NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY
(1801–1890)

John Henry Newman, an English philosopher of religion and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was born in London, the son of a banker (later a brewer) who gave his children a love of music and literature. The young Newman was thoroughly familiar with the writings of both the romantic poets and the English deists. Raised as an Anglican, he underwent a deep religious experience when he was fifteen, and thenceforth he was strongly convinced of God's interior presence and providence. The mottoes chosen by Newman at this time foreshadowed his religious quest and interest in development: "Holiness rather than peace," and "Growth the only evidence of life."

He matriculated in 1816 at Trinity College, Oxford, where he read strenuously in the classics and mathematics. A fellowship at Oriel College at Oxford won him entrance to its common room, which proverbially "stank of logic." In 1824 Newman took holy orders.

The Oriel noetics, led by Richard Whately, gave Newman a taste for cool logical analysis of religious problems. His greatest influence at Oxford was exerted in company with Richard Froude, John Keble, and Edward B. Pusey. The Oxford movement sought to revive a living, full sense of the church and tradition through a series of incisive Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), culminating in Newman's Tract 90, which earned him an official censure. Newman's historical research in the Church Fathers and his theory of development in Christian doctrine eventually convinced him that the ideal of an Anglican via media was illusory. In 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, in 1847 he was ordained, and in 1848 he established the Birmingham Oratory as a center for those who shared his aspirations.

Newman struggled futilely during the years 1851–1858 to succeed as rector of the new Catholic University of Ireland, but political forces were too strong for him. Out of this defeat, however, came his main educational work, The Idea of a University (1852, 1859), which looked forward to a new synthesis of scientific, humanistic, and theological studies. Newman's strongly felt defense of his religious integrity and conversion expressed in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) restored his rapport with educated readers in England. It also cleared the path for the presentation of his basic philosophical views on knowledge and his defense of the reasonable character of the act of religious faith. Newman regarded his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) as his way of discharging an intellectual debt to his generation and to religious seekers of every age. In recognition of his distinguished service to the church, Pope Leo XIII created him a cardinal in 1879. Even in his last years, Newman kept up an active interest in questions of science, biblical criticism, and religious beliefs.

Newman belongs in the tradition of British churchmen who have contributed to philosophical thought. This he did in the course of dealing with certain problems of a religious and theological nature. He was well read in such Enlightenment sources as David Hume, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine and had an early awareness of the modern philosophical difficulties propounded against Christianity. Under pressure from such critics, Newman felt obliged to sift the grounds for his own adherence to theism and the Christian faith. He made a close study of the rationalistic apologetic used by William Paley and by Whately in defense of the existence of God and the basic articles of the Christian creed. Although Newman appreciated their search for rigor, he remained unconvinced by their particular way of achieving it. Their formalism remained completely impersonal and abstract, leaving out of account the process whereby the individual mind comes to see the import of an argument and gives its assent to the statements under discussion. Newman found a much more realistic account of mental operations in the analyses of inquiry made by three sources: Aristotle (especially in the Nicomachean Ethics ), the Greek Fathers, and Joseph Butler. These sources all stressed the importance of probable reasoning and analogy, especially in cases involving contingent realities and moral questions. Somewhat to his surprise, Newman also discovered a similar stress in Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and the Newtonians as soon as they faced the problem of relating their formal structures to concrete nature.

Formal and Informal Reasoning

Groping during his Oxford years for a way of stating the difference between the sequence of logical steps and the path of the mind in discovery, Newman came to the distinction between formal and informal reasoning. In mathematics and formal logic, the regulative principle is furnished by the formal relations among the elements of the argument and the internal consequence of steps. The relations can be stated in a general way without taking into account the difficulties that individual minds may have in following the formal entailments. From the logicomathematical standpoint, questions about our way of grasping the proof are either deemed irrelevant or assigned to the psychological order. Newman accepted this position insofar as it was meant to preserve the integrity of the standpoint of formal reasoning and the rigor of its deductive method. But he was unable to accept Whately's rationalistic conclusion that nothing more is ever required for establishing a doctrine than to exhibit its conformity with a pattern of formal reasoning. If a statement asserts something about existent things and if we are invited to accept this assertion, then something more is involved than the application of a general pattern of formal argument. The particular ways of backing the argument must be considered, and they must be considered by individual minds called upon to weigh their agreement with the world we experience.

