CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



I. 



COMMON-SENSE, in spite of the obloquy cast upon it in 

 certain schools of philosophy, still asserts its position as 

 the ultimate tribunal before which all speculation has to 

 justify itself. It does so by certain distinctions which 

 it makes and which every school of philosophy has been 

 obliged to recognise : it may be by affirming or denying, 

 but in any case by explaining them. 



These distinctions are crystallised and perpetuated in 

 and by that great instrument of common-sense called 

 language. 1 From the words and terms of language we 



i. 

 common- 



1 With this statement I revert 

 to a position distinctly taken up in 

 modern philosophy by Thos. Reid 

 in the second half of the eighteenth 

 century. This position is fully ex- 

 plained by Prof. Pringle - Pattison 

 in his ' Balfour Lectures on Scottish 

 Philosophy' see especially 3rded., 

 p. 122. "Reid's favourite appeal 

 is to common - sense . . . ' the 

 consent of ages and nations of the 

 learned and unlearned.' . . . Reid, 

 however, does not leave his author- 

 ity so vague ; he provides his 

 scattered and inarticulate multi- 



Language 



tude with an accredited spokesman 

 and interpreter ; ' we shall fre- 

 quently have occasion,' he says in 

 the beginning of the Essays, ' to 

 argue from the sense of mankind 

 expressed in the structure of lan- 

 guage.' " The common-sense philo- 

 sophy of Reid has been unduly 

 depreciated by German philosophers 

 such as Kant and Hegel, partly 

 owing to the fact that the German 

 equivalents for " common-sense" are 

 apt to lay stress upon the adjective 

 "common" instead of the noun 

 " sense " ; mainly, however, because 



