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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat Jun 7, 2003 2:35 pm
Subject: Illation and "Brideshead Revisited"

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=62459

from Evelyn Waugh, "Brideshead Revisited", Everyman's Library
Edition,
pg. 112

ISBN 0 - 679 - 43200 - 1

Charles Ryder reminisced:

Religion predominated in the house; not only in its practices - the
daily mass and Roasary, morning and evening in the chapel - but in
all its intercourse. 'We must make a catholic of Charles,' Lady
marchmain said, and we had many little talks together during my
visits when she delicately steered the subject into a holy quarter.

One was never summoned for a little talk, or consciously led to it;
it merely happened, when whe wished to speak intimately, that one
found oneself alone with her, if it was summer, in a secluded walk by
the lakes or in a corner of the walled rose-gardens; if it was
winter, in her sitting-room on the first floor.

from pg. 122-123

I have here compressed into a few sentences what, there, required
many. Lady marchmain was not diffuse, but she took hold of her
subject in a feminine, flirtatious way, circling, approaching,
retreating, feinting; she hovered over it like a butterfly; she
played 'grandmother's steps' with it, gettingnearer the real point
imperceptibly whicl one's back was turned, standing rooted when she
was observed.

===============

from William F. Buckley, Jr., "Nearer My God", Page 246
Doubleday
ISBN 0 385 47818 6

Russell Kirk wrote:

"I was not "converted" to the (Roman Catholic) Church, but made my
way into it through what Newman calls "illation" - fragments of truth
collecting in my mind through personal experience, conversations,
knowledge of exemplars, and much reading and meditating.

============================================

We know more than we can tell, then, because the things that we know
are not purely rational constructs, but incommunicable realities.

It is Newman's observation that helps to explain the tacit dimension
shows that thought, like things, eludes articulation. This is a truth
that may be confirmed by introspection, but cannot be proven to those
who refuse to assent on "reasonings not demonstrative." Newman was
convinced that it is wrong to assume that "whatever can be thought
can be adequately expressed in words." Since we cannot inspect
others' interior processes, we can only see for ourselves in our own
patterns of consciousness that there are indeed "acts of the mind
without the intervention of language." Newman was conscious of the
paradox of attempting to speak about that which language cannot
adequately express, and he concedes that examples which confirm his
position "are difficult to find, from the very circumstance that the
process from first to last is carried on as much without words as
with them." Ironically, some of Newman's most beautiful and
arresting rhetoric is devoted to the topic of the inadequacy of
language to represent the free flow of thought:

In the unreflective state of simple assent, we may remain unconscious
of the view from which our assents stem: "Each of us looks at the
world in his own way, and does not know that perhaps it is
characteristically his own."

When confronted with this fact of human experience, it is natural to
embark on a conversion project to transform simple assent into
complex assent.There are some notable successes in this effort, as
when we move from a hunch to certitude through a long process of
finding or creating connections to verify the insight: "it not
infrequently happens, that while the keenness of the ratiocinative
faculty enables a man to see the ultimate result of a complicated
problem in a moment, it takes years for him to embrace it as a truth,
and to recognize it as an item in the circle of his knowledge."(Other
fundamental presuppositions resist such illumination. There are some
kinds of knowledge that refuse to be cast into formal operations.
Just as there are no rules that can replace genius, so there are no
rules that can take the place of real apprehension:

A peasant who can accurately predict the weather] does not proceed
step by step, but he feels all at once and together the force of
various combined phenomena, though he is not conscious of them.
Again, there are physicians who excel in the diagnosis of complaints;
though it does not follow from this, that they could defend their
decision in a particular case against a brother physician who
disputed it. They are guided by natural acuteness and varied
experience; they have their own idiosyncratic modes of observing,
generalizing, and concluding; when questioned, they can but rest on
their own authority, or appeal to the future event

http://www.bartleby.com/61/27/I0032700.html

Illation:

The act of inferring or drawing conclusions. 2. A conclusion drawn; a
deduction. Also called illative. ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin ill ti , ill
ti n-, from Latin ill tus, past participle of nferre, to carry in,
infer : in-, in; + l tus, brought

Illation

(Il*la"tion) n. [L. illatio, fr. illatus, used as p. p. of inferre to
carry or bring in, but from a different root: cf. F. illation. See
1st In- , and Tolerate, and cf. Infer.] The act or process of
inferring from premises or reasons; perception of the connection
between ideas; that which is inferred; inference; deduction;
conclusion.

