America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

The Eric Voegelin Series in Political Philosophy Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegel...

Author: Scott Philip Segrest

54 downloads 1267 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

The Eric Voegelin Series in Political Philosophy Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin, by Barry Cooper How World Politics Is Made: François Mitterand and the Reunification of Germany, by Tilo Schabert Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development, by Eugene Webb Rethinking Rights: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L. Grasso The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature, by Charles R. Embry The Constitutionalism of American States, edited by George E. Connor and Christopher W. Hammons Voegelin Recollected: Conversations on a Life, edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn The American Way of Peace: An Interpretation, by Jan Prybyla Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, edited by Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, by Barry Cooper Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, by Francesca Aran Murphy Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944–1984, edited by Charles R. Embry Voegelin, Schelling, and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, by Jerry Day Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity, by Glenn Hughes Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, by James M. Rhodes The Narrow Path of Freedom and Other Essays, by Eugene Davidson Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking, by David J. Levy A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, by Ellis Sandoz Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, by John von Heyking Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, by Thomas J. McPartland

Books in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis, by Meins G. S. Coetsier Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, by Albert Camus; translated with an introduction by Ronald D. Srigley Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, by Jeffrey C. Herndon Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, by Ellis Sandoz Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, by Elizabeth Campbell Corey Jesus and the Gospel Movement: Not Afraid to Be Partners, by William ThompsonUberuaga The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought, by Stephen A. McKnight

Copyright © 2010 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Segrest, Scott Philip. America and the political philosophy of common sense / Scott Philip Segrest. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1873-5 (cloth edition : alk. paper) 1. Common sense. 2. American philosophy. 3. Political science–Philosophy. I. Title. B105.C457S44 2010 320.01–dc22 2009040120

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Design and composition: Jennifer Cropp Printer and binder: Integrated Book Technologies, Inc. Typefaces: Minion, Cochin, and LinotypeZapfino Publication of this book has been assisted by a contribution from the Eric Voegelin Institute, which gratefully acknowledges the generous support provided for the series by the Earhart Foundation and the Sidney Richards Moore Memorial Fund.

To Ellis Sandoz,

whose work is a model of common sense.

Contents Abbreviations Used in the Text Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

xi xiii 1

2. Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition

21

3. Witherspoon’s “Plain Common Sense”

64

4. McCosh’s Scientific Intuitionism

101

5. The Common Sense Basis of James’s Pragmatic Radical Empiricism

133

6. The Common Sense Basis of James’s Moral and Social Theory

175

7. Conclusion

209

Notes

225

Selected Bibliography

253

Index

265

Abbreviations Used in the Text Works by William James ERE MT PBC PoP Pr PU SPP VRE WB

Essays in Radical Empiricism The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism Psychology: Briefer Course The Principles of Psychology Pragmatism A Pluralistic Universe Some Problems of Philosophy The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

Works by James McCosh EMP IM MDG OMN SP

An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy Intuitions of the Mind, Inductively Investigated The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics The Scottish Philosophy: Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton

Works by John Witherspoon Dominion LMP WJW

The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon, ed. Jack Scott. Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon

Acknowledgments Common sense thrives in communities, and I have been lucky enough to be part of some good ones, at home; in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Rome, Georgia; at West Point; and in the universe of good books. Leo de Alvarez, Richard Dougherty, Tom West, and John Paynter at the University of Dallas get hearty thanks for guiding me into the world of philosophy and its deep satisfactions, and for showing me that politics is about much more than who gets what, when, and how. I am especially grateful to Ellis Sandoz for his mentorship and the inspiration of his own work on American thought and on Eric Voegelin. He in his own way has labored to uncover the wellsprings of American common sense, and with profound success. I am indebted to Cecil Eubanks for heartening perspective and sound advice, to James Stoner for his powerful insights on American law, and to Wayne Parent and William Clark along with these three for sympathetic support during the dissertation phase of this project at LSU: Jon Cogburn in the LSU philosophy department alerted me to Scottish realism’s alternative to analytic philosophy; Jeremy and Simone Mhire, wonderful friends, gave me a place to stay during my visit to Baton Rouge for my dissertation defense. In the book writing stage, Lt. Col. Ike Wilson, director of West Point’s American Politics, Policy, and Strategy Program, gave wholehearted support during my two rounds of revisions, and West Point colleagues Majors Kevin Toner, Ed Williams, Matt Zais, and Paul Oh bailed me out at a critical point in the first round by grading a cycle of my cadets’ exams. Two of my students at Berry College, James Sink and David Fikis, helped me wrestle with Hume, Kant, and Reid in ways they probably did not realize. My sister JaNelle, Dennis Ignatenko, and Jerry Morrison gave last-minute assistance in the final editing phase. The Earhart Foundation gave two precious years of funding, and Liberty Fund provided another through a resident scholarship. And I must not forget Bev Jarrett, Clair Willcox, and John Brenner at the University of Missouri Press and copy editor Pippa Letsky, who offered great patience and expert assistance. To my family and friends I could not possibly do justice with

xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

poor words. My parents, Philip and Gayle, gave without stint, and the rest of the family—JaNelle, Sherilyn, and Doug—bolstered me at regular intervals. The house of David and Elizabeth Corey was a haven to me many times, where I found real food and real conversation—delightful, bracing conversation like I had never known before. David Gauthier, another great conversationalist, was a constant companion in Baton Rouge and Texas. Bob Statham believed in me when others were doubting. Without the help and influence of these extraordinary people, this spiritual labor could never have been done.

1 Introduction

This study considers the political significance of something called common sense philosophy. Two likely reactions to the proposed topic present themselves: Those generally skeptical about the value of philosophy for political life—those who tend to see philosophy as either vicious or useless—might say, “It’s about time! Finally, a common sense philosophy of politics!” Those of a more philosophical bent, conversely, might well say, “What! Crude common sense is precisely what philosophy wants to transcend!” The view here is that there is some validity in both responses. The basic conviction motivating this work, in fact, is that common sense without philosophy is inadequate by itself to address assaults on the foundations of society or to reinforce foundations already cracked; while philosophy, if not anchored in common sense, tends to radicalize and ultimately to corrode social order still further. More positively, the intuition is that a robust, living, cultivated common sense is a primary source of social vitality and that a vibrant intellectual culture, if rooted in common sense, can give visionary direction to society without undermining its existential conditions.1 The “common sense” in “common sense philosophy” indicates both a mode of philosophizing and its main object. The mode of philosophizing is to begin with and continually return to the immediate knowledge of reality as disclosed in primary experience, never letting speculation fly too far from that solid ground or, at least, never forgetting in our philosophical fancies that every object we know, material or mental, we know through that experience, if not always directly in it. The primary object, common sense, has multiple dimensions—from the faculty by which we perceive realities to the sense of things that human beings and particular human communities have in common. The political significance emerges from the “sense in common” element, but this is

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

grounded in the perception of real-world objects, material and mental, and of the necessary truths they indicate, so that every dimension of common sense is rolled up in the last. The particular context in which common sense philosophy appears is important, for the essence of common sense is to stay in close contact with life as it is lived, and for body-bound human beings, life is lived in particular places and times. The common sense philosophies examined here appeared in Englishspeaking America and are colored by specifically American experience. Yet common sense philosophy in its specifically philosophical aspect is concerned with universals, with what is always and everywhere the same, so that “American” common sense philosophy is not simply American. American common sense philosophy may be considered both in terms of its Americanness and of the pure philosophy, if you will, that it produces. The American case may thus be taken as illustrative, especially as common sense and the form of philosophy connected with it is there highly developed. This work is concerned with all these matters, not only with the common sense mode of philosophizing but equally with common sense itself as a human phenomenon, and with both of them together as essential ingredients in forming and preserving civilized society, in the American context and in general. In the American setting this complex of thought and experience has produced what is herein called “American common sense.” The term indicates variously, first, an American way of thinking and the corresponding sense of the American community on matters of communal interest, issuing into a unique political order; second, what American thinkers have said about a universally accessible phenomenon, the thing we call “common sense,” and its implications; and third, the actual presence of this phenomenon in the American sense and outlook and politics just mentioned. Four larger purposes animate the book. The first is to understand American thought and experience more adequately by considering how and why common sense has been a perennial concern for American philosophy, and in particular how three paradigmatic thinkers—John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James—exemplify “the American mind,” or the way Americans think. The second is to understand and evaluate the compatibility of the versions of common sense philosophy these thinkers present. The third is to begin to understand common sense as a feature of human experience and understanding. The fourth is to evaluate cultivated common sense as a prerequisite for healthy moral and political life and order. This last will involve, among other things, an examination of the experiential foundations of natural right and natural law,

Introduction

which are really outworkings of common sense rationality and its implications, and which are not fully intelligible or compelling apart from a deep sense of those foundations. All three of our main thinkers may be seen to unfold natural right in varying ways, not necessarily always in those terms; Witherspoon and McCosh, especially Witherspoon, address natural law directly. Ultimately, the goal is to get at the personal and social meaning of common sense through American thought. These aims, clearly, are philosophical and only secondarily historical. That is, the concern here is with what is, with enduring realities of human nature; of what generally makes for decent, fulfilling human life; and of American identity, not merely what we think of ourselves and have thought of ourselves, but what we are and with substantial consistency have been. Much more is at stake here than mere historical causation. Yet this is no philosophical treatise. It is not a systematic philosophy of common sense, though it contains significant material from which to make one. Nor is it meant to be a comprehensive analysis of American thought and life. The ambition presently is more modest. It is to see what light is shed on the above matters by considering three expressions of common sense philosophy that constitute three pivotal episodes in the development of the American mind: the introduction of Scottish Common Sense to America by John Witherspoon; the culmination of that tradition in James McCosh; and the introduction of Pragmatism and other elements of his empirical philosophy to America and the world by William James. These intellectual movements—Scottish Common Sense and Pragmatism— dominated American philosophy for most of American history (see below). As leaders of those movements, then, Witherspoon, McCosh, and James are among the best representatives of the American way of thinking, and so examining their philosophy should help fulfill the first larger purpose just mentioned, getting a surer sense of the American mind. The key features of American understanding are drawn out in the chapter on Witherspoon, and variations on those features, where they occur, noted in the McCosh and James chapters. What immediately follows here is an introduction to these three men and, touching the book’s second purpose, some indications of the ways their common sense philosophies are and are not compatible. Along the way, a few hints are given as to the substance of American common sense in a brief review of the Declaration of Independence, where all the main features of the American mind are telescoped. James is not ordinarily identified with common sense philosophy, and so first a few words about him. He is most famous as a founder of Pragmatism, though he is more justly remembered for his classic magnum opus,


The Principles of Psychology. His writings hint, however, that the “pragmatic method” of philosophizing he recommends aims at a recasting of common sense and presupposes that the common sense outlook is basically sound, though inadequate by itself (absent critical and scientific and, it turns out, religious support) for understanding the world and maximizing human fulfillment. Implicit in the opening words above is that common sense and common sense philosophy are grounded, in the first case unreflectively and in the second case intentionally, in concrete knowledge. In The Meaning of Truth, the compilation of essays published as “a sequel to Pragmatism,” James explains to his critics that “The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it.”2 Moreover, James’s own version of pragmatic philosophy, radical empiricism, is deeply rooted in common sense impressions. He points repeatedly and explicitly in his posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism to the close affinities between the radically empiricist way of seeing the world and the way of common sense.3 James has been one of the most written-about philosophers and public intellectuals in American history, yet no one, to this author’s knowledge, has until now ever systematically examined the role of common sense in his thought, much less its moral and political implications.4 It is not hard to see why John Witherspoon and James McCosh should be thought of as common sense philosophers, adherents as they were of the Scottish Common Sense movement, but the reader may well wonder, Why these two in particular? The answer is that Witherspoon and McCosh were the most important members of the school in America, Witherspoon during the founding period and McCosh in the post–Civil War era. The symmetry of their respective roles in the near century-long reign of Scottish Common Sense over the American academy is almost poetic. Witherspoon was the first and McCosh the last of its major proponents in the history of American philosophy. Witherspoon’s “Lectures on Moral Philosophy” at Princeton (published posthumously in 1810) and McCosh’s late Realistic Philosophy (republished in 1897) serve effectively as bookends of the movement. Both men emigrated from Scotland to serve as presidents of Princeton (originally, the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton University just after McCosh’s tenure). Both played pivotal parts in making Princeton into one of America’s leading institutions of higher learning. Both taught courses in philosophy there (among other subjects), and both actively participated in the major philosophical, social, and academic debates of their times. Both were ordained Presbyterian ministers and continued preaching more or less

