that he rejoices to find that the majority of mankind are, in fact, not
guided by it. And then, having made this discovery, he is quite ready to
'reason' himself, but not in the manner of an earnest seeker after
truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence,
but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys
a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his
'certitude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an
attitude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's
maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would
spurn the charge of dishonesty as hotly as the charge of scepticism. His
principles made it easy for him to adopt the characteristic Catholic
habit of 'believing' anything that is pleasing to the religious
imagination. His sermons are full of such phrases as 'Scripture _seems_
to show us'; 'why should we not believe ...'; 'who knows whether ...,'
and the like, all introducing some fantastic superstition. He
deliberately accepts the insidious and deadly doctrine that 'no man is
convinced of a thing who can endure the thought of its contradictory
being true.' To which we may rejoin that, on the contrary, no man has a
right to be convinced of anything until he has fairly faced the
hypothesis of its contradictory being true. So long as Newman's method
prevailed in Europe, every branch of practical knowledge was condemned
to barrenness.
For what kind of knowledge is it which is acquired, not by the exercise
of the discursive intellect, or by the evidence of our senses, but by
the affirmations of our basal personality? Surely the legitimate
province of 'personalism' lies in the region of general ideas, or rather
in the _Weltanschauung_ as a whole. Our undivided personality protests
against any philosophy which makes life irrational, or base, or
incurably evil. It claims that those pictures of reality which are
provided by the intellect, by the aesthetic sense, and by the moral
sense, shall all have justice done to them in any attempted synthesis.
It rejects materialism, metaphysical dualism, solipsism, and pessimism,
on one or other of these grounds. Such a final interpretation of
existence as any of these offers, leaves out some fundamental and
essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable. If no
metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive
and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge
defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which
may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the
whole man as a living and active spiritual being. This is a sound
argument. But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an
undivided whole, can decide whether the institutional Church, or one
branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible
revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether
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