it that men do, as a matter of fact, form their judgments in a very different fashion.  To most people, however, the fact that opinions are so manufactured is no proof that they ought to be so.  To most people it seems plain that the practical necessity of making unverified assumptions, and the habit of clinging to them because we have made them, even after their falsity has been exposed, is a satisfactory explanation of the prevalence of error, but not a reason for acquiescing in it.  It is useful, they hold, to point out how assumption has a perilous tendency to pass for proof, not that we may contentedly confuse assumption with proof, but that we may be on our guard against doing so.  But such is Newman’s dislike of ‘reason’ 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