Introduction

regularly during their years at Princeton. Witherspoon was most responsible for making Scottish Common Sense the leading philosophical movement in America, and it attained the status almost of academic orthodoxy in American philosophy (including ethical and political theory) shortly after his passing. McCosh’s writings and public speeches represent its last hurrah before newer trends such as Utilitarianism, German idealism, and then Pragmatism swept it from center stage and almost from memory. No systematic analysis of the common sense basis of Witherspoon’s moral and social philosophy has yet been made, and none of McCosh’s, either. Jeffry H. Morrison recently delivered a fine study of Witherspoon’s underappreciated role in America’s founding, and Thomas Miller gave a good general treatment of Witherspoon’s thought in his introduction to an edition of the Scotsman’s more important writings. Mark A. Noll wrote an excellent chapter on Witherspoon’s legacy at Princeton in a 1989 study of that institution’s Christian intellectual origins, Jack Scott produced an annotated edition of Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy in 1982, and a number of scholarly articles on Witherspoon have been published in recent decades.5 But none has made a systematic textual analysis of Witherspoon’s common sense political philosophy. Only one scholarly work of note has been written on McCosh in recent times, an intellectual biography by J. David Hoeveler, Jr.6 Our direct interest, again, is the political significance of American common sense thought, and Witherspoon, McCosh, and James speak to this in different ways. Witherspoon is the only one of the three who directly articulated a fullblown theory of politics. Neither McCosh nor James did much political theorizing, but each of them said a good deal about ethics and the moral life, and both were much concerned with the social consequences of personal morality and the moral quality of social life. McCosh was more interested than James in elucidating ethical principles. James thought that abstract principles were not much help in hard cases (McCosh actually agreed with him on this point) and therefore preferred to concentrate his energies on working out and clarifying a comprehensive moral vision. What all three have in common, beyond a generally consistent common sense view of things, is a distinctive project: both to find a via media between skepticism and idealism and to keep philosophy anchored in direct experience of reality. The quest for a middle way was perhaps the main motivation of their theorizing; the empirical anchoring enabled them to find it. The philosophical and, by extension, the practical equilibrium desired was attainable, they thought, through a kind of balancing of consciousness and assiduous attention to and respect for all experiences and intuitions, refusing


to discount most, according to modern philosophical habit, in favor of some one or few of these. Each thinker was worried especially about the moral and spiritual consequences of modern skepticism. The emergence of Scottish Common Sense as a self-conscious philosophical movement had been motivated in particular by the skeptical philosophy of David Hume. In the day of McCosh and James (the two were contemporaries, though McCosh was many years James’s senior), the specter of materialism loomed large, as increasing numbers of Western intellectuals took the establishment of evolutionary science to imply the death of God, or at least the irrelevance of God to human affairs, and by the same token also to suggest the transience and arbitrariness of moral convictions. On the other side, idealism did not seem at all a viable solution. Berkeley’s idealism, after all (or so Thomas Reid said), had only paved the way for Hume’s skeptical conclusions, and the philosophy of the “Absolute” of Hegel and his successors was too far removed from common sense to win honest belief from more than a relatively small handful of hyper-intellectuals.7 For Witherspoon, McCosh, and James the only hope for modern man lay in some common middle ground between idealistic certitude and radical doubt. American thought has, until recently at least, struck the right balance more successfully than its European cousins. Hume’s influence in the founding period was limited to political theory, for instance; his radical distrust of reason never took root. Nor could the leading thinkers of the early republic stomach the French deification of reason that led inexorably to the Reign of Terror. Hegel had an impact on the American intelligentsia through John Dewey, but Dewey’s Hegelianism was considerably tamed by his pragmatism and his rejection of a political “End of History,” the idea that has inspired such degradation and bloodshed in the twentieth century as the Hitlers and Lenins of the world tried to make it happen. America may yet be undone by a creeping moral relativism, but a deep reserve of common sense realism—recognizing certain human moral intuitions and tendencies and potentialities that never seem to go away—has so far held it in check. The classic expression of American common sense is the Declaration of Independence, in which we find indicated both the principles and the practice of the common sense realism just mentioned. The most famous part of that document begins with a pronouncement, “We hold these truths to be selfevident.” In the history of philosophy, “self-evident truths” were not truths that were necessarily obvious to everyone but, rather, only to those who looked in the right place with unclouded vision.8 Such are those “truths” on which common sense understanding is based, as Thomas Reid, the most famous British

Introduction

common sense philosopher, attested.9 People who lack common sense in any respect, then, have lacked certain experiences. The authors of the Declaration of Independence did not say, “These truths are self-evident,” but “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The truths clearly would not have been self-evident to most of the world, as they still are not today, even in the West—indeed, even in the United States. But to those who had known the experience of liberty and self-government and the rule of law and, not to be overlooked, reverence for the Creator, these truths were too obvious to be seriously questioned. That experience is laid out in some detail in the middle portion of the Declaration, in the list of grievances against King George III. To late eighteenth-century Americans, the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (“among” others, as the text reminds us) were no mere abstractions. They were known concretely in social customs and political institutions, in the stuff of everyday life. The high principles of the Declaration were thus anchored in experience, instantiated in particular practices and procedures. The American Revolution succeeded where the French Revolution failed because the French revolutionaries lacked a common sense tradition: they lacked the prior experiences that would have given “liberté, égalité, fraternité” concrete meaning. Looking back on the Declaration fifty years later, Thomas Jefferson said that the document was meant “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to make.”10 It was hoped, apparently, that, if the truths of the Declaration were not presently self-evident to the world, they might become so in later time. In any case, in this letter to Henry Lee, Jefferson seems to corroborate the reading of the Declaration outlined above: that the truths announced there were common sense to Americans both as the sense of the American people on the matter of “rights” (the tenor of “the American mind” and “the harmonizing sentiments of the day”) and as rational awareness of self-evident truths, the kind that “command assent” when we see them squarely.11 Grasping the substance of these truths, if Jefferson was right, would take us a long way toward understanding American common sense. Americans remain committed to securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—albeit with considerable erosion of the founders’ sense of natural right and higher law that gave these ideals much of their moral meaning. They also remain characteristically pragmatic and realistic in their politics (relatively speaking), concerned always with “what works” and not given, excepting small radical groups at the fringes, to ideology.12 The early American Pragmatists, heralding a new era in which we remain, continued to treat the old American ideals as sacred, although with less theoretical justification than the founders, and famously


grounded their philosophy in “what works.” James in particular, as much as Jefferson, recognized the personal and social dimensions of common sense and the importance of linking these dimensions for the health of society. If the Declaration of Independence suggests the substance of American common sense, the style of American common sense thinking in addition to the substance appears most clearly in the Scottish Common Sense of Witherspoon and McCosh and James’s pragmatic radical empiricism. The three men may be taken again as paradigmatic—representative of three key moments in the development of the American mind. The period from Witherspoon to McCosh is the first great phase of American common sense, its Scottish realist phase; and James, with his new kind of realism, inaugurates the second phase. “Scottish Common Sense” or Scottish realism was an outgrowth of the philosophizing of Thomas Reid, the one thinker Hume regarded as supplying a serious challenge to his skeptical philosophy, and more remotely of Francis Hutcheson, who gave Lord Shaftesbury’s moral and common sense philosophy systematic form and whose impact on the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment was massive.13 Scottish realism’s dominance of American academic philosophy for the better part of a century (from the late eighteenth century to the post–Civil War years) is prima facie evidence that this philosophic outlook was peculiarly congenial to the American way of thinking and that it played a disproportionately large role in American intellectual development over that period. Indeed, the pervasiveness of Scottish Common Sense into the latter nineteenth century meant that the early Pragmatists such as James, Peirce, and Dewey had to pay at least rhetorical respect to common sense in their presentation and defense of the Pragmatist philosophy. But it is clear that the Pragmatists’ regard for common sense was more than mere lip service. James repeatedly and explicitly made common sense a key test of rationality; Peirce founded his “Pragmaticism” in part on a “critical common-sensism”; and Dewey sided with “cultivated common sense” against philosophies detached from the world of primary experience, understanding common sense to be precisely the sense of things that comes of such experience.14 The seeds of Pragmatism sowed by these great originators fell on fertile soil in America, so much so that George Santayana could charge, plausibly, that Pragmatism was only making a philosophical theory of “the dawning sentiments of the age [as represented most notably by America] . . . the moods of the dumb majority.”15 Although there may be some measure of truth in Santayana’s indictment, the historical argument made here is that part, at least, of the reason Scottish realism and Pragmatism resonated so profoundly in the

Introduction

American context was their mutual appeal to common sense and to common sense experience; and that this appeal was powerful because (1) America was home to a deep-rooted common sense tradition and (2) common sense was a real and even a central concern for both philosophies. Some clarifications are necessary here to avoid misunderstanding. The argument is not that Pragmatism (whether James’s version or any one else’s) can somehow be assimilated to the Scottish Common Sense tradition. The claim of historical continuity is strictly limited. It is only that Scottish realism and American Pragmatism, distinct as they are, are movements within a larger, common, Western, and especially Anglo-American, common sense tradition and accordingly share a deep respect for common sense experience, and further, that this common ground inclined both movements toward a sober and moderate politics.16 The philosophical differences between Scottish realism and Pragmatism are obvious and well-known (to the extent that Scottish realism is still known). In particular, they are greatly at odds in their understanding of common sense principles: the Scottish realists understand these as derived from intuitive capacities built in to a human mental constitution essentially permanent, some of them necessary principles and others contingent but eternally valid for creatures such as we are, while the Pragmatists take them to be only inherited categories of thought that have stood the test of time.17 The Pragmatists, moreover, generally assume a more ambivalent posture toward traditional religion. These differences have sometimes been described in terms of Pragmatism’s rejection of “foundationalism” and “essentialism,” although to describe the differences summarily as a disagreement over the possibility of reliable foundations would be misleading in both directions (see below). But the differences that so clearly are there have distracted later philosophers and scholars from certain structural similarities in the two movements’ philosophic outlooks. Both movements see their philosophizing as grounded in common sense, and both recognize certain features as essential to common sense: both affirm a direct knowledge of concrete realities external to the knower’s mind, including knowledge of moral qualities; both regard Baconian induction and experimentalism as the proper method of inquiry (modified by the Pragmatists to reflect Darwinian insights);18 both take intelligent experience to be the most reliable guide in human affairs; and both insist that all matters be judged “on the whole,” according to the fullest range of experience. The impact on Pragmatism of Darwinism and nineteenth-century developments in psychology, neurology, sociology, and so on was considerable, but this common core of compatibilities remained unshaken right through.

