COMMON
167
COMMON
Before the fifteenth century closed, the Brethren
of the Common Life had studded all Germany and
the Netherlands with schools in which the teaching
was given for the love of God alone. Gradually the
ciiiirse, at first elementary, embraced the humanities,
|iliilosophy, and theology. The religious orders
li Hiked askance at these Brethren, who were neither
monks nor friars, but the Brethren found protectors
HI Popes Eugenius IV, Pius II, and Sixtus IV. The
i;reat Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had been their pupil
- ii\d became their stanch protector and benefactor.
He was likewise the ])atron of Rudolph Agricola, who in his youth at Zwolle had sat at the feet of Thomas
- 'i Kempis ; and so the Brethren of the Common Life,
ilirough Cusa and Agricola, influenced Erasmus and citlier adepts in the New Learning. More than half I'f the crowded schooLs — in 1500 Deventer counted (i\('r two thousand students — were swept away in the irligious troubles of the sixteenth century. Others 1 iuguished until the French Revolution, while the rise of universities, the creation of diocesan seminaries,
- Liui the competition of new teaching orders gradually
extinguished the schools that regarded Deventer and \\ iridesheim as their parent establishments. A life it De Groote is to be found among the works of 1 iiomas a Kempis.
IiELPRAT. Over dc Broederschap van Groot (Utrecht, 1830); I\ TTLEWELL. Thomas A Kempis and the Brothers of the Com- rh.nLife (London, 1S82).
Ernest Gilli.\t-Smith.
Common Sense, Philosophy of. — The term com- mon sense designates (1) a special faculty, the sensus communis of the Aristotelean and Scholastic philos- ophy; (2) the sum of original principles fotmd in all normal minds; (.3) the ability to judge and reason in accordance with those principles {recta rntio, good sense). It is the second of these meanings that is implied in the philosophy of common sense — a mean- ing well expressed by F^nelon when he identifies common sense with " those general ideas or notions which I can neither contradict nor examine, but according to which I examine and decide on every- thing; so that I smile rather than answer whenever anything, is propo.sed to me that obviously runs counter to those unchangeable ideas" (De I'existence de Dieu, p. XXII, c. ii). The philosophy of common sense sometimes called Scottish philosophy from the nationality of its exponents (though not all Scottish philosophers were adherents of the Common Sense School), represents one phase of the reaction against the idealism of Berkeley and Hume which in Germany was represented by Kant. The doctrine of ideas, which Locke had adopted from Descartes, had been made use of by Berkeley as the foundation of his theory of pure idealism, which resolved the external world into ideas, without external reality, but directly impressed on the mind by Divine power. Hume, on the other hand, had contended that there was no ground for assuming the existence of any mental substance as the subjective recipient of impressions and ideas, all that we know of mind being a succession of states produced by experience. Thus, between the two, both subject and object disappeared, and philosophy ended in mere scepticism.
Thomas Reid (1710-1796), whose dissent from Locke's doctrine of ideas had been to some extent anticipated by Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), set out to vindicate the common sense, or natural judg- ment, of mankind, by which the real existence of both subject and object is held to be directly known (natural realism). He argued that if it cannot be proved that there is any real external world or con- tinuously existing mind, the true conclusion Ls not that these have no existence or are unknowable, but that our consciousness of them is an ultimate fact, which neither needs nor is capable of proof, but is itself the ground of all proof. "All knowledge and
all science must be built upon principles that are self-
evident; and of such principles every man who has
common sen.se is a competent judge" (Works, ed.
186,3, p. 422). Dugald Stewart (175.3-1828), who
followed Reid's method without serious modification,
was more jirecise, and gave greater prominence than
Reid to his doctrine of "suggestion", or the associa-
tion of ideas. Dr. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), while
accepting Reid's main principle, carried the analysis
of the )5henomena of perception further than either
Reid or Stewart, resolving some of their first princi-
ples into elements of experience, particularly in his
treatment of the notion of causality. Sir James
Mackinto.sh (1765-1832) adopted the principles of
common sense, but accepted the utilitarian criterion
of morality, held by the school of Hartley, and applied
the analytic method to the moral faculty which Reid
had taken to be "an original power in man". Sir
\yilliam Hamilton (I7SS-ls5(i) illustrated the prin-
ciple of common sense with witlcr learning and greater
philosophical acumen than any of his predecessors.
He was much influenced by Kant, and he introduced
into his system distinctions which the Common Sense
School had not recognized. While professing himself
a natural realist, he held a somewhat extreme doctrine
of the relativity of knowledge. His comments on
Reid indicate many ambiguities and inaccuracies on
the part of that author. James Oswald (1727-1793)
made use of Reid's principles in support of religious
belief, and James Beattie (1735-1803) in defence of
the existence of a moral faculty.
The conmion sense philosophy, adopting the Bacon- ian method of "interrogation", or analysis, rejects, as contrary to the universal convictions of mankind, the notion of ideas as a terlium quid intervening be- tween the object perceived and the perceiving subject. All knowledge comes by way of sensation; and the reality of the external object is implied in sensation, together with the metaphysical principles of the existence of bodily and mental substance, of causality, and of design and intelligence in causation. What sensation is in itself it is impossible to say; it is an ultimate fact, and cannot be described or defined. But sensations are clearly not images or ideas of the objects which cause them; there is no resemblance between the pain of a wound and the point of a sword. Reid and his successors insist on the distinction be- tween primary and secondary qualities, the former (extension, figure, hardness, etc.) being "suggested" by sensations as essentially belonging to the object perceived, and the latter (as colour, taste, smell, etc.) being no more than sensations in the subject arising from qualities of the object which are only accidental or contingent. Hamilton, however, subdivides sec- ondarj' qualities into secondary and secundo-primary, a distinction now generally considered to be ill- founded. The mental powers are divided into intel- lectual and active, a distinction corresponding to the peripatetic classification of cognitive and appetitive. All cognition has thus an intellectual element, and takes place by way of suggestion, or association (a theory in which Reid was anticipated by Hutcheson). In cognition the mind is partly active and partly passive; the notion that it is a mere receptacle for ideas is rejected. Consciousness is regarded by Reid as a separate faculty, somewhat resembling the scho- lastic sensus communis: Brown and Hamilton dissent from this view, holding "consciousness" to be merely a general expression for the fundamental condition of all mental activity. The idea of causality, which implies the universal necessity of causation, cannot be educed from experience, since necessity (as opposed to mere invariableness) cannot be known by expe- rience; it is therefore an original principle in the mind. In like manner, the will is known imme- diately as free; its freedom is not susceptible of proof but is intuitively recognized; and it is from the eon-
