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NEWMAN, IMAGINATION, AND THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

MATTHEW MULLER

In this article I argue that one way of approaching Newman’s Idea of a University is to view it as

a text about the formation of imagination. This is done in three parts. First, I identify the core

features of imagination as Newman conceived it by drawing on various sources from his life and

work. Second, I turn to Idea of a University in particular, primarily the “Lectures on University

Teaching,” to demonstrate that the concept of imagination is a significant underlying presence in

Newman’s lectures. Finally, I conclude with a brief analysis of the relationship between reason

and imagination within the university.

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INTRODUCTION

ewman’s Idea of a University remains, to the amazement of some modern critics,1 one of

the most influential defenses of liberal education today. In this article, I argue that one

way of approaching Idea, especially the “Lectures on University Teaching,” is to focus on the

formation of the imagination as an essential element of the habit of mind that is the primary end

of a University education. Admittedly, this is not Newman’s explicit intention. He offers no

systematic analysis of the term or its operation in the mind. He uses the word frequently, however,

in this text and in other writings throughout his life, and it is his conception of the function of

imagination that implicitly guides his lectures on university teaching.

To show this will first require an analysis of what Newman understood by imagination. He

employed the term throughout his life, and attempted to define it in his preparation for the

Matthew Muller is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Theology at Saint Louis University. He holds an M.A. in Catholic

Studies from the University of Saint Thomas. He is currently the Associate Director of the Institute for Missionary

Activity and an adjunct professor in theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. This paper was presented

in an abridged form at the 2014 Annual Conference of the Newman Association of America.

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1 See, for example, Frank M. Turner, “Newman’s University and Ours,” in The Idea of a University by John Henry

Newman, Rethinking the Western Tradition, ed. Frank Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 282–301,

282–97.

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Grammar of Assent.2 This text provides much of the material for understanding the role of the

imagination in theological discourse and in epistemology. Newman’s use of the term in other

writings, especially his personal correspondence and his descriptions of his movement from

Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, provide another source. From these sources, it becomes clear

that Newman’s conception of the imagination has several features. First, he frequently spoke of

imagination in conjunction with reason, and often in juxtaposition to it. Second, it is a potentially

prejudiced aspect of the mind that requires preparation and cultivation. Third, experiences are

impressed upon the imagination, and it is through these that it makes judgments of credibility.

Finally, it tends to operate “implicitly,” and is analogous to the “implicit reason” of the Oxford

University Sermons.3 In this operation, the imagination performs a dynamic, accumulative, and

subjective function.4 With this concept in mind, one can read Idea as a text about the cultivation

of the imagination. The goal of university teaching, or the “philosophical habit of mind,” along

with Newman’s concept and defense of the “circle of knowledge”; the analyses of “mere

knowledge”; “professional learning”; the “religion of philosophy”;5 and the role of the Church all

have a relationship to the operation of the imagination.

2 Nicholas Lash, introduction to An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 2001), 1–21, 14. Hereafter cited: Lash, introduction. 3 John Henry Newman, Sermon 13, “Implicit and Explicit Reason,” in Oxford University Sermons, 251–77,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/oxford/sermon13.html. Hereafter cited: Newman, “Implicit and Explicit.” 4 These terms are borrowed from Gerard Magill, “Newman and Moral Imagination,” Theological Studies 53 (1992):

451–75. 5 All quotations here are taken from Newman, The Idea of a University (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907),

Part 1. In order of appearance: Discourse 3, “Bearing of Theology on Other Knowledge,” 51 (hereafter cited:

Newman, Discourse 1.3); ibid., 67; Discourse 6, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Learning,” 127 (hereafter cited:

Newman, Discourse 1.6); Discourse 7, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill,” 151; and Discourse

8, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religious Duty,” 200. Idea of a University is hereafter cited: Idea.

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IMAGINATION

Relationship to Reason

As John Coulson conceded, “The term ‘imagination’ is one to which the maxim: ‘Don’t

ask for the meaning, ask for the use’, pre-eminently applies.”6 In what follows I attempt to show

the use as a means toward a functional meaning. Coulson also insisted that “imagination is not one

faculty and reason another.”7 As accurate as this is, the two were certainly distinct in Newman’s

mind. Writing in 1857, he noted, “Imagination is distinct from reason, but mistaken for it. What is

strange, is to the imagination false. It tends to doubt whatever is strange. Experience is the measure

of truth to imagination.”8 This simple definition illustrates not only the distinct difference between

imagination and reason, but also the mode of rationality proper to the imagination and its method

of judgment. Newman’s tendency to speak of reason and imagination as related yet distinct

operations was consistent throughout his life. In 1833, remarking on his time in the Mediterranean,

he explained, “I could not reconcile my imagination, only my reason, to the notion I should ever

get back.”9 Again, in November 1844, he wrote, “If you want to know plainly, I have little doubt

where I shall be this time in two years, though my imagination cannot embrace the idea.”10 This

distinction is also present in the Apologia. He describes the “shock” that “cast out of my

imagination” the validity of his Via Media. In response, he made the decision to “be guided, not

by my imagination, but by my reason,” adding, “had it not been for this severe resolve, I should

6 John Coulson, Religion and Imagination: In Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 6. Hereafter

cited: Coulson, Religion and Imagination. 7 Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 7. 8 Newman, Theological Papers of J.H. Newman on Faith and Certainty, ed. Hugo M. de Achaval, S.J., and J. Derek

Holmes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 47. 9 JHN to Frederic Rogers, Oriel College, 31 August 1833, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 4,

36. References to the larger work are hereafter cited: LD. 10 JHN to Miss Maria Rosina Giberne, Littlemore, 7 November 1844, LD, vol. 10, 390.

