some critics have done, to confine our attention to these parts of the book, and exalt it so far as an opportune contribution to the religious thought of the age. But after all, these are but episodes or applications in the general scheme of its argument. They do not touch the peculiar substance of the author's thinking, or give its essential quality. They fail, moreover, to bring out the connexion of the volume with his previous intellectual and religious history, and so to give the key to its real meaning.

This meaning extends far beyond any defence of our common Christianity. Christianity to Dr. Newman is not only identical with Catholicism in fact, but he evidently does not believe that it can rest on any principles equally held by Protestant and Catholic. He despairs, in short, of a rational defence of it quite as much now as he did at the close of the History of his Religious Opinions. Out of that despair this volume has grown. Its whole object is to construct a scheme of argument which, coming short of reason and working independently of it, yet forms in the writer's estimation an adequate basis of religious Certitude. Feeling in himself how little he has been indebted in the growth of his religious faith to any rational considerations-to any processes of pure inquiry-he has set himself the task of explaining and vindicating his own peculiar position for the benefit not of religious inquirers, but of believers like himself. This may be said to be his avowed purpose. He does not address men in search of truth, or try to explain how it may be found; but taking Certitude as a fact as a part of our nature-his business is to justify it as such. To the inquirer he has little or nothing to say; but he invites the dogmatist to contemplate the manner in which his own mind has attained to certainty. In such matters, he says, egotism is true modesty.' Each man can only speak for himself. And so his aim has been out of his own mental experience to construct what may be called a logic of faith. Sceptical of a Philosophy of Inquiry, he has boldly adventured a Philosophy of Credulity. This and no other is the real purport of the volume.

Dr. Newman's main doctrine-the doctrine on which all the characteristic thought of his volume turns-is, that Assent is something distinct from and above Reason. It is an act of the mind complete in itself, and containing its own justification; in other words, possessing a validity in and for itself, and independently of the reasons, probabilities, or grounds of infer

*P. 379.

ence on which it rests. In his own language, Assent is ⚫ unconditional' the absolute acceptance of a proposition without any condition.' By whatever steps or stages the mind may be led to it, the act itself admits of no degrees. Its whole peculiarity consists in its absoluteness or exclusion of all qualification.

This is the lever or central principle of thought with which Dr. Newman works throughout his volume. It is announced at the outset; it is expanded in the close into a new power or faculty, which he calls the Illative Sense; it receives full exposition in the sixth and seventh chapters in the middle of the volume. He himself implies rather than expressly lays down a twofold division of his work into the subjects of Assent in connexion with the Apprehension of Propositions, and Assent in connexion with Inference; but this doctrine or definition of Assent. is really the pervasive cement of the whole book; and we will best accomplish our critical task, as it appears to us, by first examining this doctrine by itself in the light of his own exposition. It is necessary to have a clear conception of his main principle before looking at the applications which he makes of it.

Locke, in his chapter on Probability-the fifteenth of the fourth book of his famous essay, and in the following chapters -argues with his usual common sense that Assent is merely the issue of probable reasoning varying with the several 'degrees and grounds of probability.' Whatever grounds of probability there may be,' he says, they yet operate no further on the mind which searches after truth and endeavours to judge right, than they appear at least in the first 'judgment or search that the mind makes.' And in a remarkable passage quoted by Dr. Newman, he adds:

'He that would seriously set upon the search of truth ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not will not take much pains to get it, nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody, in the commonwealth of learning, who does not profess himself a lover of truth,-and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss, to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, we may truly say, there are very few lovers of truth, for truth-sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know, whether he be so, in earnest, is worth inquiry; and I think there is this one unerring mark of it, viz., the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not truth in the love of it, loves not truth for truth-sake, but for some other by-end. For the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in the

proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain all that surplusage of assurance is owing to some other affection, and not to the love of truth; it being as impossible that the love of truth should carry any assent above the evidence there is to one that it is true, as that the love of truth should be assent to any proposition for the sake of that evidence which it has not that it is true; which is in effect to love it as a truth, because it is possible or probable that it may not be true.' *

It was a sure instinct which guided Dr. Newman to this passage; for it sets forth plainly the difference betwixt his views and those not only of Locke, but we may say of every school of rational opinion. It has been supposed the special boast of philosophy to guard and purify the avenues of human belief to correct,' as a distinguished thinker of our time has said, 'the inadvertences of ordinary thinking.' The idea which has more or less inspired every attempt to organise human thought has been that man is by nature a credulous and unreasoning being, and that his natural beliefs require to be rectified and controlled-illumined and tested--by reason. But Dr. Newman's whole conception of human nature is different. He takes, or professes to take, the human mind as he finds it, with all its bundle of natural beliefs clinging to it. He refuses to analyse or criticise them--in his own language, to theorise. It is enough for him that they are there. We must take the constitution of the human mind as we find it,' he says, 'and not as we may judge it ought to be.' (P. 209.) 'Our hoping is a proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a 'weakness or an absurdity to be certain.' (P. 337.)