When Newman himself tried to set down in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua the stages in his religious journey toward Catholicism, he found further evidence of his contention that the grounds and stages of argument in concrete matters cannot be fully formalized. He did not regard religious inquiry as being peculiar in this respect, but rather as agreeing with the common human condition of informal reasoning. The religious inquirer uses his mind in much the same way as does the jurist, the historian, and the biologist: All share in a common pattern of inquiry that demands a distinctive and responsible use of intelligence moving in a region somewhere between formalism and psychologism. A prominent task of Newman's main philosophical book, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, was to explore the middle ground of inference that eludes complete formalization and yet achieves results capable of surviving the formal tests. In a general way, he described this region as a concrete personal mode of reasoning, which he customarily divided into natural and informal inference.

"Concrete" Reasoning

The reasoning is called "concrete" as an indication of its ultimate terms of reference and control. Newman was strongly convinced that ours is a world of individual unit things, each of which has its unique nature and history. There is sufficient likeness among individuals to permit comparison and general statements, but there is no real identity and hence no completely general way of following the logical rules to establish our statements about them. In the study of individual entities, a gap eventually opens between general rules and concrete matters of fact. It cannot be closed by carrying on some further manipulation of the formal procedures in logic, and one is forced to bring into play the personal discernment of the living mind working upon what it experiences. Man's reasoning becomes concrete in response to this situation.

When he inquires about concrete existents, each man assumes personal responsibility for the conduct of his own understanding. Although he cannot violate the logical system or the pattern of the language, he must determine issues that cannot be settled solely in their formal terms. In the ordinary course of life, one does not stop to reflect upon the methodological issues involved but plunges directly into the particular matters at hand. Newman refers to this unreflective and implicit sort of concrete thinking as a natural mode of inference, one that is not burdened by any second-level questioning about the kind of use being made of the mind. Every person is faced with practical decisions and moral choices that require a personal assessment of the circumstances and particular means and end in view. There is a point at which even a great military leader cannot rely solely upon the rules of strategy and his formal conception of warfare; he must place all these aids at the service of his personal estimate of a particular military situation in order to make a responsible decision. He is directly engaged in concrete reasoning in the natural mode of inference.

Yet Newman did not restrict concrete reasoning to conditions of great practical stress, where reflection on one's method is a luxury that cannot be indulged. He recognized the pattern of concrete intelligence in the judgments made by the historian, the art critic, the jurist, and the scientist. Here there is often an opportunity for attending to the problem of method. In the degree that individuals who make these judgments reflect upon their procedures and make an explicit theme of them, they are involved in what Newman calls concrete reasoning in the informal mode of inference. The concrete uses of intelligence are now thematized and critically controlled. The reasoning is informal insofar as it deals with questions that cannot be settled by appealing simply to the formal logical rules, but still it is a quite deliberate and reflective way of reasoning. Informal reasoning is required by our world of particulars, but this world does not prevent us from reflecting upon the way in which we explore and interpret it.

The Illative Sense

Newman proposed the theory of the illative sense to account for the certitude that may be attached to informal judgments. Here he was not trying to burden the mind with a new and esoteric faculty but sought instead to account for a definite feature of our intellectual activity. Hence he remarked that illative sense is only a grand name for designating a very ordinary way of using the mind.

A distinction is needed between certainty and certitude. Newman regarded certainty as a formally determinable quality of propositions and assigned its study to the logician. Newman's own interest centers upon certitude as a quality of the mind when it is engaged in concrete reasoning of both the natural and the informal sort. Concrete reasoning yields certitude when it enables us to recognize and affirm the truth of some proposition. Certitude is not achieved, as the rationalists maintain, through an impersonal coercion of the mind by the force of the formal elements contained in it. In all reasoning, but especially in concrete inference, certitude consists in an active response of the mind to the weight and tenor of the argument, a living recognition of the meaning and the truth of the proposition that states some findings. Furthermore, this certitudinal apprehension of the truth of the proposition is an inalienably individual act. I come to grasp the import of an argument; I see the bearing of the evidence; I give my assent to the proposition as true.

