Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/113

 man may be cited as a witness for the custom of the fact, in neither can he be allowed to officiate as advocate or as judge. . . We may, in short, say of the philosopher what Erasmus, in an Epistle to Hiitten, said of Sir Thomas More: ‘Nemo minus ducitur vulgi judicio; sed rursus nemo minus abest a sensu communi.’“

We have referred to the efforts of the Scottish school to extract, by means of analytic criticism, those principles of common sense which relate to our knowledge of the qualities of matter, seeing that, as already stated, it is chiefly in this province that the contest with philosophical scepticism has been maintained in Britain, and especially because the theory of external perception is the central point of Sir William Hamilton’s re-statement and vindication of the conservative philosophy of common sense. But if our metaphysical science in this country has hitherto been chiefly suggested in that region of research, we must not forget that the struggle with scepticism has, in the most profoundly thoughtful nation of Europe, been transferred for us from the arena of our beliefs about matter to the arena of our beliefs about religion. These last have in Germany been put through an ordeal as severe as that which this volume contains evidence that the former have passed through at home, and scepticism is much less able practically to distort the mind of man with regard to what concerns the present life than with regard to what concerns the life to come. A critical application of some of our higher minds to those principles of common sense that relate to our