Conscience - John Newman

John Henry Newman – Conscience as “God Given”

J.H. Newman (1801 – 1890) began his adult life as an evangelical Anglican at Oxford. He began a journey through “High Church” Anglicanism until in 1845 he converted to Roman Catholicism. He ended his life a Cardinal in Birmingham.

• Much of his time as a Roman Catholic was spent arguing against “Ultra-Montanes” who proposed a total authority of the Pope. It was during this struggle that the First Vatican Council established the “Infallibility of the Pope” as a matter of doctrine.
• During his time as an Anglican, Newman did much to re-establish the theological credentials of the Church of England. The movement that he and his friends began (known as the Oxford Movement) went on to become a significant part of 20th Century Anglicanism.

In 1870 Newman published An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). He argues that we have a special sense by which we can give our assent to propositions – he called it our Illative Sense.

The Illative Sense

This sense is a spontaneous facility to reason. Newman had been trying to understand the distinctions between various levels of human consciousness. While in Switzerland, he came to a point where he could make some progress

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.” - J.H. Newman – Letters and Diaries Vol 25

From this position, Newman began to consider the way that people give their assent (agreement) to propositions. He argued that we can know with certainty far more than we can actually prove.

There is more to human knowledge than science and mathematics (compare this with “Hume’s Fork”), and most human beings rely on something other than formal (logical) or scientific knowledge.

Our reasoning ordinarily presents itself to our mind as a single act not a process or series of acts. We apprehend the antecedent and then the consequent, without explicit recognition of the medium connecting the two, as if by a sort of direct association of the first thought with the second. We proceed by a sort of instinctive perception from premise to conclusion...We perceive external objects and we remember past events without knowing how we do so, and in like manner we reason without effort and intention or any necessary consciousness of the path which the mind takes in passing from antecedent to conclusion.

Newman means that we do not “know” things either by scientifically proving them or through logic. Instead, Newman argues that we know things through the Illative Sense.

So what???

Rather than understanding what is right and wrong through our use of reason, or through conditioning, Newman argues that we have an illative sense of moral judgement, which is where we get feelings of guilt and responsibility.

• We can acquire knowledge through experience, or through our ability to use logic. The illative sense guides us towards assent in an informal and personal way. To infer something is to establish a set of premises and then to lead to a conclusion.
• It is through this informal illative sense that we can assent to the existence of God. We do this through our experience of the conscience.

I assume, then, that Conscience has a legitimate place among our mental acts; as really so, as the action of memory, of reasoning, of imagination, or as the sense of the beautiful; that, as there are objects which, when presented to the mind, cause it to feel grief, regret, joy, or desire, so there are things which excite in us approbation or blame, and which we in consequence call right or wrong; and which, experienced in ourselves, kindle in us that specific sense of pleasure or pain, which goes by the name of a good or bad conscience. This being taken for granted, I shall attempt to show that in this special feeling, which follows on the commission of what we call right or wrong, lie the materials for the real apprehension of a Divine Sovereign and Judge.

Our conscience is the “Voice of the Lawgiver”. This voice informs an individual’s moral decision making. Following the voice of the conscience is following the voice of God, since that is the source of the conscience’s promptings.

If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.

The illative sense allows us to accept the demands of the conscience.

Does Newman’s idea of the conscience stand up to Sociological and Psychological accounts?

Since Sociology and Psychology have claimed to provide apparent scientific explanations for the existence of the Conscience, and our experience of it, Newman’s argument appears to have been proved wrong.

But supporters of Newman’s idea argue that psychological theories for the existence and experience of Conscience have provided an apparently scientific explanation for its existence, but not for its origins or purpose.