For my warrant in accepting the proposition, I cannot fall back exclusively upon the general canons of logic and the common structure of the language. Although Newman recognized their indispensable contribution by way of opposition to sentimentalism in thought, he believed that in the final analysis these elements cannot settle issues about the concretely existent. The illative sense refers to the type of operation of the human mind as it engages in concrete reasoning, reaches a conclusion of inference, and determines whether to give its certitudinal assent to the inferred proposition about a concrete reality:

The sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matter is committed to the personal action of the ratiocinative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense. … It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions. This power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection, I call the Illative Sense. (Grammar, Ch. 9)

Thus when Newman claimed to be developing a theory of the mind more empirical than John Locke's, he instanced this functional analysis of the illative sense.

The illative use of the mind is observable not only in the concluding act of an inference in concrete issues but also at the outset and along the way of the reasoning. Newman pointed out the need for a personal use of intelligence—especially in creative work as done, for example, by Newton or Edward Gibbon—in order to suggest the governing hypothesis, to gauge the strength of some particular stage in the inquiry, and to discern the bearing of many outlying investigations upon the main problem. We seek to conduct ourselves responsibly in all these operations, and the term illative sense refers to the intellectual mastery or perfection that an individual develops for inquiries in some concrete field. It comes close to the Aristotelian habit of prudence or practical wisdom, except that it can reach into the speculative order and attain certitude there. Newman added that despite a similar pattern of concrete logic for different fields, the personal mastery cannot simply be transferred from one area to another. A man may give us good grounds for trusting his judgment in military affairs or biological questions, whereas he may be utterly lacking in sagacity in respect to political legislation.

Newman did not isolate religious inquiry from other concrete uses of intelligence but required it to conform to the common requirements of concrete inquiry. The religious person is not concerned solely with abstract and general issues but seeks the truth about the reality of God, the person of Christ, the complex life of the church, and the individual soul's response to them all. These matters belong in the region of concrete existence and thus impose their own requirements upon the searcher's mind. The interested individual cannot do justice to the issues if he confines himself to what can be ascertained exclusively from the use of formal reasoning. Such a restriction is bound to lead to a noncommittal attitude, not because of the religious issues as such but because of the failure to make use of the concrete reasoning required by the situation.

Probability and Assent

At this juncture, however, Newman was confronted with a strong objection propounded by William Froude (brother of Richard Froude) and other members of the Victorian scientific community. They noted Newman's statement in the Apologia about his agreement with Joseph Butler that probability is the guide of our life. In addition they noted the function assigned by Newman to the illative sense of discerning the convergence of probabilities among several strands of argument. To Froude, it seemed that the unavoidable result is that Newman's way of concrete reasoning can yield nothing higher than a probable conclusion, which is essentially open to constant revision. This falls considerably short of the certitude claimed by Newman for the act of religious faith.

Newman's treatment of this difficulty constitutes another major topic in the Grammar of Assent. Indeed, the book's title derives from his wrestling with this issue, as recorded in the following entry in his journal. "At last, when I was up at Glion over the Lake of Geneva, it struck me 'You are wrong in beginning with certitude—certitude is only a kind of assent—you should begin with contrasting assent and inference.' On that hint I spoke, finding it a key to my own ideas" (Journal, August 11, 1865). In fixing upon assent as something different from inference, Newman was able to clarify his position with respect to Froude's objection. His terminology was geared to the earlier, Lockean era in British empiricism, but the thrust of his argument concerns the relationship between religious faith and what Charles Peirce was already calling the ideal of scientific fallibilism.

Newman felt that at least one difficulty rested upon a linguistic confusion. His critics treated probability as a trait belonging to propositions and arguments, in which respect they contrasted it with the certainty of propositions. But just as he considered certitude a quality of the mind, so Newman viewed probability as a relationship involving the mind in an existential situation, rather than as a relationship among propositions in an argument. In Newman's conception, reasoning is probable to the extent that it is nonformal. Whenever inference is carried on in a context other than that of formal logic and mathematics, it is probable in the sense of not being governed by the intention of yielding a logicomathematical sort of proof. So understood, the probable is not contrasted with the demonstrative and the certain as such, but rather with the formal kind of demonstration and the abstract kind of certitude. Whenever the mind is inquiring about a concrete matter of fact, it is engaged in probable reasoning. This means that we are adapting our investigation to the conditions of particular existents, not that we are seeking only a weaker form of evidence and consequence in our reasoning. Thus probability, as understood by Newman, does not exclude certitude of assent but permits it to be achieved in matters pertaining to the concrete world and its connections in being.

