Grammar of Assent
John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870)
John Henry Newman (1801–1890)
Nobody waits for proof before trusting a friend. He spent twenty years asking why that is not a failure.
- Catch rate
- 58 / 255
- Base research
- 184
- Stat total
- 344
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Twenty years of thinking about one question and a lifetime of watching people actually come to believe things — parishioners, undergraduates, his own family, himself.
It answers the strongest form of the objection rather than a convenient one, and it never once argues that the evidence is better than it is.
The distinction it turns on — real assent against notional — has held up for a century and a half under people who wanted badly to break it.
Slow. Newman writes long, doubles back, and refuses a summary. Nobody has ever read it quickly.
Cited for this book
Newman published this in 1870 and Clifford read “The Ethics of Belief” in 1877, so the answer was in print seven years before the charge was made — Newman is not replying to him and could not have been. HE IS ALSO A ROMAN CATHOLIC, and a convert from the Church of England who cost himself most of his friends doing it. This game is Reformed and does not follow him to Rome; the rule it already applies to Cyprian and Augustine applies here, and he says what he actually said. On this question he is the best answer in print.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Life Is for Action | Rationality | Argument | 92 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 34 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 50 | The Illative Sense | Faith | Argument | 86 | 100% | 15 |
| 54 | Question the Premise | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 56 | Argument from Desire | Natural Theology | Argument | 74 | 100% | 10 |