Thomas Cattoi 11/08/2002
Notes for the study of Newman’s Essay in aid of a grammar of assent
A review of the general argument
The main problem addressed by Newman in his Essay in aid of a grammar of assent (GA) is the necessity to restore rational cogency to apologetics by highlighting the deep reasonableness of professing the Christian faith. To this purpose, Newman sets out to examine how the human mind moves from an act of inference to an act of assent; and in order fully to appreciate the problem and the answer that he develops, he turns to an examination of the strategies adopted by human reason to assess the information about reality which we are constantly presented. A formal statement of this question can be found in Chapter VI, pg.135 [1]:
What presents some difficulty is this, how it is that a conditional acceptance of a proposition, -such as is an act of inference, - is able to lead as it does, to an unconditional acceptance of it, -such is assent: how it is that a proposition which is not, and cannot be, demonstrated, which at the highest can only be proved to be truth-like, not true, such as “I shall die”, nevertheless claims and receives our unqualified adhesion. To the consideration of this paradox, as it may be called, I shall now proceed.
The epistemological setting of the work is a critique to logical reductionism. By the time he published this work, Newman had reached a remarkable popularity due to his apologetic works and had essentially established a reputation as a controversialist. His philosophical writings, however, did not enjoy the same popularity; in his correspondence, he claimed that his philosophical thought would only be understood by future generations. In fact, while logical positivism would only become formulated forty or fifty years after the publication of the GA in 1870, Newman anticipates and counters their positions by critiquing the implications of the positivist epistemology based on the thought of Leibnitz and Locke. The former, in his De arte combinatoria, had suggested that scientists create a method, in which “all kinds of truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculation”, in this way devising “a universal language”, in which errors would just be “mistakes of calculation”. In his Essay, Locke contends that the true lover of truth shall believe any proposition only to the extent warranted by the proofs on which the proposition is built. Newman believed that this view was unduly restrictive and set out to develop an alternative and more inclusive notion of intellectual assent, which in his view was more in line with the way individuals handle reality in their everyday life.
Newman was a strong believer in the intellectual self-sufficiency of the individual. At the same time, his belief in natural law led him to believe that whatever is found as a characteristic of mankind in general, if developed and used correctly, turns to his ultimate spiritual advantage. The fact that every individual acquires knowledge by means of inference and assent means that the latter are the instruments that God has granted man to attain a clear understanding of reality. The creation of a further, artificial tool, as advocated by Leibnitz, appeared to him to be unnecessary. At the same time, he believed that the acceptance of Locke’s strict reliance on logical reasoning did not take into account the way in which much of the knowledge concerning reality is acquired by man. Locke himself, in fact, is not strictly consistent. As Newman points out in Ch. VI (pg. 137), in the Essay’s chapter on probability, Locke appears to contradict himself by admitting that “most of the propositions we think, reason, discourse, nay, act upon, are such that we cannot have undoubted knowledge of their truth”, but at the same time we assent to them “as if they were infallibly demonstrated”.
It would be incorrect to claim that according to Newman our thinking processes do not follow logic. At the same time, however, Newman qualifies this statement by pointing out that the human mind is more creative than any of its products, so that epistemology cannot be reduced to the analysis of rules of logic or language. The reasoning process weaves together different thought patterns, in the same way as our minds combine sense impressions of external reality to form concepts of objects located outside of us. The fact that such processes do not yield identical outcomes in different individuals indicates that these processes could not be reduced into mathematical logic. In his Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein would attack Russell’s notion of “the perfect language” as well Whitehead’s Principia mathematica following an argument echoing that of Newman; and Goedel’s incompleteness result, postulating the impossibility to develop a fully consistent formal system, is foreshadowed in the assertion of the fundamental incompleteness of any logical or linguistic inference.
Newman claims that the intellectual motion from inference to assent is not just a process, but rather a composite “movement” made up of two steps. In the first step, the mind does operate syllogistically or inductively, much as a machine could operate; the second step, however, introduces a subjective or personal element that defies linguistic description. The human mind does in this step reach out to grasp the truth that is indicated by the “accumulation of probabilities” that is provided by the logical process. Newman cites the example of Newton’s first lemma in his 1686 Principia (Ch. VII, pg. 253), where the circle is postulated as the limit in a series of polygons, so that the circle is defined by the sequence of polygons though no member of the sequence defines it. Another example could be the fact that the standard deviation of a statistical population is the upper limit of the standard deviations of ever increasing statistical samples; or the curve of a normal distribution is the asymptotic limit of the underlying t-distributions. Newman goes on to say:
In like manner, the conclusion in a real or concrete question is foreseen and predicted rather than actually attained; foreseen in the number and direction of accumulated premises, which all converge to it, and as the result of their combination, approach it more nearly than any assignable difference, yet do not touch it logically (though only not touching it), on account of the nature of its subject matter, and the delicate and implicit character of at least part of the reasonings on which it depends.