10


Thus, while there is some truth in understanding the historical transition from Scottish Common Sense to Pragmatism (especially in its later varieties) in terms of a “foundationalist” and “essentialist” ethics and politics struggling to hold off but finally giving way to an anti-foundationalist and relativistic version, and while this intellectual shift is profoundly significant both philosophically and politically, intellectual historians, political theorists, and students of the relevant thinkers have given almost no sustained attention to the points of overlap in this transitional process. They therefore have failed to consider precisely those points that might most illuminate the bigger picture. The most interesting point of overlap, politically, between Scottish realism and Pragmatism was a common project of finding a concrete, empirical ground that could serve as a reliable basis for moral and political reflection and action. In this sense the Pragmatists, including Dewey, were no more ready to dispense with foundations than were the Scottish realists. The hostility to “foundationalism,” as the word itself, came later. Dewey, though more of a radical than either James or Peirce, held for empirical foundations, in particular what he called the matrix of human relations (see below), and James and Peirce, contrary to general impression, categorically rejected moral relativism. Relativistic Pragmatism came after, beginning with Dewey but not fully flowering until recent decades. True, the Pragmatists were both more skeptical about the existence or knowability of permanent foundations and substantive essentials of human well-being and more idealistic about the possibility of human progress, but they shared with the Scottish realists a rejection both of classical empiricist doubt about the intelligibility of experience and of gnostic attempts such as Berkeley’s or Hegel’s to escape uncertainty about its deeper meaning. The Scottish realists on balance were certainly more dogmatic about human nature and religion. The Pragmatists can be faulted with being, like Heraclitus, so impressed with flux as to make them nearly forget, or in some cases to deny, the deeper features of human nature and human experience that seem to have remained constant through the whole stretch of recorded history. The larger point for our purposes, however, is that what the Pragmatists and the Scottish realists have in common has been overlooked, and that this heretofore little contemplated common ground may contain clues about American character and outlook, and a few clues too, perhaps, about the nature and social significance of common sense understanding. The common ground between the two groups is especially interesting in the case of William James. In addition to the general empirical approach and a robust conception of common sense rationality, James’s handling of the religious question showed an affinity to an older orientation toward the world

Introduction

11

accepted by Scottish realists such as Witherspoon and McCosh and set him apart from Dewey and later Pragmatists in a decisive respect. James understood religious faith in a way later Pragmatists have not. He took the claims of religionists about their experiences much more seriously than Dewey did, for instance. In his book on religion, A Common Faith, Dewey takes these experiences as real, but he dismisses interpretations of those experiences that see them as inspired in some sense by a divine being. James is much less dogmatic. James recognizes (as Dewey does after him) that experiences of a religious character—involving in their mature form a unification of self within through a harmonizing of self with the larger reality of which one is part—are often brought about in ways and interpreted according to terms entirely distinct from any particular religion in the traditional sense of that term.19 But James does not (as Dewey does) privilege the interpretations of “scientific” elites. Something goes on in these experiences, both of them agree, but James is much more willing than Dewey to believe that this something, at least in some cases, might be the kind of spiritual influx envisioned by classic mystics and theologians. In any event, he does not dogmatically rule out the possibility. This different attitude toward religious experience has profound and farreaching philosophical consequences, of which two are especially noteworthy. The first concerns the question of existence—the “why question” classically formulated as why there is something rather than nothing, and why the something is what it is and not something else. Dewey deliberately bracketed off the why question as “insoluble” and therefore at best a distraction, a matter of idle speculation or, more insidious, an obstacle to getting on in the world.20 Much better, he said, to spend our energies on solvable problems and on improving matters over which we have some human control than to waste ourselves musing about ultimate origins or final destinies. God is dead, in any case, and the old “views about the origin and constitution of the world and man . . . about the course of human history and personages and incidents in that history” traditionally identified with religion have become “onerous and even impossible for large numbers of cultivated men and women.”21 Brilliant trailblazer though he was for Pragmatism and modern empirical philosophy, James was, let’s admit it, a bit of a quack about the mysteries of religious experience. So Dewey seems to have thought. But it may be, the common experience of mankind in fact seems to indicate, that there is embedded deep in the race a need for some sense of a greater purpose of our existence. It may be that man really cannot live well without some consideration of first and last things; and perhaps

12


Dewey’s contempt for those old views about what grounds us and his disdain for James’s venturings into regions deemed illusory or gauche by liberal, polite society closed him off from unsuspected pathways to illumination. One cannot hope to find out, in any case, unless one is more willing than Dewey to engage seriously what serious men have thought and said on the subject of religion. James was willing so to engage them, and the result was a much richer vision of spiritual experience and a correspondingly more profound sense of man’s place in the scheme of things.22 In contrast to Dewey, he shared with classic philosophy a conviction that the why question—as James put it, “Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?”—was the most important one. “The notion of nonentity may,” James said, “be called the parent of the philosophic craving in its subtlest and profoundest sense.”23 Even if a completely unified system of things is attained (hypothetically speaking) and all being is accounted for, there would still be cause for restlessness in the awareness of non-being beyond and in the question of why what we have is there in the shape we have it. James saw a possible solution to this restlessness in mystical experience. Significantly, the question of existence was not for James merely an intellectual problem. He saw it as practically imperative: it is for many people at least (including James himself) a “live,” “forced,” and “momentous” matter that cannot therefore practically be set aside (WB 14). He perceived that human beings need to know that “the inmost nature of reality is congenial to powers which you possess” (WB 73). Experience suggests that it is so in some ways, in fact, and this observation, made and taken to heart, makes the question of existence a living one.24 The religious feeling that “there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand” makes that question forced and momentous. The universe seems amenable to our understanding and parts of it, at least, to our control; why then are we dysfunctional and at a loss? The sense some have of being “saved from the wrongness by making proper connexion with the higher powers” (VRE 400) and the beneficent fruits that have followed in and through the lives of many of these persons suggests for James that religion in this living form may have something valuable to say to us about the meaning of life. Alleged insights into the structure of reality and the movement of being coming out of such experiences deserve at least respectful consideration, particularly when the persons claiming to receive these insights evince a remarkably high quality of character and life and when their words “kindle unsuspected faculties” in their hearers (VRE 294). Dewey essentially accepts James’s generic description of “religious” phenomena, as outlined here, but he does not accept that they constitute a special class of experience distinct from “aesthetic, scientific, moral, political” experience.25

Introduction

13

Dewey wants to divorce values that, given their concern with the whole of things, may be termed “religious” (values he recognizes are precious to human life), from any belief in the supernatural, from any purposes beyond improving our lives in the here and now, and from any notion of final human ends.26 Although James is willing to consider a variety of explanations for generically “religious” phenomena and handles the relevant questions in highly innovative ways, he is clearly more inclined to give religion special status and more open to traditional understandings of God, immortality, and providence. Religious experience may indeed enable us to get at the larger purposes of existence. James thought the question of existence to be at least potentially resolvable concretely because he took religious experience seriously. The second great philosophic consequence of the difference between Dewey and James on religious experience concerns the question of permanent metaphysical foundations for human ethics. Dewey thought that the only foundation possible and the only foundation necessary and desirable for ethics was the existing and ever-changing matrix of human relations within which we find ourselves and out of which, he claimed, our values and highest ideals emerge. Dewey continually begs the question as to the source of the best human ideals, assuming it is simply persons intelligently and imaginatively engaged with their human and material environment and suggesting new possibilities for improving the quality of life, and rules out divine inspiration as unverifiable. But religious claims, as James saw it, prove themselves the same way all others do, by putting us in touch with and making sense of the whole range of possible experience; and he was convinced that only religion could open up and adequately illuminate the range of moral experience for us. He was certain that saintly examples, actions, and ideals have made the world a better place (see VRE 294). More to the point, he appreciated the relevance and the value for human flourishing of the idea of an unchanging moral order. James’s pragmatic conception of God is precisely the idea of the Agent that guarantees “an eternal moral order” and all our highest ideals (see WB 161; Pragmatism 50–62).27 This eternal order of value is glimpsed, if it is directly known at all, through noetic illumination, and James refuses to dismiss the possibility that faith can make it seen.28 In The Principles of Psychology he further intimates that the sense of obligation we feel to honor and act in accord with the ideals of “the highest judging companions” we know (our “conscience,” which he places at the core of our innermost self) points to a God of the kind just described, whose demands are imperative because God is good and has a special claim on us.29 If this analysis is correct, Dewey must be credited (or charged) with turning Pragmatist philosophy from its initial posture of spiritual openness (Peirce shared James’s attitude toward existence and metaphysical foundations) to

14


the quasi-religious scientism and worship of democracy that has characterized many of its later manifestations and most later modern thought. James never made the scientistic and corresponding anthropocentric turn.30 James represents a prior moment, a more pivotal moment in American philosophical and spiritual history. In this sense he stood athwart the divide between old and new America. He was, as all Pragmatists have been, forward-looking in his general orientation. His thought was stunningly fresh, dazzlingly original and liberating. Yet he lived in and embodied a moment of tension and transition in the American mind that was pregnant with diverse possibilities. If one wished to find one person deeply American in instinct and outlook, an epitome of American genius and character, in whom all that was old in America and all that was new was seamlessly combined, a person to whom one could look to find not only the germs of what modern America has become but all of the potentialities for what it could have become and didn’t—one could hardly find a better example than William James. John Witherspoon and James McCosh represent the old America; William James represents the new America before its intellectual leadership, or much of it, had lost all faith in God and reason. A juxtaposition and comparison of their treatments of common sense will help us see more clearly what is distinctive about the American way of thinking, what it owes to older ways, what is new about it, how it has kept its original form, and how it has changed. At the same time, observing the development of the concept “common sense” in the American context will help us come to terms with the historical dimension of common sense, how the common sense mode of mind and reasoning varies with cultural context. There is one more point to make on the relation of Scottish realism and Jamesian pragmatic empiricism, and this is that each supplies what the other lacks, so that a judicious combination of the elements would make a complete common sense philosophy. The need for this and the way it might be done are indicated in Chapters 4, 5, and 7 of the current study. In particular, Witherspoon, McCosh, and James address different elements (epistemological, moral, political) of what would have to be included in any complete common sense philosophy of politics, and James’s treatment of our obligations to God and the possibility of an “eternal moral order” opens the way to wedding the Pragmatist account of vital moral experience to the Scottish realist recognition of necessary moral truths. The third purpose of the present work—in addition to illuminating the American mind and weighing the compatibility of these three thinkers’ phi-

Introduction

15

losophies—is to understand common sense as a human, as distinguished from a merely American, phenomenon. The term “common sense,” again, has many connotations, but the whole cluster of primary meanings—good sense, good judgment, the settled sense of a community about what is right and reasonable, and the more technical philosophical notion of a perception of self-evident objects or facts or truths and the solid sense of things that comes from cultivating this capacity—all have a direct relation to a certain healthy mode of consciousness that is possible for all human beings because of some capacity, also called common sense, that is endemic to human nature. This mode of mind is the link connecting all the meanings. This book is most deeply and most essentially a meditation on the human meaning of common sense, first for the individual but ultimately for society. It is not intended except incidentally to be a history of ideas but, rather, a study in political philosophy. That is, it is concerned not merely with concepts or with intellectual discourses and debates but with fundamental human realities, with common sense itself, and with those basic moral and political realities that become clear through the common sense way of seeing, and beyond that with the ways common sense understanding helps lay the groundwork for humane society. The following chapters progressively differentiate the compact meaning of common sense just outlined, culminating in an extended elaboration of the phenomenon in the book’s conclusion. The fourth great purpose of this volume relates to the point about common sense as a basis for civilized society, to help restore a sense of the metaphysical foundations of moral and political order. In the contemporary philosophical context of radical uncertainty about or outright willful rejection of permanent metaphysical foundations for ethics and ethical politics (a development for which John Dewey bears a special responsibility in the American setting), analysis of common sense rationality as an empirical phenomenon provides a clarifying service. The experience of common sense rationality was, in some form, always the root of conceptions of natural right and natural law. Without an appreciation of the empirical basis of these conceptions in common sense, natural law concepts and principles seem contrived and dogmatic. Such an appreciation has been shallow, too narrowly focused, misdirected, or missing altogether in most modern moral and political philosophy, with serious consequences, most significantly a loss of conviction that private and public justice has any basis deeper than will or mere consent. For example, Hobbes and Locke tried to ground natural right and natural law empirically, but the empirical foundation they laid, the natural drive for