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have been a Catholic sooner than I was.”11 This distinction between reason and imagination

remained in Newman’s mind late in his life. Writing in 1882, commenting on the apparent

opposition of science to religion, he stated: “[I]t is not reason that is against us, but imagination.

The mind, after having, to the utter neglect of the Gospels, lived in science, experiences, on coming

back to Scripture, an utter strangeness in what it reads, which seems to it a better argument against

Revelation than any formal proof from definite facts or logical statements.”12 The imagination

judges in terms of “experience” and “strangeness,” while the reason does so through “formal proof

from definite facts or logical statements.” Here is a distinction much like that between implicit and

explicit reason. Both are, in a sense, “reason,” but they are distinct ways of knowing. As Nicholas

Lash explains, “Newman’s distinction is not between rational cognition and some other activity

which is nonrational, ‘merely subjective’ or irrational.” Rather, it is a distinction “between two

modes of rationality, or in [Newman’s] own words, between two ‘habits of mind.’”13

Potentially Prejudiced, Requiring Preparation

As the examples from Newman’s own life illustrate, the imagination is far from infallible.

It has tendencies “toward understanding and action as well as toward illusion and error.”14

Newman understood this well, and it is probably the most frequent manner in which he referred to

the imagination. Thus, in Idea, he wrote, “Recollect, the Memory can tyrannize, as well as the

Imagination.”15 Many of Newman’s sermons attempted to challenge and supplant some

“imagined” view of Christianity.16 He also viewed his brother Francis as suffering from a defective

11 Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 201, 215, http://newmanreader.org/works/apologia/part5.html. Hereafter cited:

Newman, Apologia. 12 JHN to W.S. Lilly, The Oratory, 7 December 1882, LD, vol. 30, 159–60. Emphasis mine. 13 Lash, introduction, 15. 14 M. Katherine Tillman, “Cardinal Newman on Imagination,” Religious Education 83, no.4 (Fall 1988): 601–10,

603–04. Emphasis mine. Hereafter cited: Tillman, “Cardinal Newman on Imagination.” 15 Newman, Discourse 1.6, 141. 16 Some examples include: Sermon 16, “Religious Cowardice,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2, 180,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon16.html (the larger work is hereafter cited: PPS);

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imagination. He wrote to Mrs. John Mozley, “[Francis] . . . has that great defect of imagination or

mysticism (so to put it) which will act always in keeping him from the Catholic system.”17

Newman certainly recognized that religious people could have a defective imagination as well,

which he linked to superstition. “Rationalism is the attempt to know how things are, about which

we can know nothing,” he wrote to Harriet Newman, noting that “on the other hand, when they

start unaccounted for, they impart a satisfaction of their own kind., viz of the imagination.” He

then aligned imagination and superstition, explaining, “When we ask for reasons, we rationalize –

When we detach and isolate things, which we should connect, we are superstitious.”18

Because the mind has this potential for prejudice or superstition, which potentially leads to

illusion and error, it is necessary to form and “prepare” the imagination. This was one of the

explicit goals of the Tractarian Movement. Newman described the project as an attempt to “prepare

the imaginations of men for a changed state of things,” and to “familiarize the imagination of the

reader to an Apostolical state of the Church.”19 The translation of the Roman Breviary was another

attempt to “prepare the imagination” of the English people. Newman wanted to “claim the Breviary

as ours,” with the hope of “getting up a feeling towards Antiquity among the members of the

Church, leaving it to work in time on the church itself as Providence shall order.”20 The great value

of the Breviary, as Newman explained to Henry Wilberforce, was its arrangement according to the

whole year, its daily variations, and the “unexciting, grave and simple” character of its prayers.

Sermon 28, “The Danger of Riches,” PPS, vol. 2, 355,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon28.html; Sermon 9, “A Particular Providence as

Revealed in the Gospel,” PPS, vol. 3, 129, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume3/sermon9.html. 17 JHN to Mrs. John Mozley, Oriel College, 28 April 1840, LD, vol. 7, 315. In the sermon, “Tolerance of Religious

Error,” Newman links imagination and mysticism when he describes a group that is “of a mystical turn of mind,

with untutored imaginations and subtle intellects, who follow the theories of the old Gentile philosophy.” This group

also believes that “[t]ruth [is] attained by means of the imagination.” Newman, Sermon 23, “Tolerance of Religious

Error,” PPS, vol. 2, 288, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon23.html. 18 JHN to Harriet Newman, 10 October 1835, LD, vol. 5, 151. 19 JHN to John William Bowden, Oriel College, 17 November 1833, LD, vol. 5, 108. 20 JHN to Hugh James Rose, Iffley, 23 May 1836, LD, vol. 5, 303–04.

