Newman's belief in the power of the unconscious was equally firm and thoroughgoing. In his sermon on "Explicit and Implicit Reason," he means by "implicit reason" "unconscious meditation." "Reasoning is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art." "Progress," he said later, "is a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language." "As each individual has certain instincts of right and wrong antecedently to reasoning, on which he acts—and rightly—so has the world of men collectively. God gave them truths in His miraculous revelations. … These are transmitted as the 'wisdom of our ancestors.' " It was Newman's staunch belief in what is intuitive and instinctive that made him accept the wisdom of the race as more trustworthy than the reason of the individual. Consequently he believed that Christian truth is preserved not by the reasoning of the individual but by the diversified powers, insight, and feeling which are found in a long-continuing society. For Newman, therefore, the Catholic Church was the articulate voice of the body of Christian believers in the past—"the concrete representative of things invisible."[1]
These two great men, who did not understand each other, based their teachings on the same initial principle—the "doctrine of the unconscious." However far apart they were at the end, they insisted with graceful pleading or with tumultuous eloquence on these high moral truths: faith in what is spontaneous and sincere in one's own nature, and spontaneous and instinctive submission to those highly endowed men whose innate sincerity will redeem the world.
- ↑ Readers interested in Newman should see the new "Life" by Wilfrid Ward.
