The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman by Jay Newman (review)

HUMANmEs 119 and the fifth, 'John Sterling and the Universal Sense of the Divine' (especially welcome given the dearth of recent comment on him) usefully trace the Victorian reception of the 'Letters on Inspiration' (published only in 1840); but in that context the artificiality of treating them in isolation from the reception of Aids to Reflection becomes increasingly evident. The sixth chapter, 'The Divinity in Man: Transcendentalism as Organized Innocence: turns to the American transcendentalists, especially Emerson, and Coleridge's 'Letters' fade from view. There is an opportunity missed here, and one which must be especially regretted, for the new flood of hitherto unpublished Coleridge texts, in particular the marginalia, is already bringing in its wake the 'poststructuralist ' interpretations of Coleridge that Harding fears. We can only await his future contributions. The book is as well produced as it is well written. (E.S. SHAFFER) Jay Newman. The Mental Philosophy ofJohn Henry Newman Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xii, 2"9. $19.95 Jay Newman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, provides us with a critical study of John Henry Newman's famous 1870 work on the foundations of Christian (and espeCially Roman Catholic) belief, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Jay (no relation to John Henry) points out that the basic aim of the Grammar is apologetic, namely, to defend the faith of the 'simple believer' against rationalist and liberal criticisms of the day by showing that it is not unreasonable to affirm unconditionally what one can neither understand fully nor prove absolutely . He traces the way the Grammar pursues this aim, explicating its detailed argument that our acts of real assent - our affirmations of propositions about real things - presuppose some but not exhaustive understanding of those propositions, that real assent is always unconditional even though it follows on inference that is conditional, and that the acceptance of a religiOUS belief can be an instance of real assent. And while finding the work to be philosophically suggestive in general and often phenomenologically astute in particular, he also judges that in key respects it is frequently inconsistent, merely subjectivistic, and downright irrational. Simply because of the references it makes, this book will be a valuable resource for Newman scholars. The author not only seems to have read virtually everything published by and about his focal figure, he also has drawn extensively on the unpublished material in the Newman Archives at the Oratory of St Philip Neri, Birmingham, England. His considerable analytic skills are evident as well, no more so than when, nearing the end of his study, he shrewdly observes that ultimately the central issue in the 120 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 Grammar is the reasonableness not just of Christianity or, indeed, of any religion; rather, it is 'the reasonableness of reason itself (p 198). Perhaps somewhat less perspicacious, however, is the very notion of rationality that he presupposes as the standard in making his fundamentally negative assessment of John Herny's stance on this issue. While Jay makes quite clear his view that genuinely human living is not only an intellectual enterprise but a practical and at best even a partly mystical one as well, he takes it for granted that rationality is radically distinct from morality and , correlatively, that cognition is radically distinct from decision, theory from practice, knowledge from virtue, intellect from will. In the final analysis, he criticizes John Henry principally for proposing in effect that the criteria of morality are not just supplementary to the criteria of rationality but are radically intrinsic to them. It remains that those who, like the present reviewer, have been greatly impressed with the results of the extensive phenomenological and epistemological investigations conducted in our own century by such diverse philosophers as Joseph Marechal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Lonergan , and Jiirgen Habermas will be inclined to judge that on this crucial issue the earlier Newman, notwithstanding all his conceptual and terminological difficulties, has got the better of the later Newman. (MICHAEL VERTIN) N.N. Feltes. Modes ofProduction of Victorian Novels University of Chicago Press. 125. us $18.95 Despite the occasional solemn insistence that part divisions are important to an understanding of the Victorian...