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“This again I like much,” he wrote, “it keeps up attention and rouses the imagination towards the

course of the Christian year, without exciting it.”21 Like other Tractarian projects, the Breviary

translation is an example of an attempt to give Anglicans an experience of Apostolic devotion and

prayer. This brings us to the third aspect of the imagination in Newman’s thought: its dependence

on experience and its standard of credibility.

Impressed upon by Experience, Judges by Credibility

Coulson tells us that “[w]hat is credible is what becomes real to the imagination.”22 What

is “real” to the imagination, then, are “experiences and their images” that “strike and occupy the

mind.”23 Newman eloquently described this aspect of the imagination in the “Tamworth Reading

Room.” Drawing once again on the distinction between imagination and reason, Newman wrote,

“The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means

of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description.”24

Newman’s “experience” beginning with the fallout after Tract 90 provides an example of the way

various “direct impressions” and “the testimony of facts and events” forced upon his imagination

a view that the Anglican Church lacked Catholicity. He wrote to James Robert Hope in March

1844:

[A] series of thwartings such as I have experienced, (I do not mean, creates,

which logically they cannot do) but realizes, verifies, substantizes, a

“show,” “display,” or “impression”] of the English Church very

unfavourable to her Catholicity. If a person is deeply convinced in his reason that

21 JHN to Henry Wilberforce, Oriel College, 25 March 1837, LD, vol. 6, 47. 22 Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 58. 23 Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 37, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-

1.html. Hereafter cited: Newman, Grammar. 24 Newman, Discussions and Arguments, “Tamworth Reading Room,” 293–94,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/arguments/tamworth/section6.html, emphasis mine.

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her claims to Catholicity are untenable . . . such events . . . corroborate his reason

experimentally. They force upon his imagination and familiarize his moral

perception with the conclusions of his intellect.25

Newman’s own experience sheds light on the process of imaginative reasoning. Experience

makes impressions upon the imagination, which possesses a certain idea of the world. These

experiences are then judged according to their credibility. Something that does not fit in the

imagination comes across as “strange” or incredible, while things that do fit appear to the mind as

valid. Reason may hold certain “propositions,” but it is the imagination that rejects or accepts these

as “facts.” Therefore, an individual’s imagination contains certain presuppositions acquired

through experiences that predispose the individual to accept or reject appeals to reason. This is

why Newman believed that arguments are often rejected or accepted, not for their rational cogency,

but for circumstances that formed the hearer’s imagination. Newman described these as “a variety

of antecedent views, presumptions, implications, associations, and the like, many of which it is

very difficult to detect and analyze.”26 Those who hold them may hold them implicitly, without

the ability to articulate them. Here the operation of imagination and “implicit reason” converge

and point to the final aspect of imagination.

Implicit Reason

“Reasoning, then, or the exercise of Reason, is a living spontaneous energy within us, not

an art.”27 This description of “reasoning” belongs, as Newman went on to describe, to that “original

process of reasoning,” which is distinct from “arguing.” This latter form, also given the name,

“explicit reason,” contains the words, “science, method, development, analysis, criticism, proof,

25 JHN to James Robert Hope, Littlemore, 14 March 1844, LD, vol. 10, 165, emphasis mine. 26 Newman, “Implicit and Explicit,” 273. 27 Ibid., 257.

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system, principles, rules, laws, and others of a like nature.”28 Coulson draws together several

analogous binaries in Newman’s thought based on this distinction between implicit and explicit

reasoning, one of which includes the binary of imagination and reason. In reference to the line

from the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “what was an impression on the

Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason,”29 Coulson argues that Newman

“assumes that faith and belief are to each other as implicit to explicit, inarticulate to articulate, and

pre-conceptual to conceptual.”30 This leads Coulson to the conclusion that “imagination, like faith,

seeks understanding, and for the same reasons.”31 Newman’s statement that implicit reason has a

reason but does not give a reason also applies to imagination.32 He understood both as a method

of precritical rationality, a “habit of mind” that is not merely passive, but active and living. This

conception of imagination and its role in Newman’s theological method has received significant

attention.

