depth a lower deep," till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. . . . I am not maintaining that all proofs are equally difficult, and all propositions equally debateable; some assumptions are greater than others, and some doctrines involve postulates larger than others and more numerous. [But] knowledge of premises, and inferences upon them, this is not to live; life is for action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.1

Newman points out another characteristic of the highest state of assurance, or "certitude":

No one can be called certain of a proposition whose mind does not spontaneously and promptly reject, on their first suggestion, as idle, as impertinent, as sophistical, any objections which are directed against its truth. No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of the fact of its contradictory existing or occurring; and that not from any set purpose or effort to reject that thought, but, as I have said, by the spontaneous action of the intellect. What is contradictory to the truth fades out of the mind, with its apparatus of argument, as fast as it enters it; and though it be brought back to the mind ever so often by the pertinacity of an opponent, or by a voluntary or involuntary act of imagination, still that contradictory proposition and its arguments are mere phantoms and dreams, in the light of our certitude, and their very entering into the mind is the first step of their going out of it. Such is the state of our minds towards the heathen fancy that Enceladus lies under Etna, or (not to take so extreme a case) that Joanna Southcote was a messenger from heaven, or

1 Ch. iv. § 3.

the Emperor Napoleon really had a star. Equal to this peremptory assertion of negative propositions is the revolt of the mind from suppositions incompatible with positive statements of which we are certain, whether abstract truths or facts: as that a straight line is the longest possible distance between its two extreme points, that Great Britain is in shape an exact square or circle, that I shall escape dying, or that my intimate friend is false to me.1

Here Newman is in accord with the best

modern psychology. The test of belief is the impossibility or difficulty, as the case may be, of thinking the opposite. Suppose A C is a thought which is incompatible with the thought A B: "in the case of complete doubt it is equally easy to frame the thought A B and its opposing alternative A C. In the ideal case of complete assurance it is impossible to frame the thought A C, so that we are absolutely constrained to think A B. Between complete doubt and complete assurance there are all manners of gradations, proportioned to the difficulty of mentally substituting A C for A B," - that is, the belief AB may be more or less intense and deeply rooted.2

1 Ch. vi. § 2.

In these respects a

2 Stout, Analytic Psychology, vol. ii. p.

241.

belief may vary, although, as Newman says, it must always "either exist or not exist."

We must grant that as psychology, Newman's account of belief is substantially sound. But in two important points it needs to be supplemented. He dwells on the fact that a number of inconclusive but converging arguments may produce a fairly intense feeling of certitude. Very often the explanation of this fact is that the real grounds of the belief, the grounds which have actually operated in the mind to produce it, are imperfectly expressed in the arguments." In the Grammar of Assent Newman appears to overlook the importance of this fact. We quoted passages from the University Sermons where he clearly indicated it; but even there we found that he failed to see how the expression of the belief itself is quite as likely to be imperfect as the expression of the grounds which led to it; so that a certitude may be well founded and just, while yet we may err in the dogmatic form in which we have expressed it. The certitude cannot be claimed

for the intellectual contents of the belief. This is the only explanation of the important fact which Newman indicates so clearly in his University Sermon xiii. :—

It is hardly too much to say that almost all reasonings formally adduced in moral and religious and philosophical inquiries are rather specimens and symbols of the real grounds than those grounds themselves. They do but approximate to a representation of the general character of the proof which the writer wishes to convey to another's mind. They cannot, like mathematical proof, be formally followed with an attention confined to what is stated, and with the admission of nothing but what is urged. Rather they are hints towards, and samples of, the true reasoning, and demand an active, ready, candid, and docile mind, which can throw itself into what is said, neglect verbal difficulties, and pursue and carry out principles.

He remarks that if we insisted on proof for everything, we should never come to action. Froude very justly observes that "this is perfectly true as regards individual persons; the clerk, as Carlyle says, cannot be always verifying his ready - reckoner. Yet the conclusions on which we act are resting on producible evidence somewhere, if we cannot each of us produce it ourselves. They are the results of past experience and intellectual thought, which are tested,

enlarged, and modified by the practice of successive generations. We accept them confidently, not from any internal conviction of their being necessarily true, but from an inference of another kind, that if untrue they would have been disproved." Newman missed the significance of the fact that we as single persons, one by one, cannot assign reasons for many of our beliefs, because he has limited his attention to the individual person and not dwelt on the psychological connections between the mind of the single person and what we may call the general mind of the race. Froude's reply brings out the bearing of these connections on the matter of belief. We know that the individual life is part of a wider social life which has a solidarity and continuity of its own. The vast majority of a man's beliefs, of every kind, do not rest on his consciously reasoned assent; they are generated in his mind through all the innumerable ways in which his social surroundings act on him. So that there is a multitude of beliefs in trusting which a man is trusting the experience of his age and his