Proof is thus defined as the limit of converging probabilities; the mind assesses a variety of data, gradually neutralizes a series of adverse explanations and clears away difficulties, so that at the end the experienced mind is convinced that a certain conclusion is inevitable, though his logical reasoning do not place him “in possession” of this conclusion. This is what Newman means in various passages of the text when he claims that a proposition is “as good as proved”, a conclusion is undeniable “as if it were proved”, and the reasons for it “amount to a proof”.
This spontaneous way of reasoning is called by Newman “ratiocinative” or “illative” sense. His contention is that this faculty is actually a collection of different faculties, which are adapted to different subject matters and can be observed in the way different individuals seem to possess innate aptitudes towards particular fields of human activity. However, every individual is endowed with this illative sense, with this “illative faculty for natural inference” that leads to “right judgment in ratiocination”; in some people it is uncultivated, in others it is degraded as it is employed to serve one’s own self-interest; in others, it is constantly developed so as to attain a high degree of conformity to reality. Interestingly, in his correspondence with the Duke of Norfolk, Newman claims that women possess this faculty to a higher degree than men.
The path leading individuals from inference to assent is therefore made up of an objective logical process that is underpinned and constantly guided by this subjective ability to discover truth. The authoritativeness of the illative sense in discovering what is true is parallel to that of conscience in discovering what is good. This ratiocinative faculty is what for Newman constitutes the basis of certitude, which can be attained only whenever the mind moves from simple assent to complex assent. Certitude is at its highest when the process of inference is concerned with abstract matters; but Newman argues that certitude can be attained also in relation to concrete matters. The difference lies in the fact that the criterion for accuracy in concrete matters is a subjective one, since the final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matters is committed to the illative faculty.
The implication of this argument is that ultimately the illative sense is the only test that can distinguish truth from error in our inferences about concrete matters. Instead of trusting logical science, we should rather “trust persons, who, by long acquaintance with their subject have a right to judge”; or “take up the subject ourselves”, so that eventually we can “direct ourselves by our own moral or intellectual judgment” and not by our skill in argumentation (Ch VIII). The application of Newman’s method to the problem of religious proposition, which makes up the last one hundred pages of the text, is then essentially an extensive rehearsal of the notion that it is only in virtue of the illative sense that we reach certitude concerning matters of faith. The claims of those critics of revealed religion that the dogmas of Christianity cannot be logically proved and thus cannot be held as true by any rational person are here answered with a great wealth of historical examples that induce the human mind to embrace the truth of Christianity.
As a footnote, we might quote Bernard Lonergan reflecting on how Insight came about:
Newman’s remark that ten thousands difficulties do not make a doubt has served me in good stead. It encouraged me to look difficulties squarely in the eye, while not letting them interfere with my vocation or my faith. His illative sense later became my reflective act of understanding.
Structure of the work
The style of the GA is that of a treatise in epistemology; only the last chapter develops the implications of the previous argument applying it to specifically religious concerns. The first three chapters:
1) Modes of holding and apprehending propositions
· Modes of holding propositions
· Modes of apprehending propositions
2) Assent considered as apprehensive
3) The apprehension of propositions constitute essentially an introduction to the rest of the work. A proposition is defined as a subject and a predicate united by a copula. Newman distinguishes propositions from the point of view of form into categorical, conditional and interrogative. The first type simply makes an assertion and implies the absence of conditions (such as “Washington DC is the capital of the USA”). The second type expresses a conclusion with an implied dependence on other propositions (such as “The USA should bomb Iraq”). The third type expresses a question that needs to be answered (such as “Does Iraq dispose of the atomic bomb?”). The way the first type of propositions are held is by way of unconditional assent (typical of the believer); the second, by conditional inference (typical of the philosopher); and the third, by means of doubt (typical of the skeptic). Newman then distinguishes between real apprehension (when we apprehend things that are external to us) and notional apprehension (when we apprehend things, such as concepts, that only exist in our mind).