Thus, Ian Ker identified the work of the imagination as performing two functions: realizing

and prehending.33 The “prehending” power as a “synthetic power” has formed Coulson’s analysis

of the analogous operation of language in poetry and religion. Drawing on Coleridge’s definition

of poetry as “the best words in the best order,”34 he explains that what makes poetry such a unique

form of communicating knowledge is its resistance to paraphrase. “It cannot without loss be

28 Ibid., 258–59. 29 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 53,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter1.html. 30 Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 51. 31 Ibid., 62. 32 Newman, “Implicit and Explicit,” 259. 33 Terrence Merrigan, “Image of the Word: Faith and Imagination in John Henry Newman and John Hick,” in

Newman and the Word by Terrence Merrigan and Ian Turnbull Ker, eds. (Louvain: Peeters, 2000), 5–48. The former

is a type of imagination that is related primarily to “the fact as grasped or apprehended (‘imaged’)” (14). The latter

Merrigan describes as a “synthetic power” which “set[s] before the mind’s eye,” the object of within the imagination

(14–15). The prehending imagination holds together difficulties or apparent contradictions and forms them into one

image. This “one true and simple vision,” as Merrigan describes it, quoting Newman, is the foundation for creeds or

doctrines that result from “the fruit of theological reason” (19). 34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 73.

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translated into other words: it is thus an uninvertible use of language, whose meaning cannot be

separated from its form, whereas prose is a language which is convertible or reducible.”35 Thus, in

poetry, as in the Pauline Epistles and Early Christian writings, “metaphors accumulate and in

accumulating modify each other.”36 He adds: “It is a thinking by accumulation, not progression.”37

Newman’s image of the polygon inscribed within a circle provides Coulson with a model for this

type of imaginative reasoning.38 Rather than a “leap,” this image indicates a way of reasoning in

which the individual “discovers the margin to have been cancelled.”39 The positive aspect of the

imagination, Coulson explains, allows this “gradual convergence (or focusing stereoscopically)

which induces belief (rather than proving it)” to occur through “its intensifying and unifying

power.”40 His description of the operation of imagination emphasizes two processes. First, he

identifies the “synthesizing” or accumulative process, which allows for a unified vision of

apparently dissimilar or even contradictory elements. Second, although he resists the language of

“leap of faith,” he does describe a process that takes place within the imagination where one comes

to or arrives at belief prior to syllogistic or discursive proofs.41

Gerard Magill links the theological use of imagination described here by Ker and Coulson

to Newman’s educational philosophy.42 According to Magill, Newman in Grammar “uses the

imagination to recover the basic insight of his philosophy of education to bridge his religious

35 Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 18. 36 Ibid., 18. 37 Ibid., 21. 38 Newman, Grammar, 320; Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 49. 39 Lash, introduction, 17. 40 Coulson, Religion and Imagination, 53. 41 Ibid., 49. 42 Likewise, Lash explains, “if Newman thus argues for the rationality of ‘simple faith,’ he is able to do so precisely

because he refuses to admit that there is any such thing as a uniquely ‘religious’ mode of apprehending truth. For

Newman, the structure of personal religious faith is the structure of ‘personal knowledge’ in respect of any subject

matter whatsoever.” Lash, introduction, 5. See also Newman, “What is a University?” in Historical Sketches, vol. 3,

6–17, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/historical/volume3/universities/chapter2.html. Hereafter cited:

Newman, “What is a University?” Historical Sketches is hereafter cited: HS.

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epistemology with his theological method.”43 He locates three points of connection between

Newman’s theological method and his philosophy of education.44 First, the religious imagination

has a “living hold on truths,” which requires real, personal appropriation of the “image” of the

truth through subjective, personal, and thus experiential, knowledge.45 Second, the imagination

“interprets what it sees around it” by performing a sort of “rational discernment” via the

convergence of probabilities.46 This is the synthetic or accumulative process that Ker describes as

“prehending” and which Coulson links to the poetic method. Finally, the imagination has the

ability to “pronounce by anticipation” certitude prior to or even without the ability to give rational

justification or proof.47

Turning to Newman’s education philosophy, Magill finds corollary operations for each of

these three aspects of the imagination. For Magill’s terminology, he drew from the following

passage from Idea which described the process of “enlargement of mind,” as

the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our

acquirement; it is a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a

familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous

statement of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to follow.48

43 Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 458. 44 Magill uses this passage from Grammar for his terminology: “It is otherwise with the theology of a religious

imagination. It has a living hold on truths which are really to be found in the world, though they are not upon the

surface. It is able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to prove—that good is the rule, and

evil the exception. . . . It interprets what it sees around it by this previous inward teaching, as the true key of that

maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most

unpromising materials.” Newman, Grammar, 117, qtd. in Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 458. 45 Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 458. 46 Newman, Grammar, 321, qtd. in Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 459. 47 Newman, Grammar, 321. Newman’s example of the “peasant who is weather-wise” (ibid., 332) provides an

illustration of how the religious imagination could arrive at knowledge that it has not, or even could not, give

reasons for (ibid., 318). 48 Newman, Discourse 1.6, 134, qtd. in Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 455.