16


self-preservation, was, in the context of the older natural law tradition, very thin, not taking account of other, equally fundamental human inclinations. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, had made the empirical foundation of natural law to consist not only of the drive for self-preservation, which he recognized, but also the tendency toward preserving the species, including affection for offspring and what might be called the herding instinct, and most important, the desire for rational sociability and knowing the truth about God and ultimate things. Thomas Reid made the connection between common sense and natural law principles, but his analysis of the link was underdeveloped and lacked historical sense. He recognized the similarity between his own formulation of common sense principles and Aristotle’s treatment of first principles (indeed, as Reid intended them they were identical), but he never systematically considered the relation of his common sense philosophy to the larger Western natural law tradition.31 Most of Reid’s followers lacked his analytical precision and his deep sense of the empirical problems. Hume and Kant had an equally keen awareness of the empirical problems but were not able to come to terms with the larger implications of the common sense rationality they understood, in some ways, very well. This was partly because they were hampered, as James points out (ERE 23), by an atomistic, discontinuous model of consciousness deriving from Locke, and a kind of Cartesian obsession with certainty as the criterion of all knowledge. I will not resolve, or even try to resolve, all these issues. The following treatment of metaphysical foundations is only suggestive, pointing to the range of issues one would have to consider in order to work out a common sense theory of politics. The basic idea presented here is that a well-cultivated common sense rationality and the firm grasp of the elements of human nature and human experience it reveals provide a better, because deeper, foundation for moral and political life than either logic or sentiment (the alternative foundations most commonly put forward in the modern period), which are secondary and derivative. Logic helps determine implications, and sentiment, properly nurtured, can incline people to right living and forge the bonds of mutual goodwill; but elemental facts must be known before we can draw true logical conclusions or begin to understand what manner of beings we are that we might aim to live well. All else depends on simple awareness of our common human situation, our tendencies and problems, and the possibilities lying open to us. Logic and sentiment in the service of partial facts—or, worse, in the service of dreamworld ideologies having no patience with the facts—are sure to mislead or in extreme cases destroy us. Our reasonings, our loves and hopes and fears must be grounded in deep acquaintance with ourselves and with the world we live

Introduction

17

in, in consciousness that is itself well grounded, settled, stable, and attuned as far as possible to the whole human scene. I have stressed that the book before the reader is a work of political philosophy. Perhaps something should be said, therefore, about the value of Scottish Common Sense and James’s pragmatic radical empiricism for academic philosophy. Scholars in the discipline may reasonably ask, particularly, why they should care about Scottish Common Sense philosophy except as a curious historical phenomenon. The first reason is that Scottish realism at its best deals more adequately with the range of epistemological problems than most schools of philosophy either before or since. A number of the epistemological dilemmas upon which many so-called analytic philosophers have hung, in particular questions about justifying beliefs, are effectively addressed, for instance, by the best of the Scottish realists, notably Reid and McCosh.32 The gist is that common sense intuitions do not need justification, are incapable of being justified, and that trying to justify them undermines rationality. Beliefs may, and in many cases should, be tested to verify their status as intuitions, but genuine intuitions (as Aristotle said of first principles) are the absolute base of reasoning and therefore incapable of demonstration. The second reason that scholars in academic philosophy should care about Scottish realism is that it may well help to forge a pathway out of the moral fog that afflicts contemporary philosophy. The substantive emptiness and aimlessness of postmodernism, beginning with Nietzsche and continuing to the contemporary movement bearing the name, have provoked a twentieth- and twenty-first-century resurgence of classic political philosophy, with which Scottish realism has a great affinity.33 Scottish realism laid epistemological foundations for ethics compelling enough to merit reconsideration, or rather consideration for the first time, from contemporary academic philosophers haunted by the sneaking feeling that the postmodern abandonment of reality might be an overreaction.34 The third reason is the reemergence of Thomas Reid’s status as a major modern philosopher. The high level of scholarly, philosophical, and historical analyses of Reid’s thought represented in the recent Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (2004) testifies to the fact. The philosophical relevance more particularly of Witherspoon, McCosh, and James may be described as follows. Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, as supplemented by his other moral and political writings, provide a unique, and rare, distillation of Scottish Common Sense philosophy as it stood in the late eighteenth century, and of Scottish Enlightenment ethical and political thought more generally.35 One gets in brief compass in those

18


writings the Scottish Enlightenment and its internal debates—notably between the defenders of common sense and its critics. The Lectures also provide an opportunity to consider the links both historical and philosophical between common sense, on the one hand, and natural right and natural law on the other. The Scottish Common Sense thinkers were very much and very directly concerned both with natural right, as seen throughout their “moral philosophy,” and with natural law, which they addressed most directly under the category of “natural jurisprudence” but which underlay their larger moral systems, in the form of conscience’s recognition of a higher law of obligation and human nature. (Natural jurisprudence itself was treated as a subset of moral philosophy.) Witherspoon did not give an unbiased account. He clearly favored mainstream Scottish thought as represented by such worthies as Hutcheson, Reid, and Kames (the defenders of common sense), with its affirmations of moral knowledge, over the maverick philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith (the critics), and he did not give Hume or Smith the same kind of serious attention as the others. It has to be admitted further that Witherspoon himself, while a good reasoner and a man of prodigious learning, was certainly far outclassed both as technical philosopher and as scholar by the leading Scottish thinkers. Nonetheless, few if any writers of the late eighteenth century give such a comprehensive view as he does of the main currents of Scottish philosophy at that time. Reading Witherspoon immerses us in the intellectual milieu of both the Scottish Enlightenment and the late eighteenthcentury American academy so that we can see the philosophical world of the period as it were from the inside. Additionally, and crucially, Witherspoon is, if not the best expositor of common sense, at least a great exemplar of it in his practical reflections and political participation. His thought and life give us a striking picture of common sense in concreto. McCosh’s philosophic importance is twofold. First, his philosophical writings represent a culmination and refinement of Scottish Common Sense. He was not as original or penetrating a thinker as Reid, but he was a superb analyst of intuition and a better logician and metaphysician than Reid was. He may justly be said to have perfected Reid’s epistemology and rectified its shortcomings on key points. Second, McCosh’s writings contain some of the clearest, most compelling accounts in the English language of certain mental operations, namely, cognition, belief, judgment, and moral conviction, and of the bad consequences of disordered conscience. James’s pragmatic radical empiricism provides a superior account of the nature, breadth, and depth of human experience, an account that has perhaps never been matched in precision and comprehensiveness. More directly rel-

Introduction

19

evant to the present project, James also offers a brilliant analysis of the experiential meaning of common sense and of the alternative it supplies, both epistemologically and practically, to skepticism and idealism. His treatment of common sense, so little appreciated as it has been, demands closer consideration, for it constitutes a major contribution to philosophy, and to common sense philosophy in particular. A note on scholarship and method is in order at this point. Scholars rigidly wedded to the prevailing methodologies of their particular fields might find this book frustrating, unconstrained as it is by such disciplinary strictures. Every effort has been made here to give a rigorous and meticulous treatment of the subject matter, but this subject matter is of such a nature as to require moving beyond contemporary professional boundaries. I aim to connect lived experience, philosophically examined, with the movements of society, and I try to uncover the kind of basic experiences and habits that make civilization possible. The task is formidable. No one should expect here more than a beginning and an outline of what needs working out. The basic method is that of William James, who took it from his friend Henri Bergson. In James’s words: Place yourself at a bound . . . inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand. . . . But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit “logically,” and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.36

The method as it relates to the material examined here is immersion in the process of common sense tradition as it touches the American experience. My intuition is that a center of American life and order does in fact exist, if it can hold; that it has something to do with what is called common sense; and further, that this center is emblematic of others holding together other decent regimes. Demonstrating this is beyond the scope of the current book, but it’s a first move in that direction. The second chapter lays out a brief history of the concept of common sense, showing that common sense rationality as a foundation for philosophy and moral and political health is a long-standing Western concern and providing contextual background to American common sense. The third chapter, on Witherspoon, uncovers the basic features and philosophic underpinnings of

20


American common sense as it appeared at the founding. The fourth chapter, on McCosh, uncovers the farthest development and limits of Scottish Common Sense, and with it of American common sense in its first phase. The chapters on James uncover other dimensions of common sense Americans had long lived but that had until James never been philosophically articulated. The concluding chapter considers the compatibility and relevance of Scottish realist and Jamesian philosophy, concludes on common sense as a human phenomenon and basis of civilized life and order, and speculates on how by attending to common sense foundations we might fortify and sustain American common sense and that of other peoples.

2 Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition

The Basic Elements of Common Sense The philosophical and political import of common sense is strikingly suggested in a passage from Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections. The passage has the additional merit of highlighting the surprising philosophic richness of American culture and outlook. As a young German scholar studying in America at Columbia University around 1922, Voegelin found himself “overwhelmed by a new [cultural and intellectual] world of which hitherto I had hardly expected the existence.” He took courses with John Dewey, among others, and repairing often to the university library “started working through the history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought.” His account of what he learned in the process is illuminating: I discovered English and American common sense philosophy. More immediately, the impact came through Dewey’s recent book, Human Nature and Conduct, which was based on the English common sense tradition. From there, I worked back to Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. This English and Scottish conception of common sense as a human attitude that incorporates a philosopher’s attitude toward life without the philosopher’s technical apparatus, and inversely the understanding of Classic and Stoic philosophy as the technical, analytical elaboration of the common sense attitude, has remained a lasting influence in my understanding both of common sense and [of] Classic philosophy. It was during this time that I got the first inkling of what the continued tradition of Classic philosophy on the common sense level, without necessarily the technical apparatus of an Aristotle, could mean for the intellectual climate and the cohesion of a society.

21

22


Precisely this tradition of common sense I now recognized to be the factor that was signally absent from the German social scene, and not so well developed in France as it was in England and America. In retrospect, I would say that the absence of political institutions rooted in an intact common sense tradition is a fundamental defect of the German political structure that still has not been overcome. . . . During my year in New York, I began to sense that American society had a philosophical background far superior in range and existential substance, though not always in articulation, to anything that I found represented in the methodological environment in which I had grown up.1

The passage indicates the meaning of “common sense,” its importance in the history of philosophy, and the political ramifications of its presence or absence as a cultural force. Let us consider each of these points in turn. Voegelin actually addresses only part of the meaning of common sense here, albeit the most fundamental part. Frits van Holthoon and David R. Olson have suggested, persuasively, that all the various employments of the term “common sense” are rooted in two related notions: common sense as “judgment, the capacity to recognize self-evident truths,” and common sense as the body of knowledge constituted by such truths.2 “Common sense,” then, has reference sometimes to a capacity of mind and sometimes to what is known through that capacity when it is finely attuned to reality. When we speak of a man having common sense, sometimes we mean the basic rational capacity of normally functioning persons, the ordinary variety intended when we say “that’s just common sense”; and sometimes we mean not any mental capacity but rather a certain mental achievement, as in good sense, or what d’Holbach had in mind when he said “nothing is more uncommon than common sense.”3 The first kind is (as Reid described it, indicating its political significance) the degree of reason “which is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable to our conduct towards others: this is called common sense, because it is common to all men with whom we can transact business, or call to account for their conduct.”4 The second kind of common sense is a product of exercising this basic capacity over and over again. It presupposes the capacity for judgment but is itself a certain mental disposition, an openness of consciousness to all that experience may show. Thus, as Voegelin said, it is a kind of “attitude” or posture toward reality, what I will call a “grounded mode of consciousness,” as it is grounded in and by experience. “Experience” here has two meanings: contact with the world (whether the physical or the mental dimensions of it), what we call “primary experience,” and then the kind of long acquaintance with the world, or with parts of it, that makes one ready to deal with it effectively. The common sense attitude is

