Abstract

In 1931 Father D’Arcy, then also a don at Oxford, published the first comprehensive exposition and critical evaluation in England of John Henry Newman’s sole philosophical work, the Essay on Assent—if one excepts the contemporary set of censorious articles published by his pedantic confrère, Father Thomas Harper, in The Month and later edited for private circulation. Father D’Arcy’s philosophic humanism and lifelong interest in the apologetics of belief make him a particularly sympathetic commentator and his work has done much to illuminate both the problem of belief and his illustrious predecessor. It is pleasant to welcome his urbane wisdom back to print in a new edition, whose Introduction concisely notes the current modest evaluation of certitude in science and whose revision includes a trenchant chapter on the shallowness of contemporary logical positivism and analysis. This latter has become more puzzled than sceptical about a certitude, which springs neither from direct observation nor from formal logic, and yet is commonly accepted in history and geography concerning matters of fact which are now either past or absent, and so apparently is beyond decisive rational verification. Nevertheless no one in practice reasonably denies the contingent existence of Mr. Krushchev or of China, even though he has never visited either. Religious belief is thus no more paradoxical than secular daily belief, whose certitude equally demands explanation and justification.