Fraudulent deductions or inconsequent illations from a false
conception of things.

- Sir T. Browne.

1627 G. HAKEWILL Apol., The ground he assumes is unsound, and his
illation from thence deduced inconsequent. - Fred Nicholls

http://www2.canisius.edu/~moleski/pkzm.htm

The purpose of this essay is to show how two very different thinkers
came to surprisingly similar conclusions about the nature of knowing.
The claim made here is that Newman recognized the reality that
Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge," while Polanyi recognized the reality
that Newman calls "illative sense." Where Newman treated the tacit
dimension as a matter of fact, Polanyi attempted to develop a theory
to account for this fact. What one man noted in passing, the other
stopped to explore at length. Newman focused on the capacity of the
mind to regulate itself by means of the illative sense; Polanyi
concentrated on the product of this potency in the accumulation of
tacit knowledge.

Newman introduced the term, "illative sense," in the last three
chapters of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, as a "grand word
for a common thing." This "grand word" refers to the theme of
informal reasoning, to which Newman returned repeatedly over three
decades of reflection. In his 1840 sermon, "Implicit and Explicit
Reason," Newman anticipated many of the points developed at greater
length in the Grammar:

The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and advances forward
with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and
versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to
point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then
availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received
law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some
popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory;
and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff,
who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows
not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by
rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is
not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale
the mountains of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general,
as the ascent of a skillful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a
way which they alone can take; and its justification lies in their
success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not
gifted, commonly reason,--not by rule, but by an inward faculty

Where British empiricists were inclined to hold that 1) one must not
believe what one does not understand and 2) one must not believe what
cannot be proven, Newman took the opposite tack:

. . . Edward Caswall, a priest of the Birmingham Orator, wrote in his
copy of the Grammar, after discussing it with Newman in 1877: "Object
of the book twofold. In the first part shows that you can believe
what you cannot understand. In the second part that you can believe
what you cannot absolutely prove."

It is the illative sense, operating informally, which licenses assent
to what we cannot understand and to what we cannot prove. In the last
analysis, Newman's Grammar of Assent declares that there are no rules
adequate to determine the conditions of legitimate assent; it is only
our own personal judgment that determines whom and what to trust.

Newman did not directly use the (admittedly provocative and
contemporary) term, "feelings." Instead, he used various forms of the
verb, "to feel," in order to distinguish the quality of illation from
that of formal argument, as in this passage: ". . . 'rational' is
used in contradistinction to argumentative, and means 'resting on
implicit reasons,' such as we feel, indeed, but which for some cause
or other, because they are too subtle or too circuitous, we cannot
put into words so as to satisfy logic

http://www.op.org/steinkerchner/comps/notes/newman.html

Newman never really defines illation: some believe that Newman
borrowed the term from Locke, who used illation in the Essay
concerning human understanding, Book 4, Chapter XVII, as the
intellectual faculty that "consists in nothing but the perception of
the connection there is between the ideas, in each step of the
deduction". On pg. 251 Newman equates illation with
the "ratiocinative", or the natural reasoning faculty of the mind. On
pg. 260 we first encounter the "illative sense", which is "right
judgment in ratiocination", or the "power of judging and concluding,
when in its perfection". In this sense, we are close to the
Aristotelian fronesis, which "guides the mind in matters of conduct".