The Common Sense Tradition

23

grounded in experience, in the sense of staying in touch with the world (again, with mental and physical realities alike), and it is grounded by experience, in that it is the fruit of innumerable encounters with the world’s basic features and innumerable judgments both of fact and logic (though the logic may not be formally recognized). The common sense attitude, once highly developed, enables the clarification, collection, and synthesis of common sense truths into a body of knowledge accessible to a broader community. Someone is certain to call into question the possibility of “self-evidence” and to object specifically that what one man considers self-evident another will call rubbish. Answering this objection fully would take a book of its own, but let me proffer some indication of an answer here. Self-evident truths can be known only experientially. If someone points at this lamp and demands to know how we know the lamp is really there, the answer can only be, “Why, we know the lamp by experiencing it, and there is no other way it can be known.” Similarly, if it be true that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, [including] life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” we know this to be true only by “seeing” it through lived experience—by observing, for example, the necessity of security of life and the free pursuit of happiness for meaningful human existence and realizing the absurdity of denying these to anyone arbitrarily. Self-evident truths are not necessarily evident to everyone; they are evident only to those who have seen the evidence and who have viewed the relevant data with sufficient attention. They are truths that every clear-eyed, unbiased observer would recognize if only he looked in the right place. Generally, then, appeal to common sense is an appeal to “what can be commonly sensed,” what can be sensed, not necessarily what actually is sensed.5 The hard-core skeptic or cynic will hardly be satisfied with this answer. It is fashionable in today’s intellectual climate to ask, like Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” and not stay for an answer. This kind of reader will probably have set the book aside already. So, for those who read on, all I ask is that they be open to the possibility that things can be recognized to be, or to be true, and when one alleged self-evident matter or another is fingered, to look closely and see for themselves. “Common sense philosophy” was a philosophical movement of the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries that had its roots in England, grew up in Scotland, and found its warmest reception in America. Pragmatism, that home-grown American philosophy, has its own roots in this earlier movement and must be accounted an extension of the “tradition of common sense” that Voegelin speaks of. But the classical and Stoic philosophers had recognized the importance of the existential posture that Voegelin calls the “common sense attitude” long before Anglo-American common sense philosophy was ever born, and conceptually the latter tradition owes much to

24


those ancient philosophic pioneers. The classic and Stoic philosophers as well as the British and American thinkers of later times took the common sense attitude as the starting point for philosophy, and both the earlier and later thinkers thought it imperative, in all their theorizing, to keep their thought anchored in it. Indeed, as Voegelin suggests, the fundamentals of truth and right were to all of these thinkers simply a working out and elaboration of this mental orientation and all that it revealed. Thus, though the term “common sense philosophy” derives from a particular philosophical movement, it may be employed (as it is here) as a descriptive term for all philosophy that understands common sense as the root of philosophizing and that takes philosophy to need common sense as much as common sense needs philosophy. The first political significance of ordinary common sense was suggested by Reid: the very possibility of human society depends on it. The extraordinary kind of common sense is no less necessary for the full flourishing of human society. That a good social life depends on men of seasoned judgment is perhaps too obvious to need saying. The fact that judicious decision-making involves recognizing self-evident facts and truths is less appreciated. This does not mean, of course, that these facts or truths are always recognized as self-evident. Very few have considered the status of common sense philosophically, and for most practical purposes it is not necessary to do so. There is a third kind of common sense that grows out of the other two, and it is of capital importance for politics. This is the common understanding or feeling of a people about what is right and good. The common sense of a people may or may not be grounded in cultivated common sense, and there may be factors at work in a particular polity that undermine, suppress, or oppose the operation of the first two kinds of common sense, and so the communal sense of justice and humanity may be twisted. The absence of cultivated common sense, the lack of a common sense tradition, can make a society vulnerable to social breakdown and self-destruction, as Voegelin suggested. Discovering how common sense rationality may be protected, nourished, and institutionalized is therefore of paramount concern for political science.

The Philosophical Tradition Herman Parret traces “two rough lines of interest in common sense in the history of philosophical doctrines.” The first, “the Aristotelian line [extending ‘from Aristotle to the Scottish and English empiricism,’ and continuing ‘even as far as George Edward Moore’] introduces common sense as a category in the theory of perception: common sense is used to explain the consciousness of perception.” The second one is “rooted in the notion of koinai ennoiai developed by the Stoics and used for the axioms of theories


25

(and geometry and pure mathematics, too),” leading to “Kant’s Gemeinsinn.”6 Actually, these are only the two lines of epistemological interest in common sense. There is a third line of interest critical to the present inquiry, raised just a moment ago: common sense as a community’s sense of what is good and right. This third line finds its classic expression in Giambattista Vico. While certainly distinct from the purely epistemological question, the phenomenon of the sense of a community is nonetheless inseparably connected to it: common sense as communal sense is grounded on some level in perceptual or intuitive experience. Aristotle might be considered the first and greatest common sense philosopher. He was the first to use “common sense” as a technical term, and something of his meaning has persisted through the whole history of the concept. In De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle describes koine aesthesis (common sensation) as the awareness of external objects through the coming together of our special sensations (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), that is, perception of “things” and their varying states and modes.7 This common sensation is what enables us to perceive “movement, rest, number, shape and size, such being not special to any one sense but common to all.”8 He does not in De Anima unequivocally indicate a faculty or power of soul that performs this operation, but most interpreters of Aristotle have taken him there to imply such a faculty,9 something he in fact explicitly affirms in Parva Naturalia.10 As Peter van Kessel puts it, this faculty is “the sense which converts the impressions given by the five senses into one unity of sensations connected to the one object and origin of these impressions.”11 Aristotle’s faculty of common sense, then, is that inner sense by which we perceive objects immediately before us as objects, rather than as heaps of disconnected sensations. Aristotle also, following Plato, modeled the common sense way of philosophizing (though he did not use the term “common sense” to describe it): starting with common experiences and common opinions, on the intuition that, being so common, they will reveal on critical examination something about human nature and human potential (See Nichomachean Ethics [1.4]). Some opinions when tested will be found to be erroneous, but even wrong opinions, if they are very common, should reveal something. For instance, in Book 1 of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle raises the question of what constitutes happiness and finds the usual answers reducible to honor, wealth, pleasure, and virtue (by the last he means a certain inward order and harmony derived from exercising one’s capacities to their fullest potential). He tries to show that the last is the right answer—virtue in his sense is the truest happiness—but the prevalence of the wrong answers tells something about universal human drives and goods. Virtue is the right answer not because honor, wealth, and pleasure have no value but because they are of comparatively

26


less value than virtue. Each of them is valuable in its own way because each answers to some fundamental human need or desire, and these needs and desires ultimately reveal the basic components of human nature.12 (Compare Plato’s discussion of the basic human loves and their connections to the parts of the soul in Books 8 and 9 of The Republic.) Further, Aristotle’s understanding of intellection as the intuitive grasp of first principles and prudence, enabled by phronesis, or practical wisdom, as the application of these principles in action to the circumstances in which one is placed corresponds exactly to the intellectual and practical dimensions of common sense as elaborated by arguably the greatest modern common sense philosopher, certainly the greatest associated with the term “common sense philosophy,” Thomas Reid, though Reid like other Scottish realists was not quite able to capture the dynamic of phronesis. In fact, Reid could fairly be described as being in many respects a modern Aristotelian.13 Aristotle describes intellection and prudence in Book 6 of the Nichomachean Ethics. These are in their moral operation the concrete basis for his natural right, though he does not make this as clear as his great admirer and expositor Thomas Aquinas does.14 Finally, Aristotle articulates the essence of common sense on the social level as the rational sense of a community about what is good, right, and in the common interest with his notion of homonoia, or “concord” (literally, like-mindedness). In the Nichomachean Ethics he describes homonoia as friendship among fellow citizens of good character based on having the “same judgment” about “what is in the common interest and what is important for life,” this judgment leading them to “choose the same things, and . . . execute what they have decided in common.”15 In particular homonoia leads to a common “wish” and determination, among ordinary and great alike, “that the best men should rule.”16 Homonoia, then, is in its fullest import a practical mode of rationality and the ground of inspired and noble politics. Aquinas later translated Aristotle’s koine aesthesis as sensus communis, the Latin basis of our English “common sense.” But in Aquinas’s handling, as Frits van Holthoon points out, “sensus communis became almost a synonym for reason.”17 In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas describes the faculty this way: The proper sense judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from other things which come under the same sense; for instance, by discerning white from black or green. But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet: because what discerns between two things, must know both. Wherefore the discerning judgment must be assigned to the common sense; to which, as to a common


27

term, all apprehensions of the senses must be referred: and by which, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived; as when someone sees what he sees.18

Thomas thus seems to go beyond Aristotle to make sensus communis “the locus of the discerning judgment.”19 Right judgment or the capacity for it, indeed, is the essence of common sense in both its personal and, as Aristotle suggested in his analysis of homonoia, its political modes. Sensus communis was a term widely used during Roman times, in both formal and informal contexts. Aquinas thus chose for his translation of koine aesthesis a term of great currency. Cicero had made several references to sensus communis in his writings and public speeches but had never made use of it as a technical philosophical concept. Cicero used it in the popular sense of “the notions or norms men in society hold in common.” He seemed to be close, however, to fusing its meaning with that of another term that bulked large in his political philosophy: humanitas, a word rich in connotations, signifying variously (1) “human nature, humanity, the qualities, feelings and inclinations of mankind”; (2) “humane or gentle conduct toward others, humanity, philanthropy, kindness, politeness”; and (3) “mental cultivation befitting a man, a liberal education, good breeding, refinement, elegant manners.” S. E. W. Bugter says that, “Humanitas in classical Latin is the counterpart of our modern common sense, gezond verstand (in Dutch), gesunder Menshenverstand (German), or le bon sens (in French).”20 The meanings of humanitas, Bugter says, correspond closely to the four connotations of sensus communis that C. S. Lewis delineates in his essay on “Sense” in Studies in Words: (1) “the elementary mental outfit of normal man,” (2) “sensus communis as a social virtue,” (3) “sensus communis as common wit,” and (4) “sensus communis [as] a collection of all our experiences, emotions, thoughts, opinions, etc.,” that is, “the collection of all the sensus that we have in common, because they are ‘normal.’”21 The Stoic koine ennoiai (common conceptions) are “the axioms of theorizing and the norms of practical life, . . . principles of reason in theory and practice, and are thus transcendental pre-conditions of reasoning (theoretically and practically).”22 The koine ennoiai, then, are something like Aristotle’s first principles— indemonstrable, self-evident principles that are primary in the sense that they are and must be presupposed, taken for granted, in all our reasonings.23 Kant’s Gemeinsinn (common sense) has a similar meaning. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant presents Gemeinsinn as the “possibility ground of the conditions” (Parret’s language) of both theoretical and practical reason. That is, common sense provides the preconditions of both. It is thus the very root of rationality. Parret explains that “Common sense [for Kant] appears just at the parting of

28


theory and practice, or at the crossroads where conditions of valid knowledge and conditions of good life meet.”24

Vico, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson In the early eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico employed the Latin sensus communis in his theory of common sense, giving it, however, a rather more involved significance than Aquinas contemplated. Vico’s sensus communis, in fact, combined the meanings of koine aesthesis and koine ennoiai together with the notion of the sense of a community to produce the very rich conception of “the primary truths residual in society,” that is, the primary truths that are universal but linguistically and culturally mediated.25 As John D. Schaeffer observes, Vico’s sensus communis contains a sense of the natural law in recognizing the “underlying agreements” about basic human needs and utilities that obtain among all nations.26 At the same time, according to Vico’s understanding, “The sensus communis cannot be merely a static set of values embodied in a literary canon [but, rather,] is a capital constantly changing its outline as it is invested in various causes. The sensus communis is constantly reinterpreted and reshaped by the decisions of the community.”27 Vico may have been influenced in his thinking about sensus communis by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, who may fairly be considered the originator of British common sense philosophy. Shaftesbury was Vico’s contemporary and lived in Italy for a time. According to Schaeffer, the two men may have had opportunity to meet and exchange ideas.28 Shaftesbury had been working on a theory of sensus communis before Vico developed his own theory in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the study methods of our time) and further in the Scienza Nuova (New Science). Shaftesbury, however, traced the English “common sense” back to the Stoics’ koinonoemosune (objectively, the commonly perceived or thought; subjectively, like-mindedness) rather than to koine aesthesis. In his essay on Sensus communis, Shaftesbury provides in a footnote a remarkable account of the early development of the concept. Here is the substantive gist: The Greek word is κoιvovoημoσυvη, which Salmasius interprets “the moderate, the usual and respected mind of a man, which takes thought for the communal good in some way and does not refer everything to its own advantage, and also has regard of those with whom it is engaged, thinking modestly and reasonably about itself. But on the other hand, all the conceited and arrogant think that they are born only for themselves and their own benefits and, in favour of themselves, they disdain and neglect others. And these are those who can properly be said not to possess sensus communis.”29


