Converging evidence and Newman's informal inference
an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts
The contrast with an isolated demonstration has a close philosophical parallel in John Henry Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (first published 1870). In chapter VIII, §2, Newman explains concrete reasoning through independent probabilities whose combined force exceeds what any one can establish. His example of certainty that Britain is an island draws on education, maps, history, commerce and ordinary testimony: heterogeneous considerations support one conclusion. The inspected witness is the Newman Reader electronic text, which preserves printed page markers; see especially pp. 288–295. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Chesterton borrowed the passage.
Newman also supplies a useful qualification. On pp. 292–293 he insists that informal inference remains dependent on its premises, whose weight different minds may estimate differently. Thus the variety of Chesterton's examples explains how conviction can be rational without a single decisive proof; it does not establish that the examples are true or that their convergence is decisive. Chesterton explicitly grants the agnostic the same method. His disagreement concerns what the experiences actually warrant, which is why the remainder of the paragraph must do substantive work rather than merely add another item to a list.
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