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
“Space is not infinite, for nothing but the Creator is such:”—starting
from this thesis as a theological information, to be assumed as a
fact, though not one of experience, we arrive at once at an insoluble
mystery; for, if space be not infinite, it is finite, and finite space
is a contradiction in notions, space, as such, implying the absence
of boundaries. Here again it is our notion that carries us beyond the
fact, and in opposition to it, showing that from the first what we
apprehend of space does not in all respects correspond to the thing, of
which indeed we have no image.
This, then, is another instance in which the juxtaposition of notions
by the logical faculty lands us in what are commonly called mysteries.
Notions are but aspects of things; the free deductions from one of
these necessarily contradicts the free deductions from another. After
proceeding in our investigations a certain way, suddenly a blank or
a maze presents itself before the mental vision, as when the eye is
confused by the varying slides of a telescope. Thus, we believe in the
infinitude of the Divine Attributes, but we can have no experience of
infinitude as a fact; the word stands for a definition or a notion.
Hence, when we try how to reconcile in the moral world the fulness
of mercy with exactitude in sanctity and justice, or to explain that
the physical tokens of creative skill need not suggest any want of
creative power, we feel we are not masters of our subject. We apprehend
sufficiently to be able to assent to these theological truths as
mysteries; did we not apprehend them at all, we should be merely
asserting; though even then we might convert that assertion into an
assent, if we wished to do so, as I have already shown, by making it
the subject of a proposition, and predicating of it that it is true.
2. _Credence._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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