Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/74

 a far higher aim and a far more difficult task than this, throws wide her portals to the entrance of all comers, come disguised and unpromising as they may. In other words, she accepts, as given, the great and indestructible convictions of our race, and the language in which these are expressed: and in place of denying or obliterating them, she endeavours rationally to explain and justify them; recovering by reflection steps taken in the spontaneous strength of nature by powers little more than instinctive, and seeing in clear light the operation of principles which, in their primary acts, work in almost total darkness.

Common sense, then, is the problem of philosophy, and is plainly not to be solved by being set aside, but just as little is it to be solved by being taken for granted, or in other words, by being allowed to remain in the primary forms in which it is presented to our notice. A problem and its solution are evidently not one and the same thing; and hence, common sense, the problem of philosophy, is by no means identical, in the first instance at least, with the solution which philosophy has to supply (a consideration which those would do well to remember who talk of the "philosophy of common sense," thus confounding together the problem and the solution). It is only after the solution has been effected that they can be looked upon as identical with each other. How then is this solution to be realised? How is the conversion of common sense into philosophy to be brought about? We answer, by accepting completely and