Abstract
The metaphysical extravagances of the Seventeenth Century provoked a reaction. Men such as Fenelon and Buffier in France, Berkeley in Ireland, Reid and his circle in Scotland, and, in a paradoxical way, David Hume, rose up to advance the claims of common sense.1 But they did so in radically different ways: and it soon became apparent that some of the proffered explications of common sense had within them vices similar to those which they were intended to extirpate.
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There is, as yet, no adequate history of common sense in philosophy; Sir William Hamilton sketched the outline of such a history in the long Note A of his edition of Reid. (From what we have already said on the subject, it will be evident that at a deeper level the history of common sense in philosophy would be a history of philosophy). At the beginning of the 18th Century the French Jesuit, Buffier, treated common sense explicitly in an able and entertaining fashion. A group of 18th Century Scots philosophers, Reid, Oswald and Beattie, publicly defended their allegiance to common sense. (See S. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, Oxford 1960). Reid and Beattie, both of whom occupied University Chairs, were influential; Oswald, the lonely Minister of Methven, because of the homespun quality of his work, has been much under-rated. Dugald Stewart and Hamilton kept the topic of common sense alive into the next century. The Scottish common sense philosophers had some vogue in France in the 19th Century under the aegis of Victor Cousin; common sense found an eloquent expositor in Jouffroy (the translator of Reid). J. S. Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) effected, in Britain, a return to favour of the scientific (and apparently anti-common sense) principles espoused by Priestley and Hartley; from about the middle of the 19th Century common sense is little heard of in British philosophical circles. G. E. Moore’s various writings, notably his Defence of Common Sense (1925), mark a turn of the tide; since that time the topic has been, tacitly, the focus of much philosophic endeavour in Britain. (Cf. VI, 1). Outside the British stream, Le Sens Commun by P. Garrigou-Lagrange O.P. (4th edition Paris 1936), and several chapters of Insight by B. J. F. Lonergan S.J. (London 1957) are notable modern contributions to the subject.
Cf. Priestley’s remarks VI i.
Locke, Essay IV, iii, 20, cf. I, iii, 25 etc. J. W. Yolton in his John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford 1956) has examined the moral and religious controversies in the England of Locke’s day; he has shown how prevalent was the appeal to innate principles by theologians, and how Locke’s polemic against innate ideas was directed to this domestic tyranny. Since it is but a short step from “innate” principle to “common sense” principle, we may, from Yolton’s enquiries, better appreciate the dismay which men like Priestley felt on witnessing what seemed to be a Scots resurgence of old and discredited doctrines. Yolton, by his researches, has brought the figure of Locke to life, and has banished the old stylised figure of the Descartes-Locke-Berkeley-Hume succession. Similarly the figure of Berkeley can be made to live, only by seeing Berkeley in the context of his contemporaries.
Enquiry, XII, iii, § 130. (Selby-Bigge p. 162).
Much philosophic endeavour since the 17th Century, especially that associated with Hume and his British heirs, would seem to be an attempt to return to the pre-Socratic condition of the world. Not always consciously so: it is rather a retreat from the challenge of Socrates, a retreat disguised from the philosopher himself under various plausible pretexts. We see this retreat conspicuously in the present case. Leaving it to the embellishment of poets etc. is precisely what Plato set out to combat. Plato loved poetry; he well knew that at its best poetry is truth; but he was also acutely aware that, just because poetry has such overwhelming power, it can wreak great mischief if mis-directed. Hence, he believed, an education by poetry alone leaves too much to chance. As he tries to explain in the Republic and Laws: Poetry is an awakening to truth through a special kind of mime. But the poet himself is not always mimetic of the right standards. And the audience may not be prepared to take even a good mime in the right way. An emotional audience tends to be arrested at the mimesis and not pass through to that which is mimed; not see through the window of poetry, but see only the window. Without ancillary training beforehand, poetry tends to keep us child-like and fickle. Plato, at times, may seem to be carried away by his misgivings. But his main contention stands firm: For poetry to be fully acceptable as an instrument of education, the poet and the audience must be properly prepared; and that preparation is ultimately the responsibility of the philosopher-guardian. Hume declined to accept this responsibility himself, and held up to derision all those who would accept it, irrespective of whether their credentials were good or bad. So, by default, the poets were to be left to carry the burden alone and unaided. In recent years the analytic movement has taken on the mantle of Hume in this regard. The philosophers elect to be spectators instead of participants. They aspire to be chiefs of staff, but shrink from the burdens of generalship. So once more the world is to be guided by the unsupported poets, as it was in the days before Plato. By holding aloof, the philosophers are deserting the poets in the field of battle.
Claude Buffier, Traue des Premieres Verites Ch. vii. Reid subscribes to similar criteria. Cf. Dugald Stewart, Works, iii, p. 61.
See especially A. A. Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterialism: An account of the making of Berkeley’s Principles (London 1963).
See especially A. A. Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterialism: An account of the making of Berkeley’s Principles (London 1963). p. 59.
The relation of Plato to the pre-Socratics is somewhat analogous. Plato on a superficial reading may appear to be an eclectic. His love of pastiche, satire, and whimsy, tends to conceal his native energies from casual observation. Like Berkeley, in his last work he writes more directly in his own person.
“We might almost call Berkeley’s criterion of the mob and the vulgar his’ third discovery’” writes Luce (ibid., p. 108) a propos of the numerous assertions in the Note Books of kinship with “the mob” in preference to “the learned” e.g. P.C. 405: His “first discovery” being the principle esse est percipi; his “second discovery” that of our tendency to false abstraction. Although the struggle to achieve the new viewpoint may well have involved several tentative and agonised steps, yet the “discoveries” are so bound together as to be virtually one. Common sense immediately suggests the abandonment of the doctrine of representative perception and a revision of extravagances concerning abstractions; alternatively, once these two latter matters have been put right, we find that we have, albeit unwittingly, identified ourselves with the common sense of the vulgar.
So Percival envisages it: “And I know not why in time that little spot [the Bermudas] may not become the Athens of the world, since the persons who intend to go are men in every way qualified to raise learning to as high a pitch as we know it was in that of Greece.” (B. Rand, Berkeley and Percival, p. 225).
See Berkeley’s remarks in A Discourse addressed to magistrates and men in authority (1738) Esteem for savages as virtuous and unprejudiced people is one of the “wild notions broached in these giddy times.” It is true that savages are free from many vices practised in civilized nations, but only because opportunities and faculties for such vices are wanting: “What they esteem and admire in those creatures is not innocence, but ignorance; it is not virtue, but necessity.” (Works vi, pp. 206-7). Lest it be thought that these words mark the disillusionment of the American fiasco, it should be noted that Berkeley had expressed similar sentiments twenty years earlier: see his remarks on the inhabitants of the island of Ischia in his letters to Percival and Pope, 1717.
G. M. Young, Stanley Baldwin (London 1952) p. 127.
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© 1968 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Ardley, G. (1968). The Rôle of Common Sense. In: Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8872-2_8
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