Grammar of Ascent

This work serves as an introduction or initiation to the spiritual life so that the intellect may give its full assent to what it knows to be true. This book provides the first critical edition of John Henry Newman’s classic work, A Grammar of Assent. Newman explains how the human mind proceeds in matters of inference, assent and certitude, and how the faculty of judgment (for Newman, the “illative sense”) ranges over a far greater diversity and quantity of different kinds of evidence than can ever be produced by logic or science, and so brings us through doubt to certainty on the vast majority of human questions, which both logic and experiment are singularly ill-suited to address. Full use has been made of the manuscript drafts and all available philosophical notebooks and papers. This is a must read for those who dig and delve within philosophy and theology.