t 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 these offers, leaves out some fundamental and
essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable. If no
metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive
and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge
defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which
may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the
whole man as a living and active spiritual being. This is a sound
argument. But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an
undivided whole, can decide whether the institutional Church, or one
branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible
revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether
Nestorius was a heretic. We have no magical sword for cutting these
knots, and no miraculous guide to tell us that authority A is to be
believed implicitly, while the possibility of authority B being right is
not to be entertained even in thought. Newman as usual supplies us with
the best weapons against himself. It startles us to find, even in 1852,
such a sentence as this: 'Revealed religion furnishes facts to other
sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach.
Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's
ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without
revelation.' The transition from belief on the purely internal ground of
personal assent to belief on the purely external ground of Church
authority is certainly abrupt and hard to explain; but Newman makes it
habitually, without any consciousness of a _salto mortale_. In the
'Apologia' he even says that the argument from personality is 'one form
of the argument from authority.' The argument seems to be--'There is no
third alternative beside