6

Assent is with him accordingly a distinct and substantive act of the mind, which carries its own validity quite apart from the reasons which have led to it. It is this, or it is nothing. To make it dependent upon what has gone before, or the degrees of evidence before the mind, is to confound it with Inference; and if it is nothing more than this, the sooner we get rid of the word in philosophy the better.' Assent and Inference are, or may be, each of them the acceptance of a proposition; but the special characteristic of Inference is that it is conditional, and the special characteristic of Assent is that it is unconditional. Inference is always Inference; even if de'monstrative, it is still conditional; it establishes an incontrovertible conclusion on the condition of incontrovertible premisses. To the conclusion thus drawn, assent gives its

* B. iv. c. xix. On Enthusiasm.'

absolute recognition. In the case of all demonstrations, assent, when given, is unconditionally given. In one class of subjects then Assent certainly is always conditional; but if the word stands for an undoubting and unhesitating act of the mind once, why does it not denote the same always?' Why, indeed, but for the obvious reason that the antecedents being different the conclusion or assent is different. Surely an unconditional assent to incontrovertible premisses does not, on the very face of the statement, warrant an unconditional assent to premisses or antecedents merely probable.

But to proceed with Dr. Newman's exposition. He argues that when we do not assent unconditionally, we do not, properly speaking, assent at all. We may accept the conclusion as a conclusion dependent upon premisses, but we do not follow up our Inference with an Assent to it.' Every day, in reading the newspapers, in looking through the debates in Parliament, leading articles, letters of correspondents, we indulge this mental indefiniteness. At the utmost we say that we are inclined to believe this position or that, that we are 'not sure it is not true, that much may be said for it, that we have been much struck by it; but we never say that we give it a degree of Assent. We might as well talk of degrees of truth as of degrees of Assent. In one sense, indeed, we may be allowed to call such acts or states of mind Assents. They are opinions, and, as being such, they are assents to the plausibility, probability, doubtfulness, or untrustworthiness, of a 'proposition; that is, not variations of assent to an inference, but assents to a variation in inferences. When I assent to a 'doubtfulness, or to a probability, my assent, as such, is as 'complete as if I assented to a truth; it is not a certain degree of assent. And, in like manner, I may be certain of an uncertainty; that does not destroy the specific notion convened in the word "certain." It is admitted that we familiarly use such phrases as a half-assent, but a half-assent is not a kind of assent any more than a half-truth is a kind of truth. the object is indivisible, so is the act. A half-truth is a pro'position which in one aspect is a truth and in another is not. To give a half-assent is to feel drawn towards Assent, or to 'assent one moment and not the next, or to be in the way to 'assent to it. It means that the proposition in question de'serves a hearing, that it is probable or attractive.' Therefore he maintains that, while there are many cases in which we do not assent at all, there are none in which assent is evidently conditional. If human nature is to be its own witness, there is no medium between assenting and not assenting.

As

'Locke's theory of the duty of assenting more or less according to the degrees of evidence, is invalidated by the testimony ' of high and low, young and old, ancient and modern.'

This absoluteness of Assent, so far from being irrational in Dr. Newman's estimation, is an essential property of man's nature. He gives various illustrations of its action; such as our primary beliefs that we ourselves exist; that we think; that we know what is right and wrong, or beautiful and hideous; that there is an external world; that we have parents; and so on. 'None of us can think or act without the acceptance of truths, not intuitive, not demonstrated, yet 'sovereign. If our nature has any constitution, any laws, one ' of them is this absolute reception of propositions as true, 'which lie outside the narrow range of conclusions to which logic formal or virtual is tethered; nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day. Philosophers who speak of degrees of assent confound the mental act and a scientific rule. The degrees or variations are not in the act of the mind, but in the thing, whatever it be, as it is presented to the mind. When they 'speak in this manner surely they have no intention at all of defining the position of the mind itself relative to the adoption of a given conclusion, but they mean to determine the ' relation of that conclusion towards its premisses.'

Nor is Assent, even as defined by Dr. Newman, to be confounded with Faith. Here also, although he does not instance the contrast, he comes into express contradiction with Locke, who indifferently uses the expressions' Assent' and 'Faith,' and says that Faith is nothing but a firm Assent of the mind.' Not only so, but Locke adds, with the wise caution which has made him, like Chillingworth, such a favourite opprobrium of all religious enthusiasts: He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the 'obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those 'discerning faculties He has given him to keep him out of mistake and error.'* On the contrary, Faith in a religious sense is with Dr. Newman superior in nature and kind,' admitting of no comparison with an ordinary act of Assent. Assent is ever Assent; but in the assent which follows on a divine announcement, and is vivified by a divine grace, there is, from the nature of the case, a transcendent adhesion of mind, intellectual and moral, and a special self-protection,

B. iv. c. 17.