29

Here we see common sense as a virtue, and the lack of it a vice. Shaftesbury sums up the Stoic meaning of sensus communis (as generally understood by Juvenal, Marcus Aurelius, Horace, Seneca, and Cicero) as the “sense of the public weal and the common interest, love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species.”30 Vico clearly drew on these overlapping Roman connotations in his theory of sensus communis, as did Shaftesbury. Whether they did so independently or Vico was motivated to work out his own more systematic view by Shaftesbury’s beginning remains a mystery. Shaftesbury’s account was in its own right a brilliant synthesis and extension of the Roman senses of the concept.31 He conceived of sensus communis as a kind of social recognition of natural right, marked by an abiding concern for the public good. It was a kind of rationally substantive public spiritedness. This public spiritedness was rooted in natural social “affection,” and the naturalness of this affection, when persisted in, became self-evident to men of common sense, ultimately revealing timeless truths of human value. “A public spirit,” Shaftesbury says, “can come only from a social feeling or sense of partnership with humankind.” Fortunately, the requisite “social feeling” is natural. If eating and drinking be natural, herding is so too. If any appetite or sense be natural, the sense of fellowship is the same. If there be anything of nature in that affection which is between the sexes, the affection is certainly as natural towards the consequent offspring and so again between the offspring themselves, as kindred and companions, bred under the same discipline and economy. And thus a clan or tribe is gradually formed, a public is recognized, and, besides the pleasure found in social entertainment, language and discourse, there is so apparent a necessity for continuing this good correspondency and union that to have no sense or feeling of this kind, no love of country, community or anything in common, would be the same as to be insensible even of the plainest means of selfpreservation and most necessary condition of self-enjoyment.

Only “a more contracted public” (subnational) can have genuine community, Shaftesbury says. Sensus communis is there direct and palpable, while on the level of “the body politic at large,” only the idea of it holds. The idea of it or, rather, a passionate attachment to the idea of it is nonetheless absolutely essential for the health of the body politic. For without a spirited devotion to the notion of sensus communis, political society will inevitably be rent by the “spirit of faction,” which is after all “no other than the abuse or irregularity of that social love and common affection which is natural to mankind.”

30


It is patent to Shaftesbury that self-interest is inadequate as a source of social order. He blasts the “modern projectors” and the “narrow-minded philosophers” (he seems to have Hobbes and Locke chiefly in mind) who aim at “conquering nature” in order to “build after a more uniform way.” “You have heard it, my friend, as a common saying that ‘interest governs the world.’ But, I believe, whoever looks narrowly [closely] into the affairs of it will find that passion, humour, caprice, zeal, faction and a thousand other springs, which are counter to self-interest, have as considerable a part in the movements of this machine. There are more wheels and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined.” Shaftesbury rejects the forced simplicity of Hobbesian and Lockean conceptions of society. Such artificial schemes do not do justice to the complexities of human nature. At the root of the modern tendency to proffer reductionistic accounts of human affairs, Shaftesbury thinks, is modern philosophy’s departure from common sense. Common sense judges matters on the whole, according to “the justness of a whole.”32 It opts for richness over logical tidiness. The modern rejection or neglect of common sense entails serious moral consequences. “As notions stand now in the world with respect to morals,” Shaftesbury laments, “honesty is like to gain little by philosophy or deep speculations of any kind. In the main, it is best to stick to common sense and go no further.” He continues: Men’s first thoughts in this matter [of morals] are generally better than their second, their natural notions better than those refined by study or consultation with casuists. According to common speech as well as common sense, “honesty is the best policy,” but, according to refined sense, the only well-advised persons as to this world are arrant knaves, and they alone are thought to serve themselves who serve their passions and indulge their loosest appetites and desires.—Such, it seems, are the wise and such the wisdom of this world! An ordinary man talking of a vile action in a way of common sense says naturally and heartily, “He would not be guilty of such a thing for the whole world.” But speculative men find great modifications in the case, many ways of evasion, many remedies, many alleviations.33

Shaftesbury is not anti-philosophical; he understands his own writings to be a species of philosophy, but he is certain that we are better off to “moralize . . . according to common sense and without canting.” After all, “Some moral and philosophical truths there are, withal, so evident in themselves, that it would be easier to imagine half mankind to have run mad and joined precisely in one and the same species of folly, than to admit anything as truth which should


31

be advanced against such natural knowledge, fundamental reason and common sense” as may be seen in the long run of human experience. Shaftesbury is distressed by the incapacity of many modern thinkers to see man complete and full-blooded, and the piling up of theoretical technicalities seems to him only to accentuate the substantive emptiness of their sense of human affairs. And the less theoretical modern approaches to understanding politics seem to him just as vacuous. “Some modern zealots,” he says, “appear to have no better knowledge of truth, nor better manner of judging it, than by counting noses. By this rule, if they can poll an indifferent number out of a mob, if they can produce a set of Lancashire noddles, remote provincial headpieces or visionary assemblers to attest a story of a witch upon a broomstick and a flight in the air, they triumph in the solid proof of their new prodigy and cry, The truth is great and it will prevail!”34 Both variants of modern political science have lost sight of common sense and therefore of the quality of human community.35 The key to preserving common sense, for Shaftesbury, is “wit,” a clever sense of “humour” that tests opinions by good-natured “raillery” or jesting.36 We saw Shaftesbury employing wit just now in his comment on the dubiousness of polling as a measure of social truth. It is an attitude akin to the serious play or playful seriousness we see in Socrates. Wit takes opinions seriously, but not too seriously. Shaftesbury seems to play with the double meaning of “humour” in his discussion of wit—the humor of a people, their mood or emotional outlook, and then also what we would call a “sense of humor,” an ability to see absurdity in matters typically treated gravely or earnestly. A person of wit possesses a sense of humor and appeals to the emotional cast of the people: knowing well the humor of his fellows, he can exploit their mood and make them see things in a different light, a truer light.37 Sensus communis for Shaftesbury emerges as a kind of mean between “zealotry” and frivolity, a mean revealed by open debate, criticism, and especially good-natured, humane ridicule.38 Vico likewise saw wit as the essence of good sense and considered it pivotal for directing the sense of the community. As Schaeffer explains: “The Baroque notion of wit [acutezze] becomes, in Vico’s hands, the mode of uniting metaphor with the sententiae and the topoi.” By sententiae is meant wise sayings, proverbs that would be recognized by ordinary people as containing obvious truths; by topoi is meant commonplace elements of argument in rhetoric, ready tools for the forensic specialist. Schaeffer describes the connecting metaphors as “conceits,” apt metaphors that reveal similarity in dissimilar things and bring a vast range of experience together in an image or turn of phrase. “Vico claims that conceits are arguments, that they teach by uniting beauty and truth in an oral performance. The orator creates the conceit by the force of his ingenuity working on the case at hand. The audience seizes it as simultaneously true and

32


beautiful. . . . The orator must use the common sense of the audience as that which connects his metaphor to the case.”39 Vico works out this understanding of wit engaging the sensus communis in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. Vico was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples and hit upon his formulation in his rhetorical studies. According to Schaeffer: Classical rhetorical theory revealed [Vico thought] that there were at least two possible roots for sensus communis: Aristotle’s what is held to be true by all, by most, or by the wisest—and Quintillian’s—a public utterance or “sentence” traced to sensus, feeling, or opinion. Thus sensus for Vico had the dual meaning that sense still retains in English, a feeling or sensation, and an intellectual grasp on an idea, that is, “making sense.” In his treatment of the conceit Vico intertwines these two linguistic roots into a concept of metaphor as argument. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, he cultivates those roots to produce a theory of sensus communis.40

Shaftesbury’s sensus communis was, like Vico’s after him, a kind of aesthetic judgment that, while not a product of ratiocination, was clearly rational. It was a form of rational intuition. It was a sense of beauty or fitness, but also of truth. By it we may see the fit of a certain response to a certain circumstance to be self-evidently right, and this sense of rightness, in matters of any weight, is pregnant with normative implications. Indeed, sensus communis, for both Shaftesbury and Vico, is preeminently a moral attitude. Schaeffer helpfully describes sensus communis in terms of its “form,” “function,” and “content”: its form is “aesthetic beauty,” its function is “judgment,” and its content is “moral consensus.”41 Neither Shaftesbury nor Vico mean to suggest that there is one and only one right response to a given circumstance—not at all, but rather, simply, that some responses can be seen to fit and others to be out of joint. The essential thing is that the man of wit finds something to say that works for the occasion, that meets the needs of the community for an answer. Shaftesbury’s influence on Vico may be uncertain, but his influence on the course of thought in Britain is beyond question. His ideas on moral sentiments, in particular, spurred the thinking of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. According to James McCosh, Hutcheson “did little more than expound [Shaftesâ•‚ bury’s] views, with less versatility, but in a more equable, thorough, and systematic manner.”42 Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson saw the moral sense as a kind of aesthetic faculty involving rational judgment. As Knud Haakonssen argues convincingly, “Moral perception [for Hutcheson] is not a subjective affective experience; and moral judgements are thus not simply the expressions of such


33

experience. Whether we make moral judgements of our own behavior or that of others, our moral perception and thus our moral judgement are explicitly representative, and thus either true or false.”43 When we judge another to be virtuous, Hutcheson says, “the Quality approved by our moral Sense is conceived to reside in the Person approved, and to be a Perfection and Dignity in him.”44 The moral sense perceives the moral quality of a person’s motivation and judges it to be excellent or flawed, dignified or unworthy. Although the determinations of the moral sense are often attended by pleasure or pain, these affective reactions are incidental.45 The determinations themselves are objective: the quality observed either is or is not a moral quality; it either does or does not reflect human excellence. The substance of Hutcheson’s “moral excellence” is love or benevolence, a tendency to actions that “contribute to the over-all happiness of the moral creation, the ‘moral system.’” The moral sense cannot function, however, without help of reasoning: “reason prepares moral judgements by establishing the subject of such judgements, namely the (likely) motivation to moral behavior in each particular case.”46 The renderings of the moral sense are irrelevant in cases where the motivation has been wrongly ascertained. The similarity between Hutcheson’s moral sense and Shaftesbury’s common sense is evident. Both involve aesthetic moral judgments about attitudes and the acts (including speech acts) that flow from them, and in each case the quality of the attitudes and acts in question is determined by their tendency to promote the common good. Shaftesbury’s sensus communis in fact presupposes a moral sense that functions just as Hutcheson says it does. In his “Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” Shaftesbury claims to have shown that, “Sense of right and wrong [is] as natural to us as natural affection itself, and [is] a first principle in our constitution and make.”47 “Natural affection” is what gives rise to sensus communis, and the highest moral quality approved by the moral sense is the willful embrace of affection for others as the best and noblest thing in human nature.48