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First, there is a “formative power” with a dynamic process by which the mind pursues

understanding. Second, “reducing to order and meaning,” the imagination is involved in a process

of “meaningfully compiling data, making connections and seeing relations between different

findings”49 by accumulating, arranging, and synthesizing data. Finally, the imagination makes “our

knowledge subjectively our own,” through “personal integration”50 via the metaphor, used by

Newman, of digestion. From this comparison of Newman’s theological method and educational

philosophy, Magill names three general imaginative processes: the dynamic, the accumulative (or

holistic), and the subjective.51 Magill concludes that “Newman’s views of liberal education, of

religious epistemology, and of theological method, combine the three characteristics of

discernment which he construed as ‘an appeal to the imagination.’”52

M. Katherine Tillman, like Magill, identifies the role of imagination in Grammar of Assent

as “the internal actualizing principle of the ideal of liberal knowledge.”53 She describes the

imagination’s power as “the ability . . . to grasp, hold and intensify what is concrete and real,

though absent, in vivid impressions.”54 This description, although it uses somewhat different

language, fits with Magill’s “dynamic,” “accumulative,” and “subjective” description. She also

describes Newman’s understanding of the imagination as “the mind’s holding, with some feeling,

of the image of a reality, which is absent, such apprehension containing within it the possibility of

tendencies toward understanding and action, as well as toward illusion and error.”55 This

description agrees with the four aspects of the imagination I have identified. It possesses the

possibility for understanding as well as error, based upon its preparation and prejudice. It is

49 Newman qtd. in Magill 454–55. 50 Newman qtd. in Magill 454–55. 51 Magill, “Moral Imagination,” 454–55. 52 Ibid., 463. 53 Tillman, “Cardinal Newman on Imagination,” 604. 54 Ibid., 603. 55 Ibid., 603–04.

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affected by experience, by feelings and images, rather than syllogisms and deductions. It has the

potent ability to reason “implicitly,” to arrive at conclusions without prior explicit rational

justification, and to do so often unconsciously or semiconsciously. For Newman, this work of the

imagination provides the mental structure, or “imagined” world, within which explicit reason

operates. Reason, as distinct from imagination, for its “due exercise,” requires “that real

ratiocination and present imagination which gives [methodical inferences] a sense beyond their

letter, and which, while acting through them, reaches to conclusions beyond and above them.”

Necessarily, “such a living organon is a personal gift, and not a mere method or calculus.”56 By

identifying the similarities between the “living organon,” the imagination, and the goal of liberal

learning, one can read Idea as a text about the cultivation of this “personal gift.”

IMAGINATION AND THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

As we have already seen from Magill, there is much in the ideal of Idea to indicate that the

imagination has a central place in the text, even if it is an implicit one. One of the most striking

descriptions of the operation of the imagination within Idea comes from Discourse 4, where

Newman describes the relationship of other knowledge to theology. The imagination, as distinct

from reason in the way Newman frequently distinguished between them, as a judge of experience

and credibility, as an implicit, precritical reasoning faculty, and as potentially prejudiced and in

need of preparation, is present throughout this passage. In the course of two paragraphs, he explains

how the mind instinctively reasons and why this instinct can lead to error. “One of the first acts of

the human mind is to take hold of and appropriate what meets the senses,” he claims. He continues,

The intellect of man . . . seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps

and forms what need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It

56 Newman, Grammar, 316.

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discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It

gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. . . . In a word, it

philosophizes; for I suppose Science and Philosophy, in their elementary idea, are

nothing else but this habit of viewing, as it may be called, the objects which sense

conveys to the mind, of throwing them into system, and uniting and stamping

them with one form.

This method is so natural to us, as I have said, as to be almost

spontaneous; and we are impatient when we cannot exercise it, and in

consequence we do not always wait to have the means of exercising it aright, but

we often put up with insufficient or absurd views or interpretations of what we

meet with, rather than have none at all. We refer the various matters which are

brought home to us, material or moral, to causes which we happen to know of, or

to such as are simply imaginary, sooner than refer them to nothing; and according

to the activity of our intellect do we feel a pain and begin to fret, if we are not able

to do so . . . though it is no easy matter to view things correctly, nevertheless the

busy mind will ever be viewing. We cannot do without a view, and we put up with

an illusion when we cannot get a truth.57

I argue that the first paragraph describes what Newman called, among other things, the

“philosophical habit of mind,” and that this is a power of the imagination. The second paragraph,

then, is a description of the way that the mind operates when it has not received the formation of

the imagination, which a liberal education provides. The first paragraph describes an operation of

the mind nearly identical to his understanding of the imagination. Driven by sense data, the mind

57 Newman, Part 1, Discourse 4, “Bearing of Other Branches of Knowledge on Theology,” Idea, 74–76,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse4.html. Hereafter cited: Newman, Discourse 1.4.

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naturally and spontaneously accumulates and synthesizes “what need not have been seen or heard.”

Rather than a methodical rational process, there is an immediate “throwing [of experiences] into

system.” The second paragraph then identifies why this operation has the potential for illusion or

error and requires formation. The mind is “impatient” in the face of new data and rushes to fit that

data into the “view” or idea that the mind possesses. Revealed in this passage is the connection

between the imagination and having a “view,” which Newman refers to a number of times in Idea.