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12673b.htm

PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING

There is an important sense, however, in which the epithet "material"
has been applied to reasoning, to denote illation in which the
relational formality has not yet been dissected out. The same laws of
thought rule the philosopher's reasoning and the peasant's, but the
latter's conclusion will only be fairly certain when its matter comes
within his usual cognizance. A man can reason well about familiar
matter; but, unless he has explicitly examined the illative process,
he will hesitate and err when dealing with new subject-matter. The
mistakes of inventors like Newton and Leibniz are very instructive on
this point. We are all, then, as Newman put it, more or less
departmental; we reason with unequal facility on different subjects.
Does it follow that in such cases of concrete informal reasoning
there is a rational surplusage of assurance over evidence? This does
not seem so clear, and cannot be answered without some analysis. Long
before the dawn of modern psychology, Aristotle emphasized the fact
that we never think without having an accompanying sense-process,
whether it be a visual image, or an auditory symbol or even the motor
impression of a word. The Scholastics also admitted this, and indeed
many urged the necessity of this conversio ad phantasmata as the
explanation of our piecemeal ratiocinative mode of learning. But this
is not equivalent to saying that all reasoning can be exactly
formulated, crystallized, as it were, into words. Language, after
all, is merely a conventional drapery of our thought, which is
convenient for logical analysis and for communicating with others.
But do we not in ordinary life often syllogize in sights and reason
in sounds? Does not our mind in its inferences leap far ahead of the
sluggish machinery of language? And which of us has ever succeeded in
fully analyzing his most commonplace attitude or emotion? To account,
then, for the major part of our existence we must admit something
analogous to the Aristotelean phrónesis) whether we call it the
illative sense, or the artistic reason, or implicit thought. The main
thing to observe is that it is not a special faculty. It is our
reason acting under disabilities of language rather than of thought;
for, after all, evidence is for ourselves while demonstration has
reference to the audience.

http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/anichols/grammar2.htm

THE ILLATIVE SENSE: EXPERIENCE AND TRUTH

Newman is not out here to manufacture from the common stuff of
experience some arcane and hitherto unrecognized power. As he wrote,
the illative sense "is a grand word for a common thing." In several
essays on the Grammar of Assent, Dessain drew his readers' attention
to a passage in Willa Cather's novel, Shadows on the Rock, set in
French Canada:

"When there is no sun, I can tell directions like the Indians."
Here Auclair interrupted him.

"And how is that, Antoine?"

Frichette smiled and shrugged.

"It is hard to explain, by many things. The limbs of the trees are
generally bigger on the south side, for example. The moss on the
trunks is clean and dry on the north side - on the south side it is
softer and maybe a little rotten. There are many little signs; put
them together and they point you right."

"They point you right": this is the heart of the illative sense. A
whole host of features of experience conspire to "carry us into" (the
original late Latin sense of illatio) the more spacious realm of a
conclusion that is larger than any of them. The heaping together of
tiny indications, none of which by itself is conclusive, produces
certitude in ordinary human affairs. At some point there is a
qualitative change in the quantitative amassment of evidence. Spread
out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on a table, and it may be only
probable that they are more than an accidental collocation. Fit them
together and there will be no doubt. Newman himself, according to his
first notable biographer, Wilfred Ward, once used the illustration of
a cable, which is made up of a number of separate threads, each
feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod
represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents
moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probabilities,
separately insufficient for certainty, but when put together,
irrefragible.

The application to religious belief is not far to seek. In Newman's
novel Loss and Gain, the protagonist, the undergraduate Charles,
finds himself confronted by just the dilemma exposed in Newman's
correspondence with William Froude. In a carriage of the Great
Western Railway, Charles enters into conversation with a Catholic
priest who identifies him as an "Oxford man" by noting telltale
features of his fellow traveler's demeanor. The ability to make such
judgments is not a bit surprising, says the priest, for "a man's
moral self is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in
the tips of his fingers and the spring of his insteps. A very little
thing tries what a man is made of." This is the illative sense at
work in an everyday world. Charles, who is struggling with the very
problems of religious thought that Newman's career had raised, senses
the relevance of the priest's remark to his own concerns. During the
conversation, his obscure sense of a way forward becomes gradually
clarified. His difficulty is exactly Froude's. "The evidence of
revealed doctrine is so built up on probabilities that I do not see
what is to introduce it into a civilised community, where reason has
been cultivated to the utmost, and argument is the test of truth."
The priest points out that we can in fact quite properly give our
assent in cases where formal inference will never find reason enough
to bring us to a conclusion. Charles asks, "Do you mean that before
conversion one can attain to a present abiding actual conviction of
this truth?" "I do not know," answered the other; "but at least he
may have habitual moral certainty; I mean a conviction, and one only
steady, without rival conviction, or even reasonable doubt, present
to him when he is most composed and in his hours of solitude, and
flashing on him from time to time, as through clouds, when he is in
the world. . . "

"Then you mean to say," said Charles, while his heart beat
faster, "that a person is under no duty to wait for clearer light?"

