This is an extract from the Introduction to the book by Jane Rupert entitled John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science and the Humanities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), appearing here by kind permission of the author and publisher. All rights reserved.
ohn Henry Newman (1801-1889) surveyed our empirical era from the perspective of the whole span of western culture. He observed the modern claims for an education in empirical science that would suppress the idea of education that had endured since ancient Greece, an education that cultivated independent and personal judgment through both theoretical reasoning and literary thought. His own area of scholarship in the Greek Church Fathers of the third and fourth centuries and his readings in Clement and Origen from the early centuries of the Church affirmed to him the deep reality of the invisible behind the visible, a realm that was beyond the purview of modern empirical science. And he noted with dismay the gathering momentum of a modern revival of an ancient materialist philosophy congenial to the modern era of physical science. This Epicurean philosophy was hostile to the personal cultivation of the mind that had been the foundation of western culture since antiquity, celebrated the emancipation of humankind from the shackles of religion, and reduced all thought to the function of mind required for the kind of knowledge pursued by modern science.
From his vantage point in the nineteenth century, Newman recognized the enormity of the consequences to western culture through the monopoly of mind exercised by the dual influences of experimental science and empirical philosophy — the loss of a versatility of intellect in those employed in the physical sciences, and the active denial by empirical philosophers of those parts of the mind cultivated in the humanities and engaged in religious belief. What was at stake went to the core of who we are as human beings, not only through the soul’s relation to God but also through the way we reach judgments and find our convictions in matters regarding both the human and the divine. Increasingly, Newman sensed a period looming in the west gripped by a narrow idea of mind reducing our perception of the world to the material plane alone. This movement was nothing less than an assault on reason itself as it had been understood and valued prior to the modern era.
In The Idea of a University Newman considers this assault on reason undertaken in the name of reason by empirical philosophers like John Locke, David Hume, and Lord Shaftesbury. All these philosophers demonstrated the tenets common to the philosophical materialism of Epicurus (341-279 BCE), revived in seventeenth century France, that had permeated the thought of subsequent empirical philosophy. Epicurus had perceived the cosmos on a strictly material plane and maintained that the only instrument of knowing was through sensation and inferences drawn from sense. He believed that the use of this rational instrument to explain the natural causes of things, such as earthquakes, would emancipate humankind from superstitious fear of the gods.
As Newman considers neo-Epicurean empirical philosophers in The Idea of a University, he points out how their contraction of reason to knowledge that begins with sense experience had in effect eliminated the verbal domain of the liberal arts and the spiritual domain of religion which can be known on their own terrain only through the instruments of mind proper to them. Newman cites, for example, from one of Hume’s dialogues where Epicurus argues that reason’s only legitimate path is to begin with sense observation or personal experience. God, Newman concludes, is reduced by this restriction on reason to what the microscope and telescope can reveal; religion becomes only a parasitical production of science....
Two of Newman’s illustrious contemporaries, one a neo-Epicurean philosopher and the other a man of science, described in their retrospective autobiographies the injury to their inner lives caused by the too exclusive exercise of empirical reason and the absence of the kind of reason cultivated in literature and the arts. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the utilitarian philosopher, and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the century’s eminent empirical scientist, both comment on the diminishment to their humanity that they perceived to be the result of the dominant use of empirical analysis in their professions.
In his Autobiography (1873), as Mill reflected on the depression that he had first experienced as a young man, he recalled how at that time he had lost the capacity to feel, including the Epicurean pleasure associated with doing good. He attributed this state to the imbalance fostered by the education he had received from his father [James Mill, the utilitarian philosopher] which cultivated analytical reasoning in the neo-Epicurean manner. Mill wrote that because this habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings when no other mental habit is cultivated, there is a need for natural complement and correction in other mental habits. Although he did not underestimate the value of analytical thought for its clarity, he speaks of it as undermining all desires and pleasures and as a “worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues.”
Mills’s recovery came initially through accidentally reading in a memoir the moving account of a distressed family which released his feelings. He says that Wordsworth’s landscape poetry also touched him because it was not just a literal description but involved “thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.” As a result of his experience, Mill realized that “the maintenance of a due balance among the faculties” now seemed of primary importance to him. He wrote that the cultivation of the analytical intellect needed to be balanced by the internal culture of the individual as a prime necessity of life.
The effect of the erosion of other ways of knowing through the constant use of the empirical method is also described in the personal testimony of Charles Darwin. Toward the end of a lifetime dedicated to empirical science, Darwin wrote in his autobiography that his mind seemed to have become a machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. He referred to the atrophy through disuse of the part of his brain that had once delighted in poetry, music, and art. He said that he regretted this loss not only as a loss of happiness but as possibly injurious to the intellect, and probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. Were he able to live his life over again, he wrote, he would make a practice of reading some poetry and listening to some music at least once each week.
Related Material
Bibliography and Further Reading
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. London: Collins, 1958.
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. Citations: pp. 89, 93, 96.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
Rupert, Jane. John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
_____. "Newman and Bacon." The Downside Review 118:410 (2000) 45-67.
_____. "Newman on Pedagogical Practice." Newman Studies Journal 17:1 (2020) 103-16.
_____. "Newman and the Tyranny of Method in Contemporary Education" in Newman, Doctor of the Church. Oxford: Family Publications, 2007.
_____. "The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education." Logos 3:2 (2000) 118-44.
Created 2 August 2023