The former provides the latter, so that whatever has formed the imagination provides the lens or

“view” to observe experience. Thus, a properly formed imagination enables the individual to take

the proper view of whatever meets their senses so that they can arrive at the truth. The first

paragraph I have taken to be a description of the “philosophical habit of mind,” which is the goal

of a university education. The second paragraph is an explanation for why this habit must be

cultivated, and it informs Newman’s defense of the “circle of knowledge” along with his criticisms

of deficient modes of learning and views of knowledge in the second half of the Idea.

The Catholic Church’s desire in founding a university “is, not the manners and habits of

gentlemen,” Newman wrote in the preface, “but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness

and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of

things as they pass before us.”58 Newman referred to this “real cultivation of mind” using several

different terms.59 For consistency’s sake, I have chosen to use “philosophical habit of mind,” which

Newman linked to “the science of the sciences.”60 In the original fifth discourse of the 1852 edition

of the Dublin lectures, Newman also made the link between philosophy and the “science of the

sciences.” He explained that in education “we make use, as nature prompts us, of the faculty, which

58 Newman, preface to Idea, ix–xxi, xvi. 59 Newman, Discourse 1.3, 51. 60 Ibid., 51.

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I have called an intellectual grasp of things, or an inward sense, and which I shall hereafter show

is really meant by the word ‘Philosophy.’”61 He went on, “A science is not mere knowledge, it is

knowledge which has undergone a process of intellectual digestion. It is the grasp of many things

brought together in one, and hence is its power. . . . Imagine a science of sciences, and you have

attained the true notion of the scope of a University.”62 The “process of intellectual digestion”

recalls the passage utilized by Magill to identify the three aspects of the imagination (dynamic,

accumulative, and subjective), in which is included the image of “enlargement.” Dwight Culler

recognized a seeming inconsistency with the use of these two images.63 However, under the rubric

of the imagination, the use of these different metaphors does not result in incoherence or

inconsistency. As the imagination operates as an accumulative or, to use a similar term, synthetic

power, “enlargement” of mind consists in the mind’s ability to engage more and more

knowledge.64 Moreover, the examples of the use of the term “imagination” in Newman’s life and

writings indicate that the “enlargement of mind” produces the result of preparing the imagination

and removing prejudice or illusion. Further, by referencing the imagination, the metaphor of

digestion closely resembles its subjective function. In this sense, the result of “digestion” and

“enlargement” would be “an acquired illumination . . . a habit, a personal possession, and an inward

endowment.”65 These descriptions of the “philosophical habit of mind” indicate an imaginative

61 Newman, Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (Dublin: Duffy, 1852),143–44. Hereafter

cited: Newman, Discourses 1852. For an analysis of Newman’s decision to remove this discourse from later

editions, see Ian Ker, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker,

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), xxxiv–xxxvii. Hereafter cited: Ker, “Editor’s Introduction.” His edited edition of Idea is

hereafter cited: Ker, Idea. 62 Newman, Discourses 1852, 144. 63 Dwight Culler, Imperial Intellect: A Study in Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1955), 206. Hereafter cited: Culler, Imperial Intellect. 64 Ker notes that when Newman referred to “enlargement” of mind, it was not a quantitative enlargement, as in the

ability to store up facts. Ker, Idea, 607. 65 Newman, Part 1, Discourse 5, “Knowledge its Own End,” 113,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse5.html. Hereafter cited: Newman, Discourse 1.5.

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rational process more than a reasoning or discursive one. In addition, as a “science of sciences,” it

is necessary to have a “view” that properly arranges data as it comes to the mind. This, Newman

argued, requires the university to teach universal knowledge.

The argument for the “circle of knowledge” rests on Newman’s religious conviction of the

unity of truth.66 Each particular science pursues the truth, and thus all seek the same object.67 Each

science takes then a “view” of that one object. “Viewed altogether, they approximate to a

representation or subjective reflection of the objective truth, as nearly as is possible to the human

mind, which advances towards the accurate apprehension of that object, in proportion to the

number of sciences which it has mastered.”68 Likewise, the absence of any field has a negative

effect on the mind’s ability to take a view. Put in terms of the imagination, the teaching of the

whole circle of knowledge prepares the imagination in such a way that the claims of mathematics,

physics, theology, and of the other sciences find their proper place and elicit their proper response.

The trouble with an absence in the circle is not a reduced view, but a defective one. When theology

is left out of the teaching of the circle, other sciences “will take possession of it.”69 This is the

result of that instinctive desire of the mind identified in the long passage cited above. When there

is a gap in the circle, other fields seek to fill its space. Newman devotes most of his attention to

the way that secular sciences make theological claims when theology is not present in the circle.