The following two chapters:
4) Notional and real assent
· Notional assents
· Real assents
· Notional and real assents contrasted
5) Apprehension and assent in the matter of religion
· Belief in one God
· Belief in the Holy Trinity
· Belief in dogmatic theology
develop the notion of assent in relation to propositions. Newman’s contention is that there is no medium between assenting and not assenting. It is not difficult to imagine that notional assent refers to propositions apprehended notionally, while real assent refers to propositions apprehended in reality. Religious dogmas are then posited as a proposition; to give a real assent to a dogma is an act of religion, while to give it a notional assent, it is a theological act. Beliefs in God and the Trinity or any other article of faith can be “appropriated as a reality by the religious imagination”; when they are held as truth, they are appropriated by the theological intellect. Chapter V concludes Part I of the work, whose title is Assent and apprehension; with Chapter VI we move to Part II, which is instead called Assent and inference. In Ch. VI (pg. 157),
6) Assent considered as unconditional
· Simple assent
· Complex assent
assent is defined in pg. 157 as an act of the intellect “direct, absolute, complete in itself, unconditional, arbitrary, yet not incompatible with an appeal to argument, and at least in many cases exercised unconsciously”. The latter assent is defined by Newman as simple assent; in contrast with complex assent, which instead are made consciously and deliberately. In connection with complex assent, Newman asserts that acts of inference are the antecedents of complex assent before assenting, and its usual concomitants after assenting. He then argues that if the proposition to which the assent is given is absolutely true as the reflex act pronounces it to be, the assent becomes a perception, and the conviction a certitude; the proposition becomes a certitude, and to assent to it becomes to know. With this in mind, Newman moves on to a set of three chapters
7) Certitude
· Assent and certitude contrasted
· Indefectibility of certitude
8) Inference
· Formal inference
· Informal inference
· Natural inference
9) The illative sense
· The sanction of the illative sense
· The nature of the illative sense
· The range of the illative sense
where he elaborates on the connection between assent and certitude, and in so doing he analyses the process of inference that allows the human mind to move from one to the other, as well as the illative sense that constitutes the yardstick against which the deliverances of the inferential process have to be assessed. Chapter 8 and 9 can therefore be regarded as the core of the work, since Newman summarizes his earlier discussion of assent in order to show how the extension of assent to non-logically proved propositions is reasonable. As we mentioned earlier, the last chapter
10) Inference and assent in the matter of religion
· Natural religion
· Revealed religion
consists in an application of the previous argument to the apprehension of religious truth, much as Ch. 19-20 of Insight constitute a transposition of the previous philosophical argument to the theological plane. If what comes in Chapter 7-9 is accepted, the arguments of the opponents on Christianity appear to be more unreasonable than the acceptance of Christian belief.
The argument as it stands, however, does present a major problem. The certitude that is the “crown” of the process of judgement is posited by Newman as “not admitting of an interior, immediate test, sufficient to discriminate it from false certitude”. Essentially, we need to trust our illative sense- not even the illative sense of other people who have gone the same way before us can provide us with any help. As pointed out by Nicholas Lash in his introduction to the GA, Newman himself saw that the lack of a test of false certitude was the weak point of the book. If such an absolute test were available, however, faith would lack the personal character that Newman is so keen on, and then it would no longer be the “venture pregnant with risk” to which he himself refers in his Parochial sermons. On the other hand, the repeated questioning of the limits imposed by modern rationality on the horizon of intellectual activity in texts such as Gadamer’s Truth and method as well as Kuhn’s Structure of scientific revolution does highlight the originality of Newman’s philosophical thought, which is at the same time deeply Victorian and profoundly modern.
Major themes in the work
1) Assent and apprehension
In Ch. I, section 2, Newman defines apprehension as “an experience or information about the concrete”. This definition indicates that the term apprehension can be used to indicate two types of understanding reality: direct perception of what reality is, and the attempt to find an underlying meaning to the latter. The first instance indicates an immediate recognition of the truth, while the second includes the understanding of the meaning of words and sentences. The GA, however, is more interested in assents that can be expressed by means of verbal propositions, and as a result, Newman uses the term apprehension to indicate, as in Chapter I, “an intelligent acceptance of the idea or of the fact which a proposition enunciates”.
