The Grammar of Assent

Newman's epistemological masterwork — an account of how we reach certainty in matters of religion and ordinary life, where formal logic is insufficient.

The illative sense: a faculty of judgment that synthesizes informal inference into certitude — neither formal logic nor mere feeling, but the trained capacity to draw warranted conclusions from complex, probabilistic evidence. Real vs. notional assent: real assent engages the whole person; notional assent is merely intellectual. A sophisticated defense of the rationality of religious belief that anticipates later work in informal logic and Bayesian epistemology.