"He will not have, he cannot expect, clearer light before conversion.
Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an
act of the will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace
the truth when nature like a coward shrinks. You must make a venture;
faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a grace after
it."

"Certainty in its highest sense": Newman is speaking here, as the
language of "grace" implies, of a supernatural state of the mind, and
the analysis of the act of faith in terms of reason and will is very
much the commonplace account of classical Latin Christian theology
rather than the personal tones of Newman himself. But it is arrival
at the "habitual moral certainty" which precedes the gracious act of
faith itself that is characteristically Newmanian, proceeding as it
does by implicit reason working through the delicate instrumentality
of the illative sense. Of this, a major Newman scholar has summed
up: "It is the mind in its perfection, judging and correlating at the
highest point of any given individual; it concerns itself with
principles, doctrines, facts, memories, experiences, testimonies, in
order to attain insights too delicate and subtle for logical
analysis." One illuminating way to see Newman's concept of illation
is to view it as a transposition into a philosophical key of the
sacramentalism of the English religious tradition. The illative sense
actualizes our capacity to uncover, by a searching and subtle
attention to experience in its complexity, the sacramental
transparence of the world to God. We touch here on a presupposition
of Catholic Christianity consciously recovered by Anglicans in the
seventeenth-century renaissance of Christian Platonism, itself the
successor to the "long reign of Nominalism through the unmetaphysical
epoch of the Reformation."

The man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he chooseth, through it may pass,
And then the heaven espy.

3) Certitude and illation

We mentioned earlier how for Newman reflex assent differs from simple
assent as the former is explicit and conscious. The fact that a
proposition is embraced by a reflex assent is one of the
prerequisites that Newman sets so that a proposition can be a
certitude. The other two prerequisites are a psychological state that
Newman calls repose, and what he terms the "indefectibility of
certitude"- the fact that once certitude is attained, it can longer
be lost. In Ch. VI, pg. 164, Newman writes that "no man is certain of
a truth who can endure the thought of the fact of its contradictory
existing or occurring"; certitude cannot co-exist with hesitation or
doubt. At the same time, certitude does not depend on proofs; in
fact, as we pointed out earlier, in concrete matters proofs cannot in
any way be regarded as the "creating cause" of certitude, as it is
instead the case with speculative reasoning. Newman does in fact
claim that it is possible not to reach certitude even after being
confronted with a perfectly cogent chain of arguments; certitude,
though necessarily given to complex propositions at the end of an
inferential process, is a strictly personal phenomenon. Knowledge is
merely the contemplation of truth as objective; on the other hand,
certitude means that what the intellect is contemplating outside
itself is objective.

As we mentioned earlier, the typical objection to this stance is that
in concrete matters no proof that we can devise can go beyond the
sphere of probability. Newman does not really answer this objection,
but merely claims that in some occasions we are just unable not to
assent to a truth that cannot be proved. Again, the feeling of repose
concerning a certitude might simply reflect a particular
psychological disposition, rather than any objective reality; there
is no reason why a prejudice should not also give rise to a feeling
of repose. The most problematic question, however, is that of
certitude's indefectibility, which is the term Newman uses to
indicate the persistence of assent and repose in relation to a
complex proposition.

