"A third criterion that Newman puts forward is what he calls 'the power of assimilation.' Just as a healthy organism can take in what it can from its environment, even as it resists what it must, so a sane and lively idea can take to itself what is best in the intellectual atmosphere, even as it throws off what is noxious. Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness."
-from an article by Fr. Robert Barron (italics mine).