However, he recognizes that theology is not immune to the same exorbitance and itself has a

tendency to commit (and a history of committing) the same error if the other sciences do not find

their proper place within the circle.70 Moreover, although he is chiefly concerned with

66 Ker, “Editor’s Introduction,” xlvii. 67 Newman, Discourse 1.3, 45. 68 Ibid., 47. 69 Newman, Discourse 1.4, 96. 70 Ibid., 97; also, “Far indeed am I from having intended to convey the notion . . . that Theology stands to other

knowledge as the soul to the body; or that other sciences are but its instruments and appendages. . . . This would be,

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demonstrating the damage to the circle when theology is excluded, his logic does not remove the

possibility that the exclusion of any subject would result in a similar exorbitance on the part of

other secular sciences. In any case, the teaching of the whole circle of knowledge helps to reduce

potential errors of imagination that may occur even with advanced learning.

Discourses 6, 7, and 8 deal with the problems of learning as “mere knowledge,” as

subordinate to profession, and as a religious duty respectively. Each of these represents a flawed

view of learning and thus leads to a lack of imagination, a utilitarian imagination, or an aesthetic

imagination respectively. In Discourse 6, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Learning,” Newman

confronts the problem with learning as the accumulation of “mere knowledge.” The trouble with

this type of learning is not that it corrupts the imagination. Rather, it does not form it at all: “It is

the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects.”71 The

imagination in this case receives no view from which to judge its experiences. Newman described

it as seeing “the tapestry of human life, as it were on the wrong side, and it tells no story.”72 In the

long run, this is a bewildering experience, which impresses on the imagination not one main idea

or view, but none at all, leaving the student enslaved to their senses and experiences.73

In the area of professional knowledge, the great danger Newman identified was the

tendency to judge all knowledge according to its utility or power. In this case, the imagination

becomes dominated by the criteria of power and usefulness, and the result is a utilitarian

imagination. “Men,” he argued, “whose minds are possessed of some one object, take exaggerated

views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are

I conceive, to commit the very error, in the instance of Theology, which I am charging of the other sciences, at the

present day, of committing against it.” Newman, Discourses 1852, 152. 71 Newman, Discourse 1.6, 142. 72 Ibid., 136. 73 Newman associates this sort of learning with book knowledge. They may provide the basic principles of any

subject matter, “but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these

from those in whom it already lives.” Newman, “What is a University?” 9.

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utterly foreign to it.”74 The physical and mechanical sciences have an especially noted power to

make impressions upon the imagination because of their ability to explain and manipulate the

natural world. In “A Form of Infidelity of the Day,” Newman addressed the appeal to imagination

that the sciences make. There he makes a similar claim that, “any one study, of whatever kind,

exclusively pursued, deadens in the mind the interest, nay, the perception of any other.”75 The

exclusive study of the natural world gives the impression—though a false one, Newman

contends—that revealed religion is inconsistent with reason, “and this seeming discordance acts

most keenly and alarmingly on the Imagination.”76 Because the imagination, as I have noted above,

is moved and concerned with experience, it is affected by what strikes the senses and moves the

affections. Thus, Newman conceded, “sciences which concern this world and this state of existence

are worth far more, are more arresting and attractive, than those which relate to a system of things

which [people] do not see and cannot master by their natural powers.”77 In the final discourse,

Newman offered the Church and Her influence as a remedy to this situation within the University.

Before addressing this remedy, he dealt with the problem of liberal learning and religious duty.

In Discourse 8, Newman reveals his pessimism concerning liberal learning and its effect

on religion.78 This discourse describes what he calls a “religion of philosophy”79 that frequently

accompanies even the type of liberal education he advocates. “The educated mind may be said to

be in a certain sense religious,” he argued, “that is, it has what may be considered a religion of its

74 Newman, Discourse 1.5, 100. 75 Newman, Part 2, Discourse 5, “Form of Infidelity of the Day,” Idea, 399,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/article5.html. 76 Ibid., 401. 77 Ibid., 403. See also Culler, Imperial Intellect, 209. 78 See Newman, Apologia, 380; “Intellect: the Instrument of Religious Training,” in Sermons Preached on Various

Occasions, 8–12, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/occasions/sermon1.html; “Influence: Athenian Schools,” in

HS, vol. 3, 79, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/historical/volume3/universities/chapter7.html. 79 Newman, Part 1, Discourse 8, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion,” 200,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse8.html. Hereafter cited: Newman, Discourse 1.8.

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own.”80 This “tendency of intellectual culture” to replace the rule of conscience with “our mere

sense of what is fitting and becoming”81 results in a kind of aesthetic imagination. In this case,

claims of virtue or vice, or truth or error, are determined to be credible by a standard of beauty or

deformity.82 The famous gentleman of this discourse holds that there really is nothing objective in

religion or morality.83 Thus, it is curious that people have taken this description of the gentleman

as “a serious expression of Newman’s positive ideal.”84 Newman connected this defect of the

imagination to the study of literature in the final discourse. Thus, his last three discourses relate

how the two major areas of study within the university, science and literature, have a tendency to

corrupt the imagination, and, therefore, why the Church’s presence is necessary for the “integrity”

of the university and, I argue, the imagination.85

In his final discourse, “Duty of the Church Towards Knowledge,” the Church is called

upon to shape the corporate imagination of the university through “faithful presence.”86 In

