"The whole man moves"

" I did not like to see men scared or scandalised by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have touched them to the day of their death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, " Non in dialectic! complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum ";-I had a great dislike of paper logic.

For myself, it was not logic then that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but a record of it.

All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; as well might you say that I have arrived at the end of my journey, because I see the village church before me, as venture to assert that the miles, over which my soul had to pass before it got to Rome, could be annihilated, even though I had had some far clearer view than I then had, that Rome was my ultimate destination.

Great acts take time."

John Henry Newman:
Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1864

PART VI: HISTORY OF MY RELIGIOUS OPINIONS FROM 1841 TO 1845

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/newman/apologia1.html