The apprehension of a proposition takes place when we proceed to co-ordinate the combination of words within the proposition with the reality to which these words refer. The fact that communication is possible at all signifies that the relation between words and realities is not completely arbitrary. There is however an enduring personal element in apprehension, which Newman describes as “entering” into the reference of the proposition. When we interpret, we appropriate signs that of themselves lack an intrinsic meaning and proceed to discern the meaning that they are intended to convey. The distinction between apprehension and understanding is very important for Newman. He declares that understanding is an ambiguous term, since it might refer to either “comprehension” or “apprehension”. The first term would indicate a full and complete knowledge of a proposition, while the latter would not imply that I must fully understand the object of my assent before I assent to it. Newman does therefore argue that assent requires only a limited, not a complete, understanding of its object.
Of course such a distinction between apprehension and comprehension raises the question of the extent to which one must understand before assenting. Newman argues that we have understood sufficiently when we have grasped what is expressed in the predicate: “in a proposition, one term is predicated of another: the subject is referred to the predicate, and the predicate gives us information about the subject; (…) therefore to apprehend the proposition is to have that information (…); the very drift of the proposition is to tell us something about the subject; but there is no reason why our knowledge of the subject, whatever it is, should go beyond what the predicate tells us about it” (Ch. II, pg. 33).
Newman does also distinguish between assent and assertion. He argues that assent must be accompanied by some apprehension of the matter asserted, while an assertion does not have. In fact, we might assert something without actually understanding what we are saying. The question is then how we can assent to something that we cannot in any way apprehend, such as religious mysteries; Newman himself defines a mystery as “a proposition that conveys incompatible notions, or a statement of the inconceivable”. In Chapter V, when Newman discusses belief in the propositions of dogmatic theology, he claims that we can give assent if our apprehension of the proposition is sufficient to enable us to recognize it as a mystery. We might assent to the dogma of the Trinity while at the same time acknowledging the logical contradictions that this dogma presents.
It is important to point out that while assent does involve a leap, for Newman this is never a blind leap. Theological statements can be assented to only if they have some meaning for us. An interesting implication (and one that has been repeatedly questioned) is that, since our assent is limited to what we can apprehend, different people shall assent differently according to our mental abilities and theological knowledge. Newman however claims that when a person assents to a proposition, he or she also assents implicitly to all that is included in this proposition.
A further important distinction is the one between real and notional apprehension in relation to religious beliefs. Newman uses it to distinguish between religion and theology, pointing out how religion is concerned with “the real and the particular”, i.e. with what we apprehend as images, while theology works with notions and tries to be “general and systematic”. As a proposition can be apprehended both notionally and really, it can be apprehended both theologically and religiously; though Newman himself admits that it is often impossible to draw a line between the two and says that “every religious man is to some extent a theologian” (Ch. 5, Section 1).
It is important to remember that Newman believes that we can have a real apprehension of God, since our conscience furnishes us with the material that we need for it. In his discussion of the nature of conscience in Chapter V, Section 1, Newman points out that “conscience is our great internal teacher of religion”, and that “conscience teaches us not only that God is, but what He is; it provides for the mind a real image of Him”. From the experience of our conscience, we conceive an image of God as an all-powerful judge; an image that becomes more and more clearly defined if we obey the dictates of our conscience and that can be corrected further “by means of education, social intercourse, experience and literature”. Unlike what happens in relation to other matters, our image of God is not self-authenticating; on the contrary, it might have to be modified in light of theological reasoning. In the case of religion, since what is “real” cannot be experienced directly, our images of it must be corrected by “notional” ideas. Newman believes however that such real apprehension of God, which is primarily constructed out of the deliverances of consciousness, is possible to every man; in this way, every individual has the necessary material to give his or her personal assent to the notion of God’s existence.
2) The notion of inference
Newman defines inference as the conditional acceptance of a proposition, in opposition to assent, which is regarded as the unconditional assent to a proposition. The reciprocity of these two processes is embedded in the structure of human reasoning. As Newman says in Ch VIII, pg. 208, we hold something as true if we either think that the evidence for the proposition in question is sufficient or tends to be sufficient or if we rely on something else that is evident or tends to be evident. The natural inference that occurs in the state of nature ensures that the individual is not actively aware of the connection between antecedent and consequent; often, however, natural reasoning has to be replaced by more conscious reflection on the connection between different propositions, and there our reasoning might actually deceive us. On pg. 211, Newman argues that it is necessary to develop a method enabling us to escape the limitations of our individual reasoning process, with whose failings we are all too familiar. Geometry and algebra are highlighted as instances where this general method would enable us to escape “the more egregious personal blunders” and “the slavish reliance on the capricious ipse dixit of authority”.
