Traits of Learner-Centered Instruction by

"...not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to follow. There is no enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them. We feel our minds to be growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already..." Newman, Discourse 6, "Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Learning"

"Truth is the object of knowledge of whatever kind; and when we inquire what is meant by truth, I suppose it is right to answer that truth means facts and their relations…All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which, as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one towards another. Knowledge is the apprehension of these facts, whether in themselves or in their mutual positions and bearings." - Discourse 3

Assembling knowledge like "locomotion," occurs in uneven process, and not merely the assembling of facts or information.

"Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth to the other; but the multiplicity of phenomena which they have encountered, forms no harmonious and consistent {289} picture upon their imagination: they see, as it were, the tapestry of human life on the wrong side of it. They sleep, and they rise up, and they find themselves now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands of the ocean; they gaze on the Andes, or they are ice-bound; and nothing which meets them carries them on to any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a meaning, nothing has a history, nothing has relations. Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes in its turn, like the shifting sights of a show, leaving the beholder where he was." Newman, "Sermon 14. Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry"

"No sailing vessel makes for its port without tacking." Newman, The Idea of a University