John Henry Newman, the Victorian Englishman who wrote The Idea of a University a few years before the Texas Constitution was framed, distinguished between "notional" assent, an intellectual assent to a proposition, and what he called "real" assent, assent of the whole person, the heart as well as the head or, as we would say now, both sides of the brain. If our goal is the education of the whole person we need to recall that, as Newman put it in his Grammar of Assent, "the heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us." Exercises of imagination such as literature, presenting us with concrete impressions, are extremely valuable in this regard. "Science, working by itself, reaches truth in the abstract, and probability in the concrete; but what we aim at is truth in the concrete" for "the concrete exerts a force and makes an impression on the mind which nothing abstract can rival" (233, 49). Particular images, concrete "things," not only help us hold on to reality, they limit and test the validity of abstractions: "without a firm hold on things, we shall waste ourselves in vague speculations. However, real apprehension has the precedence, as being the scope and end and the test of notional" (47). This is not merely the customary method of the humanities, it is the most common logic of all: "our most natural mode of reasoning is, not from propositions to propositions, but from things to things, from concrete to concrete, from wholes to wholes.... This is the mode in which we ordinarily reason, dealing with things directly, and as they stand, one by one, in the concrete" (260-1, cf. 243).

In questions of human nature, therefore, the emphasis in the arts and humanities often remains on the kind of particular cases, the representation of individuals so prevalent in literature. Lists, statistical summaries, and generalizations result all too often in stereotypes, yet "there is no such thing as a stereotyped humanity; it must ever be a vague, bodiless idea, because the concrete units from which it is formed are independent realities. General laws are not inviolable truths; much less are they necessary causes" (Newman 224). In the humanities "individual" is an even more important term to oppose to "abstraction" than is "concrete": "Let units [individuals] come first, and (so-called) universals second; let universals minister to units, not units be sacrificed to universals. John, Richard, and Robert are individual things, independent, incommunicable" (223). Individuals, particulars case call for a different kind of logic: "the real and necessary method is...the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review; probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible" (Newman 230).