Historically, Newman had to face Locke's restriction of probability to those inevident relations among ideas that permit neither intuitive nor demonstrative knowledge. Locke also held that belief is an act of assent that cannot rise above the probability of the inference leading to it and hence cannot enjoy the certainty of intuition or demonstration. Newman had two grounds of disagreement with this teaching. First, there is no general rule necessarily subsuming religious assent under Lockean probability. Whether there is certitude in an act of religious faith cannot be settled by general stipulation about the meaning of probability and the judgment of belief. There must be a direct examination of the particular case and its grounds for claiming something about the order of concrete fact. Second, the act of assent is no mere shadow or reduplication of the conclusion of the inferential process. Using J. S. Mill's canons of induction, Newman sought to show the distinctive nature of assent as an act of the mind that remains irreducible to either the formal conclusion of an inference or to its psychological correlate in the act of concluding. We always conclude in a referential and conditional way, in view of what the premises state. But assent is made directly to the proposition as true; hence assent intends the certitudinal acceptance of the proposition in itself as being a true one. Newman made an extensive analysis of such expressions as "half assent, "conditional assent," and "hesitating assent." These describe circumstances surrounding the assent or features of the content to which assent is given rather than the act of assent itself.

The drift of Newman's reply to Locke and Froude is fairly clear. The sort of probability that he accepts as a guide and about which the illative sense must make an appraisal consists in a relation of the human mind to concrete modes of being. We follow the way of probability when we adapt our analysis to the concrete particulars and make a personal appraisal of the particular evidence. Our concrete personal thinking does not always attain certitude, but there is no a priori reason drawn from the definition of assent and probability that prevents us in principle from attaining it. Furthermore, there remains a difference in structure and intention between the inferential process and the act of assent. The revisability attaching to the former, especially in scientific inquiries, does not prevent the achievement of assent with certitude in some concrete instances. Newman's defense of the certitude in the act of religious faith depends upon keeping inference and assent distinct, as well as upon interpreting probability in terms of his theory of concrete reasoning.

Notional and Real Assent

Within the order of assent itself, Newman distinguished between notional and real assent. His view cannot be understood if it is taken as implying an opposition in principle between these modes of assent, or as assigning all the intellectual worth to real assent. The distinction is a functional one, arising from Newman's study of the interpretative operations of the mind. In assenting to a proposition, we can intend to accept the statement itself as true or to accept the real thing intended by the statement. A notional assent is one made to the truth of the proposition itself, whereas a real assent is one made to the reality itself intended by the proposition. Thus one may give a notional assent to God in terms of some abstract divine attributes and also give a real assent to God considered as a personal being who cares for one as an individual person. This is a matter of interpretation on the part of the mind that is considering the statement. In the case of purely ideal inquiries, a notional assent is sufficient. But we live in a translinguistic world, and our questions reach out to the community of real existents, especially to other persons. Here, the mind's notional assent must be integrated with, and further perfected by, a real assent to the very realities under investigation.

For Newman, the fully appropriate intellectual response to our human situation is unavoidably a complex one, involving both notional and real assents. Taken by itself, the way of real assent is intense but unclarified. We need to engage in both formal and informal inference, weighing the evidence carefully and arriving at a careful act of notional assent. Inference and notional assent are indispensable elements in human cognition; otherwise we could not weigh the pertinent evidence on an issue, do justice to the difficulties, or formulate the theoretical findings with cool precision of statement. Thus Newman assigned a large role to the modes of formal and informal inference and to notional assent in the total composition of human knowledge.

