An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of AssentNewman, John Henry
Religion
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
Newman, John Henry
Faith; Theism
Analogous to such an exercise of sight, must be our mode of dealing
with the verbal expositions of an argument such as Clarke’s. His words
speak to those who understand the speech. To the mere barren intellect
they are but the pale ghosts of notions; but the trained imagination
sees in them the representations of things. He who has once detected
in his conscience the outline of a Lawgiver and Judge, needs no
definition of Him, whom he dimly but surely contemplates there, and
he rejects the mechanism of logic, which cannot contain in its grasp
matters so real and so recondite. Such a one, according to the strength
and perspicacity of his mind, the force of his presentiments, and his
power of sustained attention, is able to pronounce about the great
Sight which encompasses him, as about some visible object; and, in his
investigation of the Divine Attributes, is not inferring abstraction
from abstraction, but noting down the aspects and phases of that one
thing on which he ever is gazing. Nor is it possible to limit the depth
of meaning, which at length he will attach to words, which to the many
are but definitions and ideas.
Here then again, as in the other instances, it seems clear, that
methodical processes of inference, useful as they are, as far as they
go, are only instruments of the mind, and need, in order to their due
exercise, that real ratiocination and present imagination which gives
them a sense beyond their letter, and which, while acting through them,
reaches to conclusions beyond and above them. Such a living _organon_
is a personal gift, and not a mere method or calculus.
3.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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