48 ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE 



how he had seen ' a certain great thing ' in the lung of 

 the frog ; this was the blood flowing through transparent 

 capillaries from the small arteries into the small veins. 



In reflecting how it comes to pass that men of the 

 intellectual capacity of Sir William Temple should thus 

 run their heads against the brick wall of logical certainty 

 a remark of Tyndall's is suggestive. He said with refer- 

 ence to the somewhat general opposition of clergymen 

 to science, ' the leaning towards belief in scientific truth 

 is probably as strong in them as in other men, only the 

 resistance to the bent is stronger ; they do not lack the 

 positive element, the love of truth, but the negative 

 element, the fear of error, predominates/ It may have 

 been this fear of error which made Temple appeal to 

 common sense as against scientific reasoning ; at any 

 rate such an appeal is a familiar form of shirking 

 personal intellectual responsibility. 



It is worth while considering how it comes about that 

 common sense can be appealed to in order to oppose 

 the conclusions reached by the scientific method. By 

 common sense is meant a general consensus of opinion, 

 based upon either the current belief of the majority of 

 mankind or upon apparently uniform sensory experience. 

 When such current beliefs are concerned with the causa- 

 tion of natural phenomena it is notorious that they are 

 accepted on most inadequate evidence, a few striking 

 coincidences being considered as sufficient for a generaliza- 

 tion. Moreover, it can be shown that sensory experience 

 is often grossly misleading, and thus even its uniformity 

 does not warrant its being the foundation for general 

 statements as to natural phenomena. 



In a very remarkable work published in 1661, Joseph 

 Glanville discusses with great mental acumen the sources 

 of the intellectual errors which mankind is subject to ; 



