Assent and inference: can a mind be certain of what it cannot prove?

John Henry Newman, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Yes, and it is what people do constantly outside religion. Certitude follows an accumulation of converging probabilities judged by a personal faculty, and no formal inference reproduces that judgement.¹²

Sources

1. Keble, is brought forward in one of the earliest of the "Tracts for the Times." In No. 8 I say, "The Gospel is a Law of Liberty.

   Apologia pro Vita Sua

2. With the countless instances, on all sides of us, of human fallibility, with the constant exhibitions of antagonist certitudes, who can so sin against modesty and sobriety of mind, as not to be content with probability, as the true guide of life, renouncing ambitious thoughts, which are sure either to delude him, or to disappoint?

   An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent

Where the argument is made

• An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), especially the distinction of notional and real assent and the treatment of the illative sense
• Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (1843), particularly Sermons XI–XIII on faith and reason

How the argument was received

The philosophical core of the authorship and the part of it still argued about outside theology.