What will be the verdict of history on the type of Catholicism which Newman represented?  He was kept out in the cold by a conservative Pope, and honoured by a liberal Pope.  Which was right, from the point of view of Catholic interests and policy?  This is perhaps the most important question which the life of Newman raises; for it affects our anticipations of the future even more than our judgments of the past.  Is Newman a safe or a possible guide for Catholics in the twentieth century?

Newman was no metaphysician; he confesses it himself.  ’My turn of mind,’ he says, ’has never led me towards metaphysics; rather it has been logical, ethical, practical.’[84] For metaphysics requires an initial act of faith in human reason, and Newman had not this faith.  Even in his Anglican days he uttered many astonishing things in contempt of reason.  ’What is intellect itself (he asks) but a fruit of the Fall, not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with the regenerate mind?...  Reason is God’s gift, but so are the passions....  Eve was tempted to follow passion and reason, and she fell.’[85] ’Faith does not regard degrees of evidence.’[86] ’Faith and humility consist, not in going about to prove, but in the outset confiding in the testimony of others.’  ’The more you set yourself to argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to reason correctly.’[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the rationalist to contemptuous laughter.  In this and many other cases, Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in that form in which they outrage common sense most completely.  We can imagine nothing more calculated to drive a young and ingenuous mind into flippant scepticism than a course of Newman’s sermons.  The reductio ad absurdum of his arguments is not left to the reader to make; it is innocently provided by the preacher.

And yet Newman’s central position is not absurd, or only becomes absurd when it is applied to justify belief in gross superstition.  He holds that what he calls ‘reasoning’ deals only with abstractions, and is not the faculty on which we rely in forming ‘judgments.’  These judgments, to which we give our ‘assent,’ and by which we regulate our conduct, are affirmations of the basal personality.  And these have an authority far greater than can ever arise out of the logical manipulation of concepts.  ’There is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony borne to the truth by the mind itself.’  The ‘mind itself,’ the concrete personality, is concerned with realities, while the intellect, which for him corresponds very nearly with the discursive reason (dihanoia) of the Greek philosophers, is at home only in mathematics and, up to a certain point, in logic.  The concepts of the intellect have no existence outside it.