In Chapter VII, pg. 181, Newman claims that "the intellect (…) is
made for truth, can attain truth, and having attained it, can keep
it, can recognize it and can preserve the recognition". We all know
however that very often we hold convictions for a long time only to
find out at a later stage that they did not provide us with an
adequate understanding of reality. It becomes therefore quite
difficult to believe that certain assertions might be held with a
certitude that is no longer liable to change. Newman responds to this
argument by developing a distinction between infallibility and
certitude, where the former is posited as a faculty that can be
applied to every possible subject matter, while certitude can only be
applied to particular (complex) propositions. People can therefore be
infallible, as well as abstract rules, while propositions can only be
regarded as infallible in a broader sense of the term, if they are
the result of an infallible procedure. So, if the certitude is found
to lack justification, we are to exercise greater caution in granting
it- what Newman is saying is effectively that we might believe to
hold a certitude, but in fact we have only reached a mistaken
conviction. If this is so, the issue becomes really a semantic
dispute on the meaning of certitude, whose "authentic presence" in
the mind of the subject is independent of what the subject thinks
about it.

The problem of certitude in the area of religion is particularly
problematic, as according to Newman the acceptance of a religion does
not simply imply a simple or a complex assent to a set of
propositions, but rather, in the words of G. Casey, "a complex of
various propositional attitudes adopted towards those elements of
religion which are propositional". According to Newman's view on
certitude, a Protestant does hold a number of propositions about
Christianity, some being certitudes, some being mistaken convictions.
In this way, if a Protestant abandons Protestantism and embraces
Catholicism, he is simply retaining the certitudes that he held
before and shedding the false convictions that he held before; so, it
never happens that earlier certitudes have to be dropped. This
argument does not appear to be fully convincing; in fact, as we
mentioned earlier, we are effectively left with no criteria to
discriminate between real certitude on one hand and illegitimate
prejudices on the other.

The importance of this illative sense stems from the fact that its
scope is not as restricted as that of inference, so that by using it
we can reach conclusions that are outside the scope of logical
thought. Illative sense can consider matters that cannot be clearly
expressed or consciously analyzed: in this way, we might reach a
conclusion without being able to articulate to ourselves the premises
that we have used to reach a conclusion, while remaining convinced of
the correctness of this conclusion. In formal reasoning, the
individual might be able to connect premises and conclusions by
necessary links; in an illation, the mind is attempting to determine
the balance and the degree of probability of a conclusion. Some
commentators have argued that such method does effectively escape
description and therefore is beyond our comprehension.

In fact, the method of convergent probabilities that we outlined
earlier in connection with the relation between the polygons and the
circle have a marked similarity with methods of legal inference. The
determination of whether a person is guilty or not of murder is often
the result of a process where the judge weighs the evidence and
assesses it against the deliverances of her own moral intuition to
decide the likelihood of a possible verdict. Matters of faith are
very much like legal matters, in the sense that ultimately they are a
personal decision. Illation, therefore, is not an irrational
procedure, but rather it is the "most natural way of reasoning" and
is found in the educated and in "the state of nature". Since this
instinct of illation is "natural", Newman thinks that we can trust
its conclusions and that it should not be regarded as necessarily
less trust-worthy than memory or sense perception. The correctness of
the conclusions obtained by the illative sense does not necessarily
depend on a direct intervention of God who ratifies the conclusion,
but merely on the power given to us by nature to obtain conclusions
using informal methods.

The value of illation as an antecedent of assent can be weakened if
illation is influenced by subjective factors. On pg. 230 Newman
acknowledges that our moral state can affect our illative
conclusions; "in ordinary minds", he says on pg. 251, illation might
be "biased and degraded by prejudice, passion and self-interest". So
the individual who really wants to discover truth without being
misled by personal considerations is most likely to benefit from the
illative sense. Since Newman appreciates the impact of the personal
element in illation, he stresses the significance of personal
testimony in relation to religious assent. This is what leads him to
accumulate almost one hundred pages of examples of personal
testimonies to the truth of Christianity in the last chapter of the
book. This has exposed Newman to the accusation that he was more
interested in the "psychological" rather than in the "logical" aspect
of the faith. We must remember, however, that Newman does not use the
term "certainty" and "logic" as synonymous: in fact, even the
conclusion attained by means of the illative sense can be regarded as
representatives of a wider type of "logic".

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