’The mind has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalisations which have no counterpart, no existence, out of it.’[88] Parenthetically, we may remark that passages like this show how wide of the truth Mr. Barry is when he speaks of Newman as a ‘thorough Alexandrine.’  To deny the existence of universals, to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists.  No more misleading statement could be made about Newman’s philosophy than to associate him with Platonism of any kind, whether Pagan or Christian.  Newman adopts the sensationalist (Lockian) theory of knowledge.  Ideas are copies or modifications of the data presented by the senses; ’first principles are abstractions from facts, not elementary truths prior to reasoning.’  This is pure nominalism, in its crudest form.  It makes all arguments in favour of the great truths of religion valueless; for if there are no universals, rational theism is impossible.  It follows that the famous scholastic ‘proofs of God’s existence’ have for Newman no cogency whatever; indeed it is difficult to see how he can have escaped condemning the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a juggling with bloodless concepts.  Newman himself pleaded that he had no wish to oppose the official dogmatics of his Church.  But protestations are of no avail where the facts are so clear.  ‘The natural theology of our schools,’ says a writer in the Tablet, quoted by Dr. Caldecott in his ‘Philosophy of Religion,’ ’is based frankly and wholly on the appeal to reason.’  This is notoriously true; and what Newman thought of reason we have already seen.  His extreme disparagement of the intellect seems to preclude what he calls ‘real assent’ to the creeds and dogmas of Catholicism; for these clearly consist of ‘notional’ propositions.  But Newman would answer that the Church is a concrete fact, to which ’real assent’ can be given; and the Church has guaranteed the truth of the notional propositions in question.  But since reason is put out of court as a witness to truth, on what faculty, or on what evidence, does Newman rely?  Feeling he distrusts; that side of mysticism, at any rate, finds no sympathy from him.  Nor does he, like many Kantians and others, make the will supreme over the other faculties.  Rather, as we have seen, he bases his reliance on the verdicts of the undivided personality, which he often calls conscience.  This line of apologetic was at this very time being ably developed by Julius Hare.  It is in itself an argument which has no necessary connexion with obscurantism.  ‘Personalism,’ as it is technically called, reminds us that we do actually base our judgments on grounds which are nob purely rational; that the intellect, in forming concepts, has to be content with an approximate resemblance to concrete reality; and that the will and feelings have their rights and claims which cannot be ignored in