Hume, Kant, and Reid Like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Hume understands morality in aesthetic terms. Also like them, he is alert to the dangers of “zealotry.” We noticed already Shaftesbury’s recommending the use of wit to puncture the excess; Hutcheson, too, was famously keen to oppose zealotry of all kinds, political as well as religious; and opposing zealotry (or “enthusiasm,” as he called it) was a central motive of Hume’s political theorizing.49 Hume even agrees with Hutcheson’s account of the moral sense on all essential points. If David Fate

34


Norton’s account of Hume’s moral theory is accurate (and he makes a strong textual case), one must conclude that Hume was a moral realist, in exactly the sense that Hutcheson was.50 In his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume explicitly rejects moral skepticism.51 But Hume’s epistemology fatally undermines the possibility of humanly accessible moral truth. This was central to Thomas Reid’s motivation in undertaking his painstaking analyses of the operations of the mind in An Inquiry into the Human Mind, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers, and the Essays on the Active Powers. Hume seems to have thought that instinct, habit, and utility would prevent skepticism from spreading out beyond members of the intellectual class, and he thought that, beyond the obvious usefulness of moral distinctions for personal and social life, the instinct to believe in objective reality, including moral facts, was irresistible even for intellectuals.52 But Hume made the validity of this belief questionable, and Reid was concerned that others would follow who would take Hume’s epistemological skepticism with less equanimity, would take his thought as a refutation of the possibility of truth, and, as a result, feel freer to ignore their natural beliefs. (The history of philosophy has proved Reid correct in this concern.) For morality and human fulfillment, such neglect of the plain verdicts of common sense could be disastrous. As Reid puts it in the dedication of his Inquiry: “Can any ingenuous mind admit this skeptical system without reluctance? . . . I am persuaded . . . that, if all belief could be laid aside, piety, patriotism, friendship, parental affection, and private virtue, would appear as ridiculous as knight-errantry.” Reid, as the comment suggests, was troubled about the moral implications of Hume’s theological as well as his moral skepticism. Hume was satisfied that there are sufficient grounds for morality in human nature such that no supernatural reference is necessary.53 But Reid was concerned that skepticism about a divine ground of moral order would altogether undermine people’s confidence in the truth of their moral perceptions.54 Thomas Reid’s name after his death quickly became almost a synonym for common sense philosophy. For the better part of a century, from the late 1700s to the late 1800s, Reid’s common sense philosophy “enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States, Great Britain, and France.”55 But for much of the last century and a quarter, he has not been considered a philosopher of great importance, and the reputation of common sense philosophy suffered along with Reid’s own flagging fortunes. This is beginning to change, however. A recent resurgence of Reidian scholarship testifies to a growing sense that Reid was in fact a philosopher ahead of his time. Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s judgment that Reid was “one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the other being of course Immanuel Kant,” is no longer an implausible


35

position, as witness the impressive collection of essays in the recently compiled Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid.56 Part of the reason for Reid’s disappearance from the story of modern philosophy was Kant’s publicly expressed opinion that Scottish Common Sense thought was not worthy of serious consideration.57 The great German philosopher’s dismissal of that school in the preface of his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics has become legendary. His statement there is so forceful and apparently devastating, any common sense philosopher wishing to be taken seriously must answer to Kant, and so it is submitted here in full: Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. It is positively painful to see how utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestley, missed the point of the problem; for while they were ever taking for granted that which he doubted, and demonstrating with zeal and often with impudence that which he never thought of doubting, they so misconstrued his valuable suggestion [that reason is completely in the dark about the connection between cause and effect] that everything remained in its old condition, as if nothing had happened. The question was not whether the concept of cause was right, useful, and even indispensable for our knowledge of nature, for this Hume had never doubted; but whether that concept could be thought by reason a priori, and consequently whether it possessed an inner truth, independent of all experience, implying a more widely extended usefulness, not limited merely to objects of experience. This was Hume’s problem. It was a question concerning the origin of the concept, not concerning its indispensability in use. Were the former decided, the conditions of its use and the sphere of its valid application would have been determined as a matter of course. But to satisfy the conditions of the problem, the opponents of the great thinker should have penetrated very deeply into the nature of reason, so far as it is concerned with pure thought—a task which did not suit them. They found a more convenient method of being defiant without any insight, viz., the appeal to common sense. It is indeed a great gift of heaven to possess right or (as they now call it) plain common sense. But this common sense must be shown in deeds by well-considered and reasonable thoughts and words, not by appealing to it as an oracle when no rational justification of oneself can be advanced. The appeal to common sense when insight and science fail, and no sooner—this is one of the subtle discoveries of modern times, by means of which the most superficial ranter can safely enter the lists with the most thorough thinker and hold his own. But as long as a particle of insight remains, no one would think of having recourse to this subterfuge. Seen in a clear light, it is but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan

36


glories and confides in it. I should think Hume might fairly have laid as much claim to common sense as Beattie and, in addition, to a critical reason (such as the latter did not possess), which keeps common sense in check and prevents it from speculating, or, if speculations are under discussion, restrains the desire to decide because it cannot satisfy itself concerning its own principles. By this means alone can common sense remain sound. Chisels and hammers may suffice to work a piece of wood, but for etching we require an etcher’s needle. Thus common sense and speculative understanding are both useful, but each in its own way: the former in judgments which apply immediately to experience; the latter when we judge universally from mere concepts, as in metaphysics, where sound common sense, so called in spite of the inappropriateness of the word, has no right to judge at all.58

Now, this scorching critique may apply in some measure to Beattie and Oswald and Priestley, but Kant is badly off the mark in the case of Reid. As Terence Cuneo observes, “Reid is a Humean about (non-agent) causation.” As Reid himself wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “Mr Humes reasoning on this Subject In Essay on Necessary Connexion would have convinced me if I have not been convinced before, by S. I Newton.”59 But that Reid appreciated the problem with which Hume (and later, Kant) was concerned is clear enough from his published writings. In his Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Reid states: Nature is the name we give to the efficient cause of innumerable effects which fall daily under our observation. But, if it be asked what nature is—whether the first universal cause or a subordinate one, whether one or many, whether intelligent or unintelligent—upon these points we find various conjectures and theories, but no solid ground upon which we can rest. And I apprehend the wisest men are they who are sensible that they know nothing of the matter. From the course of events in the natural world, we have sufficient reason to conclude the existence of an eternal intelligent First Cause. But whether He acts immediately in the production of those events, or by subordinate intelligent agents, or by instruments that are unintelligent, and what the number, the nature, and the different offices, of those agents or instruments may be—these I apprehend to be mysteries placed beyond the limits of human knowledge. We see an established order in the succession of natural events, but we see not the bond that connects them together.60

We are able to discover laws of nature—fixed regularities in the way things happen—and “explain” many of these laws by subsuming them under greater,


37

related laws, but the substance of causation remains impenetrable to us. Certain factors clearly are involved in the production of certain effects, but it is not at all clear why things should work that way.61 But Reid not only appreciated Hume’s insight into the mysteriousness of causation. He also understood Hume’s challenge and answered it in much the same way Kant did (though not systematically), and in all likelihood, without ever having heard of Kant.62 Hume’s challenge was his suggestion that what we call causation is known, as he asserts all things are known, only a posteriori, from experience, and only as a “constant conjunction” of certain events as long as we have observed them. By mere observation we cannot know whether events that have always been conjoined in our experience will continue to be conjoined in future. We can never infer any necessary connection between events from the mere fact of their previous correlation; and necessary connection would be essential to genuine causation, as Hume saw very clearly. Hume’s conclusion is that, not only do we not know the inner substance of causation, we cannot even know that causation is involved in these events at all. Happenings do not necessarily imply causation.63 The problem Hume poses, then, is not merely epistemological but metaphysical. His analysis of our idea of causation calls into question the very possibility of metaphysics and science (including political science), which depend on a knowledge of causes. Not only can we not apprehend causation directly in his scheme, we cannot even confidently posit it, and therefore we cannot know the deeper structure and undercurrents of reality at all, even in form. We know things only in their phenomenal aspect. In order to meet Hume’s challenge, one would have to show, first, the possibility of a priori knowledge, knowledge that leaps beyond experience. Second, one would have to show that we have a priori knowledge of causation. Students of modern philosophy will recognize this as Kant’s description of the problem, but Reid saw the same difficulty. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid treats causation under the heading of metaphysical first principles. Like Kant, Reid took the question of causes to be the central concern of philosophy: “What has philosophy been employed in since men first began to philosophize, but in the investigation of the causes of things?”64 Again like Kant, Reid says that we do in fact know causality a priori. The metaphysical principle of causality is “That whatever begins to exist, must have a cause which produced it.” This, Reid says, is not a contingent but a necessary proposition. It is not that things which begin to exist commonly have a cause, or even that they always in fact have a cause; but that they must have a cause, and cannot begin to exist without a cause.

38


Propositions of this kind, from their nature, are incapable of proof by induction. Experience informs us only of what is or has been, not of what must be; and the conclusion must be of the same nature with the premises.65

We do not necessarily know what the cause of a given event is, but that something caused it we know for a certainty, not from experience but from pure intuition. Like Kant, Reid also offered a negative proof for this, and a counter challenge to Hume. Hume has the concept of causation as a necessary connection of events but cannot account for how he got the idea on his own presupposition that all knowledge is a posteriori. On his own terms, he cannot have got it from experience, so where did the idea come from? The only conceivable answer, Reid suggests, is that it derives from the mind’s direct grasp, somehow, of extra-phenomenal reality. That it cannot have come from experience proves that a priori knowledge is possible, and that the conception of causation is an instance of such knowledge.66 Reid makes the point indirectly with respect to the concept of “power,” a synonym for “cause.” Hume tries to wriggle out of the problem of where we got the idea of “power” by the remarkable gambit of denying we have such an idea. The term cannot be traced back, he says, to any clear and distinct “impression” (that is, to any sense-percept), thus we have no clear and distinct idea of what we mean by it, and thus it is chimerical and signifies nothing at all.67 Hume assumes here what must be proved, however, that all concepts or ideas are derived from experience. Hume says (as Reid quotes him), “If we examine this maxim [that whatever begins to exist must have a cause] by the idea of knowledge above explained [Hume’s theory of knowledge], we shall discover in it no mark of . . . intuitive certainty.” Reid’s wry comment in response is withering and incisive: “The meaning of this seems to be, that it did not suit his theory of intuitive certainty, and, therefore, he excludes it from that privilege.”68 The fact is that we do have the concept of power, and the concept means something definite. As to the first point Reid says, “Whether this popular opinion [that some productive power must lie behind every event] be true or false, it follows, from men’s having this opinion, that they have an idea of power. A false opinion about power, no less than a true, implies an idea of power; for how can men have any opinion, true or false, about a thing of which they have no idea?” As to the second point, to Hume’s objection that no one has been able to define “power” except, absurdly, by employing synonyms, Reid says, “Surely this author is aware that there are many things of which we have a clear and distinct conception [many of the operations of the mind, for example], which are so simple in their nature, that they cannot be defined any other way than