But he also insisted upon the need for directly relating the mind to individual existents. The act of real assent achieves our intellectual orientation toward the domain of concrete existents and their values. It does so by furnishing a concrete image of the individual being under consideration and by establishing the relevance of that imaged reality to the inquirer's own personal life. Real assent does not necessarily ensure action, but it does furnish a necessary condition for our practical responses by directing our mind toward the real existent, grasped in an image that can appeal to our passions and will.

There is a strongly theistic motive behind Newman's insistence upon blending inference, notional assent, and real assent. Humankind's relationship to God is not yet one of direct vision; hence we must engage in inference. Since theistic inquiry concerns a real existent, it is not enough to employ formal inference, even though its resources must be used to analyze and test our arguments. A concrete personal mode of reasoning is also required in order to proportion our inquiry as fully as possible to the situation of man's search after the truth about God. Our aim must be the complex one of attaining some definite and well-grounded propositions to which we can legitimately give our notional assent, and also of forming a concrete image of the personal, morally good, and providential God to whose reality we can then give our real assent and practical attachment.

Conscience and the Moral Life

Newman's final philosophical problem in the Grammar was to describe the area where he personally could realize this synthesis of intellectual acts bearing on the being of God. He readily admitted that there are many ways to God and that many natural informants lead us to him: the way of causality and purpose, the meaning of human existence and history, and the import of our moral life. As a reader of Hume and a contemporary of Charles Darwin, however, Newman refused to grant independent value to the design argument, which he regarded as a supplementary way of looking at nature on the part of those who already accept God on other grounds. To reach the transcendent, personal God, Newman examined the witness of our moral life, for this is a personal region where relations with other persons are best established. It is here that we have the experience of conscience, of being under command to do and not to do, of being responsible to a just and caring person who transcends our human reality but does so in a way that keeps him personally concerned about our conduct. Conscience as a commanding act discloses the full human situation of our responsibility toward the good God.

Three features of the living command of conscience recommend it to Newman as the best way of achieving real as well as notional assent to God: its intentional character, its personal significance, and its practical ordination. The dictate of conscience by its very structure refers the conscientious man beyond himself, pointing him toward the reality of the supreme lawgiver and judge of his moral actions. This is not a purely abstract orienting of our mind but involves a concrete image of God as our concerned father. Another advantage of the way of conscience is that the moral relationship in which it consists is personal in both poles of reference. Conscience engages me precisely as a personal self; hence it enables me to give a real assent to God as a morally concerned person. Finally, the acts of conscience relate us to the personal God in a concrete way that leads to moral and religious actions. Hence the approach to God from conscience encourages us to assent to the truth about God not only notionally but really, not only in respect to our propositions but also in respect to the personal, provident reality of God himself as the practical goal of our knowledge and love.

As a reader of Hume and Mill, Newman was very sensitive to the naturalistic criticism based upon physical and moral evil in our world. He suggested that the moral problem of theism be treated within a moral context. One cannot pose an objection to theism on moral grounds and then rule out the conditions that would permit theism to present its moral type of interpretation. Real assent to God as the lord of conscience furnishes a frame of reference for wrestling with evil and discerning his providential presence. A mind that is carefully formed upon the theistic implications of conscience "interprets what it sees around it by this previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials. Thus conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator" (Grammar, Ch. 5). Whereas the naturalistic critic appeals to the vast disorder as an antecedent reason for withholding our assent from God, Newman asks us to secure first of all the inward principle of interpretation provided by the personal and moral relation of men to the lord of conscience. The work of this principle is not to soften or gloss over the power of evil, but to bring in the other considerations concerning God and moral man that will enable us to understand and work with hope against physical and moral evil in our world.

Historical Development and Social Principles

Like other nineteenth-century thinkers, Newman was dissatisfied with the older empiricism's emphasis on the solitary and static individual perceiver. Hence he widened his horizon to include the social, developmental, and historical aspects of human experience. His Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) opens with a chapter on the general nature and kinds of development among ideas. Here Newman explores the logic of those social ideals that grip the minds of men and account for developments in their beliefs and institutions.

