is y; every y is z, therefore every x is z.' But then no one denies it, because x and y and z are abstract quantities which can be relied on for being really all of the same order, and for not transcending the class in which you classify them. But directly you apply this to practical life, as in the case " All men die ; Elijah was a man ; therefore Elijah died ;" the reasoning fails for all at least who need con- vincing,—because no proposition can be known to be true of all men, except it is known to be true of every man, and every fresh man is a fresh instance in which, if there is any real gain of intellec- tual knowledge in drawing the conclusion, there is also a fresh doubt. In this case those who doubt it will assert that Elijah was a man, perhaps, in everything but this, but not in this. In fact, each living individual of a class is in Dr. Newman's language" more than a uni- versal, he falls under other universals ; universals are ever at war with each other ; what is called a universal is only a general ; what is only general does not lead to a necessary conclusion." Hence every proposition may mean practically one thing to one man, and another thing to another man, in proportion to the range of personal experience which each throws into it. The more abstract or " notional " a proposition is, the more nearly does it mean the same thing for all men capable of understanding it. The closer it approaches to the description of actual life and fact, the more widely will different men's apprehension of it differ. Thus the old Latin saying, it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country,' is a mere notional or abstract proposition in a schoolboy's month ; but in that of such men as Wallace or Tell might be one of the most real and expressive of asser- tions, covering an immensity of living sacrifice and aspiration. In all abstract or notional propositions, individual experi- ence is, says Dr. Newman, " starved " down into a mere aspect of life suggesting comparisons between very different living things, and nothing more. Hence, abstract truths, " notional " apprehensions, widen the mind which has a great command of them, teaching it to take in a great many similar aspects of very different realities, and suggesting often a deceptive amount of similarity. Concrete truths, " real " apprehensions, narrow the mind, but keep it nearer to the ground of fact. " To apprehend notionally," says Dr. Newman, "is to have breadth of mind but to be shallow ; to apprehend really, is to be deep but to be narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement." In other words, men who reason about life and fact in abstract terms, seldom perhaps appreh end it in its fulness ; while those who enter into it so individually as to be suspicious of reasoning about it in abstract terms at all, will be apt to resist stoutly, as irrelevant, all attempts to apply to it the lessons taught by other similar life and other similar facts. From all which, our author infers that the logic of practical life must be quite different from the logic of abstract reasoning, and even the practical logic of one man quite different from the practical logic of another ; since one man's " real " and living apprehensions are another's merely abstract and " notional " apprehensions ;—and more than this, the real and living appre- hensions which are purely literary pictures to one mind, and not practical forces at all, may be to another mind, which is full of desire 1kt9r the life they seem to promise, the most powerful of attrac- tions. Now of course the practical significance of any proposi- tion presented for our assent depends as much on the interior wants which it promises to satisfy, as on its truth itself. It is th2Ittliitssents which are pregnant with real experience of all sorts, those which are vivid not merely because they bring living images with them, but because they concentrate a great force of thought and feeling and hope and fear upon them, which form great characters. "Notional " assents can be made almost at will, and do not, as such, exercise any powerful influence on character. For all these reasons, it will be obvious why Dr. Newman puts aside as absolutely inapplicable to the deepest moral exigencies of the practical reason in the search for truth every species of formal logic, which can only be used when you are dealing with notions,—like numbers or geometrical magnitudes,—sufficiently abstract to mean the same things to all minds, and not to change and grow out of one's knowledge, as it were, with the growth of experience. Dr. Newman assumes, then, that that logic, by the aid of which men seek the moral truth whereby they are to steer their lives, must not be of the abstract type, not of the syllogistic,— nor, he might have added, of the physical or experimental,— order, and must be elastic enough to admit of indefinite variations
with the various special experience and practical faculties of each truth-seeker. Every man begins life with a vast stock of assents, the grounds of which he has to investigate for himself, of which the effect will be that he must reject many, modify many, and develop many.
