ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how two very different thinkers came to surprisingly similar conclusions about the nature of knowing. The claim made is that John Henry Newman recognized the reality that Michael Polanyi calls “tacit knowledge,” while Polanyi recognized the reality that Newman calls “illative sense.” It aims to show the convergence of Newman’s and Polanyi’s fundamental insights into the tacit and personal dimension of human judgment rather than to develop a complete harmonization of their terminology. Newman introduced the term, “illative sense,” in the last three chapters of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, as a “grand word for a common thing.” Newman adverted to two quite different kinds of tacit knowledge: that which is only accidentally tacit, because it may be converted into an assertion based on formal reasoning, and that which is irreducibly tacit. Newman, like Polanyi, believed that apprehension of a reality supplies a contact with, but not complete control over that reality.