For Newman, two questions are of prime importance in understanding the social growth of ideas and institutions: Why do certain ideas display themselves only through historical development? What pattern is common to diverse sorts of developing social principles? As an answer to the first question, Newman points to the interpretative activity of many minds as they are engaged in judging, relating, evaluating, and dealing practically with our complex world. There are some meanings that can be worked out only in this gradual social way. Historically important ideas are those that contain many facets and require the interpretative activity of many minds, testing and developing them over many years. "Ordinarily an idea is not brought home to the intellect as objective except through this variety; like bodily substances, which are not apprehended except under the clothing of their properties and results, and which admit of being walked around, and surveyed on opposite sides, and in different perspectives, and in contrary lights, in evidence of their reality" (Development, Ch. 1). We can grasp the intentional structure of basic human meanings only through studying their various perspectives, forcing them to enter the battlefield of critical discussion, and sometimes embodying them in visible, powerful social institutions.

Newman also suggested that there is a common pattern of development that has certain traits distinguishing a healthy growth from a sickly one. His seven criteria for genuine development are preservation of the type of principle that is socially influential, continuity of these principles, their capacity for assimilation of new data, their logical sequence in organizing a complex social process, their anticipation of their own future, conservation of their past achievements, and their chronic vigor. He deliberately illustrated these criteria by showing their development in kingdoms, economic policies, religious convictions, scientific hypotheses, and philosophical theories. Although the entire analysis is applied ultimately to the theological question of development among Christian doctrines, Newman's comparative use of empirical materials indicates the wider significance of his study of the dynamics of human thought and institutional forms. He himself, in fact, makes an explicit application of this theory of development to the ideas of civilization, the political constitution, and the university.

The University

Newman's effort at interpreting the Western ideal of the university in the context of his theory of development is revealed in The Idea of a University. He was more keenly aware than most of his contemporaries that the crucial decisions affecting the course of cultural development were being made within the university. It was replacing the episcopal palace, the banking house, and the parliamentary floor as the real center for determining the long-range direction of human history. Newman looked for a fresh synthesis of tradition and originality in the university community. The task of such a community is to educate men for the world by gradually introducing them to the full complexity of our humanistic, scientific, and religious interpretations. This it should try to do by cultivating an understanding of the various methods and ways of knowing, along with an awareness of their differences, limitations, and possibilities for unification.

As a Catholic churchman, Newman devoted the bulk of his writings to problems raised by the Christian faith and its practical institutions, especially as they are brought into close relation with modern humanistic and scientific ideas. His contributions to these issues might be considered as a sustained effort at education that draws its strength from both Christianity and the other components in the university ideal.

See also Aristotle; Bacon, Francis; Butler, Joseph; Darwin, Charles Robert; Enlightenment; Hume, David; Locke, John; Mill, John Stuart; Newton, Isaac; Paine, Thomas; Paley, William; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Propositions, Judgments, Sentences, and Statements; Religion; Religion and Morality; Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de; Whately, Richard.

Bibliography

works by newman

The following are modern editions of Newman's works: Two Essays on Biblical and on Ecclesiastical Miracles (New York, 1924); An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947); The Idea of a University, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947); Essays and Sketches, 3 vols., edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1948); Apologia Pro Vita Sua, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947); An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949); Sermons and Discourses, 2 vols., edited by C. F. Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949); and The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, edited by C. S. Dessain (New York: T. Nelson, 1961–; to be published in 30 vols.).

works on newman

Benard, E. D. A Preface to Newman's Theology. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1945.

Boekraad, A. J. The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God according to J. H. Newman. Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1961.

Boekraad, A. J. The Personal Conquest of Truth according to J. H. Newman. Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955.

Bouyer, Louis. Newman: His Life and Spirituality. New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1958.

Collins, James. Philosophical Readings in Cardinal Newman. Chicago: Regnery, 1961. A presentation of Newman's philosophical views in terms of his theory of personal knowledge, his concrete inference to God, his notion of social development, and his account of the relationship between faith and reason.

Culler, A. D. The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman's Educational Ideal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955. An interpretation of the liberal and traditional strains in Newman's mind and educational outlook.

Walgrave, J.-H. Newman the Theologian. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960. An advanced analysis of the theory of development and the psychological aspect of Newman's approach.

Ward, Wilfrid. The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1912. A reliable, standard life, with many letters and documents.

James Collins (1967)