ovided 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. '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