Newman distinguishes between informal and mental inference on one hand –both characterized by a certain degree of spontaneity and both conducted on non-verbal lines- and formal inference on the other –the latter being defined as “thought arrested in language”. There is however no sharp border between these two types of reasoning- what situates inference across the continuum from complete spontaneity to full awareness is the degree of consciousness or verbalization. The more we move towards the extreme of full consciousness, the more words tend to become pure symbols, as in algebra. If we are dealing with pure symbols, the logic of inference is perfectly demonstrable and cannot be overruled; if we deal with concrete matters, demonstration declines to mere probability.
A connected problem is that of the ultimate measure of inference, which is the age-old problem of first principles. These latter are defined on pg. 216 as “the recondite source of all knowledge”; but since they are the foundation of all inferential processes, they cannot be proved by means of inference. Newman himself admits that “we are not able to prove by syllogism that there are any self-evident propositions at all”; and he goes on to ask “and supposing there are (as of course I hold there are), still who can determine these by logic?”. As a result, he concedes that “difficulty lies in determining first principles, not in the arrangement of proofs”. It is interesting to point out that the awareness of this issue would lead Wittgenstein increasingly away from his early interest in formalization that gave rise to the Tractatus to a study of first principles of knowledge in his late study On certainty. Newman is aware of this problem, but he thinks that it is outweighed by all the advantages presented by formal inference, which “reduces chaos to harmony”, is “capable of correcting its own mistakes” and “show us the direction in which truth lies”. It is important to stress that Newman does not look down on formal inference, and that he is not a champion of irrationality; at the same time, his main purpose in the GA is to discuss informal modes of reasoning, which in his opinion constitute the most commonly used pattern whereby we organize knowledge.
As he points out on pg. 230, Newman argues that the method whereby certainty is attained in the realm of concrete matters is the “cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review”. Of course, he is not proposing a mere numerical cumulation of probabilities; in the words of G. Casey, it is necessary that these probabilities “be mutually supportive and that they form a coherent structure”. As a result, even if each of the strands of reasoning that we take into consideration is unable to bear the entire weight of the inference, their mutually supportive relation is able to provide sufficient evidence to convince the mind of the truth of the conclusion. Syllogistic reasoning, in this perspective, appears to be simply one out of the vast number of possible strategies that can be deployed to structure the information we receive from the outside world.
What formal and informal inference have in common is that both of them are conditional, since the conclusion remains essentially dependent on the premises. Of course the conditionality of an informal inference is more problematic than that of a syllogism, since the premises of an informal inference are implicit and might be valued differently by different individuals. As pointed out on pg. 233, “what to one intellect is a proof, is not so to another”. For Newman, the correlation between certitude and informal reasoning is a law of the human mind; the complementarity of formal and informal inference is part of the “organon” of the human mind – a tool that is “a personal gift, and not a mere method of calculus”.
We might wish to compare this discussion of inference with Newman’s own argument in an 1853 essay entitled “On the certainty of faith”. Therein he makes the distinction between formal and informal inference in terms of “seeing” and “feeling” propositions; and in so doing he foreshadows the discussion of the dogma of the Trinity in Ch. V of the GA, where separate claims as to this dogma are claimed to be accessible to reason, while the whole of it is the object of religious imagination. The essay does also distinguish between evidentia veritatis and evidentia credibilitatis, the first being the sort of evidence underpinning formal arguments, the latter providing support to informal reasoning.
We should be aware of the fact that there is a third type of inference in the GA, which is the exercise of reason in its so called “natural state”. According to Newman, natural reasoning is apprehended by us as a simple, indivisible act; the move from antecedent to consequent is here “instinctive” and somehow inevitable. The example of the peasant that can predict the weather with a remarkable precision without being able to explain how he reaches this conclusion seems to be quite appropriate. At the same time, Newman seems to recognize that this natural inference might actually be regarded as the limit case of natural inference, in the sense that in informal inferences the inferential process is partly unconscious, whereas in this case it is entirely so. In fact, towards the end of Ch. VIII (pg. 265), Newman seems to equate natural inference with assent, by saying “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”. G. Casey actually argues that Newman is simply mistaken and that natural inference should be simply regarded as assent- at most, it could be said that it is an instance of intuition that is based on the innate ability of the individual to interpret reality without turning to conscious reasoning.
