EPISTEMOLOGY John Henry Newman, whose Grammar of Assent, though written to a religious agenda, is a classic of epistemology in its own right little way out of ourselves: we have to be near things to touch them; we can neither see nor hear nor touch things past or future But though a staunch empiricist, Newman gives a more exalted role to reason than it was granted by the idealist Kant: Now reason is that faculty of mind by which this deficiency [of the senses] is supplied: by which knowledge of things external to us, of beings, facts, and events, is attained beyond the range of sense It ascertains for us not natural things only, or immaterial only, or present only, or past or future; but even if limited in its power, it is unlimited in its range It reaches to the ends of the universe, and to the throne of God beyond them; it brings us knowledge, whether real or uncertain, still knowledge, in whatever degree of perfection, from every side; 146