If we are to keep our notice within even somewhat immoderate
imits, we must here pass over a great deal of very subtle and instructive intermediate disquisition, and go straight to the logical type which Dr. Newman presents to us as that of the mode of proof by which on practical subjects we are to arrive at certainty. That type Dr. Newman takes to be the convergence of a number of different orders and classes of probabilities all upon the same solu- tion,—a number of probabilities which you can almost increase at pleasure, but which all point to the same conclusion. He gives us one example from Sir Isaac Newton's Principia ; another from the evidence of the Laws of motion, which springs from their explain- ing, and their alone explaining, a number of totally different physical phenomena ; and a third from the kind of evidence which was considered to bring home the guilt of the great railway murder committed some years ago to the German who was found guilty of it,—namely, that the story which in all its parts incriminated him, was "not told right out and by one witness, but was taken up and handed on from witness to witness," and thus gradually unfolded and tended to the same explanation, " just as we see that two straight lines are meeting, and are certain they will meet at a given distance, though we do not actually see the junction." This, then, is the kind of proof which Dr. New- man regards as the one fit to be actually used for all moral pur- poses in life. And he points out that it is strictly analogous to all the natural modes of proof, which we are accustomed to attri- bute to sagacity and tact. " A peasant who is weather-wise may be simply unable to assign intelligible reasons why he thinks itwill be fine to-morrow, and if he attempts to do so, he may give reasons wide of the mark,"—but in fact he is unconsciously combining the results of a number of impressions to all of which his organism has become sensitive, and all of which point to the same result. So again, the physician who is great at divining secret maladies by diagnosis, really discovers the centre, as it were, to which all the different symptoms converge. The same sort of gift belongs to those who are skilful in the divination of character. They cannot analyze, but a number of separately imperceptible indications all lead them to the same conclusion. All these are cases in which nature does for men, half unconsciously, what in moral reasoning men must do for themselves consciously. And this is a mode of reasoning which satisfies Dr. Newman's second condition, that it should not only be not of the abstract type of formal logic, but should be capable of very large variations with the varying nature and faculty of each individual person. It is certain that a power of successful practical reasoning belongs to one man with relation to one subject-matter, and to another man with relation to another subject-matter. Thus a great lawyer has a wonderful power of arranging legal evidence so as to point to one single conclusion, but will be utterly unable to reason with any security on a different field of action, such as that which made Napoleon so great a strategist, or that which enabled Columbus to infer the existence of a western world. This sort of power of finding the centre of a number of trains of con- vergent moral probability is specially personal. The moral proba- bilities one man's experience has made impressive to him will be far less impressive to another, while to that other, others will take their place. Thus this type of reasoning enables each man to move freely on those lines of conviction which are most effective to his own mind, works up his own experience, and, especially on moral and religious topics, gives him the full benefit of his actual experi- ence of moral and religious wants and hopes. In fact, it gives every man a separate moral calculus for reaching truth adapted to his peculiar character and powers, but ensures to the man of the most rich and real moral and religious life the best chance,—so far at least as that goes,—for reaching moral and religious truth; and to the man of the most rich and real artistic feeling, the best chance, so far as that goes, for reaching artistic truth and so forth. It is in this view of moral logic, then, that Dr. Newman rests. He regards it as a faculty, partly of conscious, partly of uncon- scious reasoning, which estimates either by full intellectual appreciation, or by half-instinctive appreciation, the centre of a number of convergent probabilities, varying in kind with the range of each man's personal life and experience, but which may be in- creased in number almost at pleasure. And he answers the objection, if we understand him correctly, that, after all, this can never lead to certitude, but only to the belief that one particular conclusion is highly probable, by saying that it is providentially of the very constitution of the mind to add a certain "surplusage of assurance"
to every such assent to a high moral probability,—a surplusage which seals it with the seal of certainty, and that especially on moral and religious topics, this " surplusage of assurance " becomes by the blessing of God the certainty of faith.
Of course, one of the most interesting parts of the book, is Dr. Newman's personal illustration of this theory in the field of religious and Christian evidence, by the use of his own individual calculus of moral logic. But we have devoted so disproportionate a space already to the exposition of the general theory, that with this we must deal very shortly. He justifies the belief in God in the same • way as he justifies the belief in an external world. The latter, he says, is the point to which a vast number of instinctive sense- perceptions converge ; we infer it, and then extend our belief in it infinitely beyond the range of those actual perceptions of sense on the strength of which we first inferred it, i.e., we believe not merely in external points and surfaces, but in an external world. In precisely the same way, from the convergence of all the magis- terial elements of the sense of . right and wrong, that is, from the sense of hope and fear, and compunction, the sense of promises and of threats, attending its dictates,—so different from the mere sense of beauty and ugliness which carries no imperative character with it,—we infer a supreme Will who rules and judges us, and then extend His away and presence infinitely beyond the special range of the impressions which first suggested Him. The sense of fear which inspires the first belief in a spiritual Judge, becomes the sense of sin in all cases of actual wrong-doing, and is universally accompanied by conceptions of sacrifice and atonement which aim at the restoration of the broken tie between mankind and God. To the same effect,'i.e., of the existence of a Judge more or less alienated from us, speaks the evidence of universal history, which shows more or less a chaos where we should have looked for divine order, and sins and sufferings innumerable where we should have expected the reflection of God's own love and holiness. Innumerable phenomena of human nature, then, all converge to- wards the existence of a moral Judge with whom our harmony is broken ; and the constant yearning for its restoration, and the constant expectation in all nations that some revelation would come or had come from God by the help of which that restoration could be effected, are convergent testimonies of the same kind written on the human heart. There has been, too, in almost all nations some dim belief that this reunion would be effected by the voluntary suffering of the innocent and holy for the guilty, and hence every religion has had its devotees brought nearer to God by voluntary sacrifices, through whom it is supposed that others can gain a nearer approach to God.