Before moving to an analysis of illation and certitude, we should remember that Chapter V, Section 1 (Belief in One God, pg. 95-109) contains a discussion of the existent of God, which is what in Newman’s writings comes closest to a proof of God’s existence. Within any act of conscience, Newman distinguishes between a critical aspect and a judicial aspect. The former provides man with guidance, though everyone knows that conscience is far from being infallible tutor; the latter is the basis for man’s sense of duty. Newman claims that under the influence of the judicial aspect of consciousness the individual becomes aware of the fact that he is subject to a higher moral law that is different from any law devised by man. We are here told that there is something higher than us whose nature is yet to be defined. The Kantian line of argument would see here nothing more than the moral law. Newman, however, points out that the feelings of remorse and reverence that we feel whenever we transgress the commands of consciousness are those that we feel when we are in the presence of a person. The judicial aspect of conscience is therefore what alerts to the existence of an on-going relation between man and God. We mentioned earlier that according to Newman it is necessary to have an image in front of us if we are to experience a real apprehension. So in this case conscience grants us an image of God in the form of a judge.
Of course, this argument is vulnerable to the usual criticisms addressed to “proofs from conscience”. Unbelievers will readily claim that the feelings of remorse or obligation that they experience do not stem from reverence towards a super-natural Person- rather, they shall simply say that they are part of human nature. Since some individuals experience them more than others, it would then appear that some people have a closer relationship with God than others. At most, this proof is meant to reinforce belief in God among people who already have accepted His existence. At the same time, it would be incorrect to present this argument as an instance of inference, either natural, formal or informal- rather, what we have here is the articulate presentation, in line with previously appropriated beliefs, of certain phenomenological features that accompany the experience of consciousness.
3) Certitude and illation
We mentioned earlier how for Newman reflex assent differs from simple assent as the former is explicit and conscious. The fact that a proposition is embraced by a reflex assent is one of the prerequisites that Newman sets so that a proposition can be a certitude. The other two prerequisites are a psychological state that Newman calls repose, and what he terms the “indefectibility of certitude”- the fact that once certitude is attained, it can longer be lost. In Ch. VI, pg. 164, Newman writes that “no man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of the fact of its contradictory existing or occurring”; certitude cannot co-exist with hesitation or doubt. At the same time, certitude does not depend on proofs; in fact, as we pointed out earlier, in concrete matters proofs cannot in any way be regarded as the “creating cause” of certitude, as it is instead the case with speculative reasoning. Newman does in fact claim that it is possible not to reach certitude even after being confronted with a perfectly cogent chain of arguments; certitude, though necessarily given to complex propositions at the end of an inferential process, is a strictly personal phenomenon. Knowledge is merely the contemplation of truth as objective; on the other hand, certitude means that what the intellect is contemplating outside itself is objective.
As we mentioned earlier, the typical objection to this stance is that in concrete matters no proof that we can devise can go beyond the sphere of probability. Newman does not really answer this objection, but merely claims that in some occasions we are just unable not to assent to a truth that cannot be proved. Again, the feeling of repose concerning a certitude might simply reflect a particular psychological disposition, rather than any objective reality; there is no reason why a prejudice should not also give rise to a feeling of repose. The most problematic question, however, is that of certitude’s indefectibility, which is the term Newman uses to indicate the persistence of assent and repose in relation to a complex proposition.
In Chapter VII, pg. 181, Newman claims that “the intellect (…) is made for truth, can attain truth, and having attained it, can keep it, can recognize it and can preserve the recognition”. We all know however that very often we hold convictions for a long time only to find out at a later stage that they did not provide us with an adequate understanding of reality. It becomes therefore quite difficult to believe that certain assertions might be held with a certitude that is no longer liable to change. Newman responds to this argument by developing a distinction between infallibility and certitude, where the former is posited as a faculty that can be applied to every possible subject matter, while certitude can only be applied to particular (complex) propositions. People can therefore be infallible, as well as abstract rules, while propositions can only be regarded as infallible in a broader sense of the term, if they are the result of an infallible procedure. So, if the certitude is found to lack justification, we are to exercise greater caution in granting it- what Newman is saying is effectively that we might believe to hold a certitude, but in fact we have only reached a mistaken conviction. If this is so, the issue becomes really a semantic dispute on the meaning of certitude, whose “authentic presence” in the mind of the subject is independent of what the subject thinks about it.
