rdsworth:

'Here then we rest; not fearing for our creed
The worst that human reasoning can achieve
To unsettle or perplex it.'

Wordsworth too, it may be remembered, speaks of 'reason' with hardly
more respect than Newman himself as:

'The inferior faculty that moulds
With her minute and speculative pains
Opinion, ever changing.'

Robert Browning also, especially in his later years, uses
anti-intellectualist language equally uncompromising. 'Wholly distrust
thy reason,' he says in 'La Saisiaz.' Coleridge's distinction between
'understanding' and 'reason,' or Westcott's distinction between 'reason'
and 'reasoning,' might have saved these great writers from the
appearance, and perhaps more than the appearance, of blaspheming against
the highest and most divine faculty of human nature. For the reason is
something much higher than logic-chopping; it can provide, from its own
resources, a remedy for the intellectual error which is just now
miscalled intellectualism; it is the activity of the whole personality
under the guidance of its highest part; and because it is a real
unification of our disordered nature, it can bring us into real contact
with the higher world of Spirit. Newman's scepticism was not
doubtfulness about matters of faith; it was only a wholly unjustifiable
contempt and distrust for the unaided activity of the human mind. This
activity, as far as he could see, produced only various forms of
'liberalism,' which he strangely enough regarded as a kind of
scepticism. Thus he retorted, with equal injustice, the unjust charge
brought against himself.

Newman has often been suspected or accused of quibbling and intellectual
dishonesty. Kingsley, whose healthy but somewhat rough English morality
and common sense were revolted by Newman's whole attitude to life and
conduct, was unable to conceive how any educated man could believe in
winking Virgins and liquefying blood, and thought that Newman must be
dishonest. More recently Dr. Abbott has accused him of being a
_philomythus_. Judged by ordinary standards, Newman's criteria of belief
do seem incompatible with intellectual honesty. Locke, whom Newman
resembles in his theory of knowledge, lays down a canon which condemns
absolutely the Cardinal's doctrine of assent. 'There is one unerring
mark,' he says, 'by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth
in earnest, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with gre