Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/136

 126 sell, to outstrip competitors, and to be efficient in whatever you undertake"; if I could make such an appeal to you, your instincts and prejudices would secure me your ready sympathy. But I should have deceived you. What I should thus have recommended to you would not be philosophy. For philosophy is neither plain nor hard-headed; nor is it a means of success, as success is ordinarily construed. This is the case, not accidentally, but in principle. The very point of philosophy lies in the fallibility of common sense, and in the arbitrariness of vulgar standards of success. Philosophy is one of those things that must be met on its own ground. You must seek it where it is at home; if you insist upon its meeting you half-way it will turn out not to be philosophy at all, but some poor compromise — the name or husk of philosophy with the soul gone out of it. No one can understand what philosophy means unless he lets it speak for itself and in its own language. If philosophy is good, it is because it contributes to life something different, something peculiarly its own, and which cannot be measured by any standards save those which philosophy itself supplies.

PHILOSOPHY AND COMMON SENSE If we cannot justify philosophy by common sense, we can at least contrast it with common sense, and so approach it from that more familiar ground. Since we must admit that philosophy is at odds with common sense, let us make the most ot it. What, then, is common sense ? First of all it is evident that this is not a common-sense question. One of the things peculiar to common sense is that it must not be questioned, but taken for granted. It is made up of a mass of convictions that by common consent are to be allowed to stand; one does not ask questions about them, but appeals to them to determine what questions shall be asked. They are the conservative opinion, the solidified and uniform belief, on which men act and which is the unconscious premise of most human reasoning. As a man of common sense, I use common sense to live by or to think by; it is a practical and theoretical bias which I share with my fellows, but which I do not think about at all.

Now suppose that in some whimsical and senseless mood I do think about common sense. Something very startling happens. This