The problem of certitude in the area of religion is particularly problematic, as according to Newman the acceptance of a religion does not simply imply a simple or a complex assent to a set of propositions, but rather, in the words of G. Casey, “a complex of various propositional attitudes adopted towards those elements of religion which are propositional”. According to Newman’s view on certitude, a Protestant does hold a number of propositions about Christianity, some being certitudes, some being mistaken convictions. In this way, if a Protestant abandons Protestantism and embraces Catholicism, he is simply retaining the certitudes that he held before and shedding the false convictions that he held before; so, it never happens that earlier certitudes have to be dropped. This argument does not appear to be fully convincing; in fact, as we mentioned earlier, we are effectively left with no criteria to discriminate between real certitude on one hand and illegitimate prejudices on the other.
The notion of illation and its relation with assent is the object of Chapter IX of the GA. In fact Newman never really defines illation: some believe that Newman borrowed the term from Locke, who used illation in the Essay concerning human understanding, Book 4, Chapter XVII, as the intellectual faculty that “consists in nothing but the perception of the connection there is between the ideas, in each step of the deduction”. On pg. 251 Newman equates illation with the “ratiocinative”, or the natural reasoning faculty of the mind. On pg. 260 we first encounter the “illative sense”, which is “right judgment in ratiocination”, or the “power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection”. In this sense, we are close to the Aristotelian fronesis, which “guides the mind in matters of conduct”.
The importance of this illative sense stems from the fact that its scope is not as restricted as that of inference, so that by using it we can reach conclusions that are outside the scope of logical thought. Illative sense can consider matters that cannot be clearly expressed or consciously analyzed: in this way, we might reach a conclusion without being able to articulate to ourselves the premises that we have used to reach a conclusion, while remaining convinced of the correctness of this conclusion. In formal reasoning, the individual might be able to connect premises and conclusions by necessary links; in an illation, the mind is attempting to determine the balance and the degree of probability of a conclusion. Some commentators have argued that such method does effectively escape description and therefore is beyond our comprehension.
In fact, the method of convergent probabilities that we outlined earlier in connection with the relation between the polygons and the circle have a marked similarity with methods of legal inference. The determination of whether a person is guilty or not of murder is often the result of a process where the judge weighs the evidence and assesses it against the deliverances of her own moral intuition to decide the likelihood of a possible verdict. Matters of faith are very much like legal matters, in the sense that ultimately they are a personal decision. Illation, therefore, is not an irrational procedure, but rather it is the “most natural way of reasoning” and is found in the educated and in “the state of nature”. Since this instinct of illation is “natural”, Newman thinks that we can trust its conclusions and that it should not be regarded as necessarily less trust-worthy than memory or sense perception. The correctness of the conclusions obtained by the illative sense does not necessarily depend on a direct intervention of God who ratifies the conclusion, but merely on the power given to us by nature to obtain conclusions using informal methods.
The value of illation as an antecedent of assent can be weakened if illation is influenced by subjective factors. On pg. 230 Newman acknowledges that our moral state can affect our illative conclusions; “in ordinary minds”, he says on pg. 251, illation might be “biased and degraded by prejudice, passion and self-interest”. So the individual who really wants to discover truth without being misled by personal considerations is most likely to benefit from the illative sense. Since Newman appreciates the impact of the personal element in illation, he stresses the significance of personal testimony in relation to religious assent. This is what leads him to accumulate almost one hundred pages of examples of personal testimonies to the truth of Christianity in the last chapter of the book. This has exposed Newman to the accusation that he was more interested in the “psychological” rather than in the “logical” aspect of the faith. We must remember, however, that Newman does not use the term “certainty” and “logic” as synonymous: in fact, even the conclusion attained by means of the illative sense can be regarded as representatives of a wider type of “logic”.
NOTE- For a very detailed commentary of the Grammar of assent, you might wish to consult either of these two works:
David A. Pailin, The Way to Faith- An Examination of Newman’s Grammar of Assent as a Response to the Search for certainty in Faith, London, Epworth Press, 1969
Gerald Casey, Natural reason- A study of the Notions of Inference, Assent, Intuition, and First Principles in the Philosophy of John Henry Cardinal Newman,New York, 1984
[1] Throughout these notes, the text used is the edition of the Grammar of assent published by University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, with an introduction by Nicolas Lash
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