As the development of, and answer to, these faiths, hopes, and expectations, at least to the minds of all who share them, for Dr. Newman insists strongly on his view that Christianity comes home only to those who are prepared for it by sharing the moral impres- sions and expectations to which it appeals,—our author treats the history of the Christian revelation, which he regards as demonstra- tively divine in this sense, that its divine origin is the only solution of all the historic facts of the case, which is also the solution of the universal instincts, and yearnings, and faiths comprehended under the previous head of natural religion. He points then to the fact that in the history of the Jews we have the history of almost the only Oriental nation " known in history as a people of progress," and that their line is " progress in religion." Theism is their life, and a progressive Theism. The Jewish people was " founded in Theism, and set up in Theism, kept together by Theism, maintain- ing Theism for 2,000 years, till the dissolution of their body politic." In Theism their philosophy, politics, poetry, were all rooted, and prophet after prophet gave their successive revelations " with a sustained reference to a time when, according to the secret counsels of their divine Object and Author, it is to receive com- pletion and perfection." That time was defined by a prophecy among the oldest in the Jewish literature as the time when the patriarchal staff should be about to " depart from Judah." When that time came, and before any fulfilment of the hope so con- stantly expressed came, the expectation of the Jews themselves in the fulfilment of the prophecy grew high, as we know from independent sources. And then it was that the fulfilment of the hope followed, and yet in a sense so different from that in which it was generally interpreted, that though it founded a faith and Church which have endured ever since, it overruled the desires of the very people who had cherished it. Dr. Newman insists very much,—with the intention probably of confuting the mythical thetry of Strauss,—on the calm independence which Christ showed of the old prophecies, on His sense of superiority to them, His conscious power of interpreting them in His own way, His indiffer- ence to the special titles by which the prophets had announced Him And when He came, He almost immediately left the world, and left it without leaving behind Him any physical power to carry on his work, merely announcing to His followers, what seemed contrary to the whole genius of previous prophecy so far as it was then understood, that they were to conquer by suffering and defeat. And with such strange ease did the disciples catch this singular note of warning, that St. Paul, who had never lived with Christ, made the "foolishness of preaching," and the natural weakness of the apostle, the key-note of all his teaching. More- over, the converts when they came thick and fast, long after Christ's departure, were all of the poorer and weaker class, but all united in one personal devotion to Him, through the strength of which they exulted in martyrdoms of the most terrible kind for centuries, regarding immortality not as valuable for its own sake, but only as representing a conscious and eternal union with Him.
Such is the sort of consilience of probabilities, all pointing,— at least to one who believes in a supernatural power,—to the supernatural origin of Christianity, on which Dr. Newman insists as illustrating his theory of that moral logic by which we judge of the most important facts and truths of life. His point is that a priori instincts as to a divine Judge, a priori expectations as to a spotless Redeemer who should redeem by self-sacrifice, a priori hopes of immortality, all converge to the same central faith with an almost indefinite number of most unimpeachable and otherwise inexplicable historical facts which have changed the whole history of the world. Here, says Dr. Newman, is a solution which solves, for me at least, all these converging lines of fact and expectation ;- and is not that "surplusage of assurance" which crowns such a belief with certitude, legitimate? Indeed, may it not be taken as a finish- ing divine touch given to the best use of human reason ? So at least we understand the drift of this remarkable book. It contains very little indeed that is distinctively Roman Catholic, and that only incidentally. Almost any Protestant might read, it without finding more than two or three pages in all to which on any Protestant grounds he could object. As we agree, on the whole, profoundly with the general drift of this subtle essay, and have more than exhausted our readers' patience in mere exposition, we prefer to leave it,—at least for the present uncriticized. The work of a really great man may fairly be allowed, for some time at least, to speak for itself, before smaller men begin to praise or censure.
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