148 Luck, or Cunning ? 
with things that, though they have mind enough for an 
outsider to swear by, can hardly be said to have yet found 
it out themselves, and advancing to those that know their 
own minds as fully as anything in this world does so. The 
more a thing knows its own mind the more living it becomes, 
for life viewed both in the individual and in the general 
as the outcome of accumulated developments, is one long 
process of specialising consciousness and sensation ; that is 
to say, of getting to know one’s own mind more and more 
fully upon a greater and greater variety of subjects. On 
this I hope to touch more fully in another book; in the 
meantime I would repeat that the error of our philosophers 
consists in not having borne in mind that when they quitted 
the ground on which common sense can claim authority, 
they should have reconsidered everything that common 
sense had taught them. 
The votaries of common sense make the same mistake 
as philosophers do, but they make it in another way. 
Philosophers try to make the language of common sense 
serve for purposes of philosophy, forgetting that they are 
in another world, in which another tongue is current ; 
common sense people, on the other hand, every now and 
then attempt to deal with matters alien to the routine of 
daily life. The boundaries between the two kingdoms 
being very badly defined, it is only by giving them a wide 
berth and being so philosophical as almost to deny that 
there is any either life or death at all, or else so full of 
common sense as to refuse to see one part of the body as 
less living than another, that we can hope to steer clear of . 
doubt, inconsistency, and contradiction in terms in almost. 
every other word we utter. We cannot serve the God of 
philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and 
the same time, and yet it would almost seem as though the 
making the best that can be made of both these worlds were 
the whole duty of organism. 
It.is easy to understand how the error of philosophers 