Newman’s words, the Church must breathe her “pure and unearthly spirit” into the entire

university.87 He considered university professions of faith insufficient due to the tendencies of

literature and the sciences described in the two preceding discourses. “Liberal knowledge,” he

reiterated, “has a special tendency . . . to impress us with a mere philosophical theory of life and

conduct.”88 This is not inevitable, but when the study of science or literature limits itself only to

what is visible or aesthetic, as Newman believed it was likely to do, “you will make present utility

80 Ibid., 180. 81 Ibid., 191. 82 Ibid., 199. 83 Ibid., 192. 84 Culler, Imperial Intellect, 238; Ker, “Editor’s Introduction,” li. 85 Newman, preface to Newman, Idea, ix. 86 This is a term borrowed from James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility

of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 87 Newman, Part 1, Discourse 9, “Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,” Idea, 216,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse9.html. 88 Ibid., 216–17.

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and natural beauty the practical test of truth, and the sufficient object of the intellect.”89 However,

he actually recommended that the Church do very little with regard to the fields of science and

literature. After describing why religion and science tend to conflict, he explains that the Church

has no real duty “to watch over and protect Science.” Its job is to watch over and protect theology,

to which “she has a distinct duty.”90 By protecting theology, she does her duty to the rest of the

circle. Yet the Church does not attempt to whitewash the literary curriculum or remove it entirely.

Literature is “the manifestation of human nature in human language,” as Newman argued, so “if

Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian literature.”91

According to him, it prepares the imagination for the natural world because it is the study of the

natural man. As a recommendation for the place of the Church in the university, Newman proffered

the example of St. Philip Neri. Rather than follow the example of a Savonarola, Charles Borromeo,

Ignatius of Loyola, or Francis Xavier, the Church should look to the example of Neri who

“preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science,

literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man

had spoilt.”92

CONCLUSION: IMAGINATION AND REASON TOGETHER

So where is reason in this reading of The Idea of a University? As noted at the outset of

this article, in discussing imagination and reason as distinct mental operations, it is important to

remember that for Newman they were not completely separate faculties. Reading Idea as a text

about the imagination assumes the operation of reason within university lecture halls. But it takes

seriously the way that the exercise of reason forms and shapes the imagination. Newman had

89 Ibid., 217. 90 Ibid., 227. 91 Ibid., 232, 229. 92 Ibid., 235.

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confidence in the power of reason in the abstract, but “as a real agent in the world,”93 he was rather

pessimistic. Reason, “as an operative principle in man’s nature . . . considers itself from first to

last independent and supreme.”94 Thus, reason exercised within just one discipline yields an

imagination dominated by one idea. The exercise of reason solely for the sake of accumulation,

for the acquisition of useful knowledge, or for the study of purely natural knowledge shapes the

imagination to take a view that is incomplete. As the university “embodies the principal of

progress,”95 it uses reason in conjunction with the “circle of knowledge” to expand and advance

the mind in various subjects. This leads to a fascination of the imagination with particular subjects

and the mind’s own abilities. Because of this, the university requires the counteracting force of the

college as a source of “stability.”96 Although the college system received little attention in Idea, it

is not absent.97 Through its own system of study and discipline, the college stabilizes the

imagination. In much the same way as the Breviary, the college “rouses the imagination without

exciting it.”98 Both the college and the university have their particular method for forming the

imagination through different exercises of reason. It is interesting that Newman described the

objects of both institutions as “the cultivation of the mind.”99 Rather than dividing reason and

imagination, and assigning the cultivation of the former to the university and the latter to the

college—which is tempting at first glance—it is more consistent with Newman’s thought to view

93 Newman, Discourse 1.8, 181. 94 Ibid., 181. 95 Newman, “Abuses of the Colleges: Oxford,” in HS, vol. 3, 228,

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/historical/volume3/index.html. 96 Ibid., 228. 97 See Newman, preface to Newman, Idea, xix–xx, which seems to identify the type of preparation for university

learning which the college is supposed to provide (see “Colleges the Corrective of Universities: Oxford,” in HS, vol.

3, 214–15, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/historical/volume3/index.html); see also Newman, Discourse 6,

145–50, where Newman expresses his preference for the college over the “babel” of the modern university that

“gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects.” 98 JHN to Henry Wilberforce, Oriel College, 25 March 1837, LD, vol. 6, 47. 99 Regarding the colleges, see “Abuses of the Colleges: Oxford,” HS, vol. 3, 229. Regarding university teaching, see

Newman, Idea, xvi, 114.

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the college and university as two modes for the operation of reason and imagination together. Thus,

the indispensability of the college and university working in tandem provides a model for the lived

function of imagination and reason. At times the imagination arrives at assents that reason cannot

justify or express, while at other times the reason arrives at conclusions that to the imagination are

foreign or “strange.” The “philosophical habit of mind,” then, is the sound union of these two

operations.