39

by synonymous words. It is true that this is not a logical definition; but that there is, as he affirms, an absurdity in using it, when no better can be had, I cannot perceive.”69 We know exactly what we mean when we speak of “causes” and “powers,” though we can neither describe them nor know their inner substance. Ironically, Hume himself brought the concept of causation into sharp focus by speaking of the thing-we-do-not-know-or-conceive as involving, if there were such a thing, a “necessary connection” between events.70 Of course, Hume could still escape into the skeptic’s last refuge of pleading ignorance: he does not deny dogmatically that there may—even that there must—be a cause for every event; his only point is that we cannot know this. But the evidence is all on one side, so that the skeptic’s position looks less like wisdom than timidity, or stubbornness, the latter taking the form of an unreasonable insistence on a kind of certainty (apodictic) inappropriate to the subject matter—first principles by their nature cannot be proved by demonstration. As Reid observed, “It is contrary to the nature of first principles to admit of direct or apodictical proof.”71 The foolishness of Hume’s position is compounded by his giving equal weight to the possibilities of causation and non-causation, when neither he nor anyone in his right mind would try to live by the proposition that for any given event there may be no cause. This is the essence of the practical objection to radical skeptical doubt, an objection Reid makes frequently against Hume.72 Kant, and many others following his example (including the learned Sir William Hamilton, generally an admirer of Reid’s), dismiss the argument from practicality as missing the point, because the skeptic does not deny the utility or practical necessity of the belief in causation or in external reality, only its epistemological certainty. But in this, they themselves miss the point of the practical objection: it’s not that the skeptic raises epistemological doubts. Reid explicitly concedes the value of this in forcing other thinkers to examine more closely the reliability of our basic beliefs.73 Rather, it is that the skeptic gives so much respect to a possibility that it would be irrational to adopt in practice. The practical irrationality, the argument suggests, should call into question the theoretic rationality. It may be that a proposed possibility can be practically irrational but theoretically sound. This would not violate the principle of noncontradiction (which is itself, though the foundation of all logic, indemonstrable), which requires only that nothing can be true and not true at the same time and in the same way. But where practical insanity is patent and intuition tells against theoretic rationality, and where on top of all no argument can be given in defense of it, giving great respect to the thesis in question begins to look truly absurd. The practical rationality of an idea, in the perspective of common sense, should be taken as a mark of its truth or, at the very least, should secure

40


for it the benefit of the doubt.74 This posture of Reid and his acolytes shows a great affinity to that of the Pragmatists, and putting the matter in this light helps to make sense of the Pragmatist conception of truth, which did not posit, as critics have charged, that truth is a product of utility but, rather, that utility is an indication, on some level, of truth.75 The practical objection to skeptical doubt is one of the appeals to vulgar opinion that Kant so deplores. Concerning Kant’s accusation that Reidian common sense is an “appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed . . . when no rational justification for one’s position can be advanced . . . when insight and science fail,” it is, as Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg note, “more than a little ironic, for Reid himself would not have denied that there is a sense in which appealing to common sense—to what it ‘is ridiculous to doubt’—is humiliating for the philosopher.”76 The passage from Reid’s Intellectual Powers that Cuneo and Woudenberg quote in support of their observation is to the point: When I remember distinctly a past event, or see an object before my eyes, this commands my belief no less than an axiom. But when, as a Philosopher, I reflect upon this belief, and want to trace it to its origin, I am not able to resolve it into necessary and self-evident axioms, or conclusions that are necessarily consequent upon them. I seem to want that evidence which I can best comprehend, and which gives perfect satisfaction to an inquisitive mind; yet it is ridiculous to doubt, and I find it is not in my power. An attempt to throw off this belief, is like an attempt to fly, equally ridiculous and impracticable. To a Philosopher, who has been accustomed to think that the treasure of his knowledge is the acquisition of that reasoning power of which he boasts, it is no doubt humiliating to find, that his reason can lay no claim to the greater part of it.77

In Reid’s case at least, Kant mistakes humility for ineptitude. How could a thinker of Kant’s immense capacity be, as we have seen, so far off target in his understanding and assessment of Reid? Part of the reason is that he wrote the famous passage in the Prolegomena’s preface before the appearance of Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers, where Reid first gave his account of the concept of causality.78 This might explain Kant’s error in the preface with respect to Reid’s treatment of causation, but it does not explain why he declines to give any serious attention to Reid’s penetrating analysis of sensation and sense perception in the Inquiry, which powerfully answers Hume on the nature of our perceptions, or why he doesn’t later give attention, at least not in writing, to Reid’s Essays (on the intellectual and active powers of man),


41

both of which had been published by 1788, sixteen years before Kant’s death. This despite a sizable body of serious scholarship on Reid and Scottish Common Sense that was available to him in Germany.79 One suspects that Kant was prejudiced against Reid by his disgust for the writings of Beattie and other popular advocates of Reid’s work and so never gave the latter a fair reading. It may also be that Kant lacked the philosophic humility he failed to see in Reid. Arrogance tends to skew otherwise good judgment. Nor does Reid’s humility take the form of foreclosing questions about the “mysteries” that face him. He probes deeply into the workings of the human mind and of nature in his Inquiry and Essays, with an acuity occasionally matched but perhaps unsurpassed either before or since. The great difference between Reid and Hume, and between Reid and Kant, is not the subtlety with which they think (Reid holds his own here) or the care with which they observe (although here Reid surely has the advantage) but the place from which they start their inquiries. Reid starts, after the pattern of Plato and Aristotle, with a certain trust in reason and what is given in experience (what is given including our seemingly built-in intuitions about reality) while Hume and Kant begin with Cartesian doubt.80 This trust is the essence of the common sense attitude. Hume and Kant say, effectively, “Prove to me that what I seem to know is real,” whereas Reid says, “How should I understand what I seem to know?” As relates to sense perception, Reid in the Inquiry describes the Humean and Kantian skeptic thus: “The skeptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you believe? . . . There is nothing so shameful in a philosopher as to be deceived and deluded; and therefore you ought to resolve firmly to withhold assent, and to throw off all this belief of external objects, which may be all delusion.”81 Compare Reid’s description of the skeptic here with Kant’s description of the philosopher’s stance in The Critique of Pure Reason. While rejecting Descartes’ material idealism, Kant explicitly accepts his method of philosophizing: “a thorough philosophical way of thinking [permits] no decisive judgment before a sufficient proof has been found.”82 In context, the proof demanded is for the existence of realities external to the mind. Kant proceeds to provide a logical proof, but the larger questions are whether such a proof is really needed and whether demanding one undermines confidence in our intuitions regarding reality. Certainly in practical life decisive judgment cannot wait for logical proof, and Kant’s dismissal of the practical objection to radical doubting was too hasty (see above). But leaving the practical suggestion aside, what evidence is there that we do not know external objects directly? Kant’s logical proof is interesting, but until any good reason can be given for doubting what appears to be certain knowledge via sensation, his proof is not terribly important.

42


As Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, the skeptic with which Reid is concerned is a “classically modern foundationalist.”83 “To be a classical foundationalist with respect to some particular truth-relevant merit,” Wolterstorff explains, “is to hold that a condition of some judgment or belief possessing that merit is that it be an ideally formed belief,” a belief formed on the basis of direct acquaintance with facts. “The classically modern foundationalist is a classic foundationalist who embraces the position [that] the only source of acquaintance with facts is inner awareness, with reason understood as a special case thereof: reason yields acquaintance with the logical properties of states of mind and their logical interconnections.”84 Reid thinks this “classically modern foundationalist” position cannot be safely assumed. He thinks that we have no good reason a priori to privilege one verdict of consciousness over others, and consciousness emphatically affirms the existence of external reality. There is no good reason then to doubt we have direct awareness of the physical world any more than to doubt our grasp of logical relations. Thus there does not appear to be any reason to call in inner awareness for support of our sense perceptions. Kant seems to reject what Wolterstorff calls “classically modern foundationalism,” but he does not entirely escape it.85 He wants to make inner awareness in Wolterstorff ’s sense the criterion and test of knowledge. Kant never adequately questioned the critical premise (which Reid calls the “theory of ideas”) adopted implicitly (Reid thinks) by leading ancient philosophers and explicitly (and with a vengeance) by moderns, most notably Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.86 There is at least a family resemblance between Plato’s theory of ideas and Descartes’ assertion that what we really know in physical objects is their essence, that we know the mind better than we know those objects, and that essence is more real than substance.87 If essence is more real than substance, it can only be in the restricted sense that essences have an eternal character (at least as potentialities) while physical substances (it may be otherwise on some level with spiritual substances, if there be such) are temporal and changeable. Plato in fact seems to understand the greater reality of eidoi in this restricted sense, and also in the sense that the ideas have a greater significance and dignity than sense perceptions. Descartes appears to go farther in suggesting that we don’t know physical realities directly at all, beyond their essential characteristics. He seems to demote not merely the dignity but even the capacity of physical sensation and sense perception in a way that Plato does not. Locke, and then Berkeley and Hume, reject Descartes’ rationalism but in varying degrees hold on to his assumption that we do not know physical realities directly but only mediately, through what Locke and Berkeley call “ideas,” imprinted mysteriously on the mind by some external force. Both Locke and


43

Berkeley define “idea” as whatever is the object of thought, so that “ideas,” in their usage, include passions and mental “operations” as well as sense-percepts. Hume, with greater linguistic precision, calls the phenomena of perception “impressions” and distinguishes them from “ideas,” which in his scheme are copies or “faint images” of these impressions. These ideas, the material of memory, are both the basis and content of all reasoning.88 For Hume, as for Locke and Berkeley, all knowledge is perceptual. Locke held that we do know “primary qualities” of physical objects (such as “solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number”) directly but not “secondary qualities” (such as “colors, sounds, tastes, etc.”).89 Berkeley and Hume take things a step further and hold that, given Locke’s presuppositions (which they accept), we cannot know these primary qualities directly, either. As Reid observes, their logic seems impeccable.90 Reid asks one simple question: What is the evidence we have that these mediating entities called “ideas” even exist? He cannot find any evidence. If they do exist, and all we know are ideas, we cannot make any inferences about external realities. For if all we know are ideas, how could we get around them to reach the world outside? Why should we think that the notion of external reality has any external basis at all, and how, by the way, could we get such a notion? That outer world, if it exists at all, must be utterly mysterious to us. Kant would then be right to conclude that we do not in any meaningful sense know the “things in themselves.”91 But after painstaking analysis, Reid discovers compelling, arguably conclusive, evidence that we apprehend physical objects immediately,92 as they are and none at all that this apparently direct apprehension is illusory. And after all, how could one know whether it was illusory?93 And if all the evidence points one way, what is the sense in privileging the possibility that has no evidence and demanding that the stronger case prove itself to the weaker? This is all very interesting—but what, the reader may ask, does the debate about the nature of sense perception have to do with politics? The relevance is indirect but nonetheless profound. If educated people, mediately or immediately the leaders of society, can doubt their own senses, then they can doubt anything, including the most basic moral verities. In fact this has happened in the West over the last two centuries, to an alarming degree. As education rates have risen, the educated and semi-educated have become less and less confident in their basic convictions in the face of relentless deconstructions by cutting-edge (that is, fashionable) philosophy and “science.” If men as brilliant as Hume openly doubt the reliability of sense and moral conviction, and others such as Kant have so much trouble supporting them, who are we lesser mortals to decide the issue?94 No philosopher, apparently, can win the argument, so there must be no way to know. One recalls the old joke about the quick-witted criminal who,

44


confronted with irrefutable evidence against him, quips, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” But in the case of the modern philosophic powers that be, the same challenge is posed in earnest. There is something ridiculous about this, which is why Thomas Reid, like Lord Shaftesbury before him, occasionally resorted to ridicule in response.95 The business ceases to be funny, however, when a professor today (as happened to me) can find colleagues and students willing to entertain seriously the notion that Hitler’s atrocities were not categorically wrong because all morality is subjective and/ or relative to culture. Reid worried about precisely this kind of degrading of moral capacity. He (again like Shaftesbury) used ridicule as a weapon, with deadly serious purpose.96 Kant, a supremely humorless thinker and writer, failed to grasp this and took offense. The same kind of trust afforded to sense perception, Reid insists, must be extended to our intuitions concerning first principles. Reid agrees with Aristotle that the first principles on which all reasoning is based are necessarily indemonstrable (as logic is founded on them, they cannot themselves be subject to logic), and so any attempt to prove them valid is doomed to failure and bound to undermine confidence in reason. Reid wrote: First principles differ from deductions or reasoning in the nature of their evidence, and must be tried by a different standard when they are called in question. . . . When we attempt to prove, by direct argument, what is self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it who never did so before.97

This is, Reid thinks, what happened to Hume. How we know first principles is a mystery, but only by trusting reason and accepting the truth we seem to see by it can the world make sense. It was said before that trust in reason and in what is given in experience is the essence of the common sense attitude. Reid describes this trust in terms of “taking for granted.”98 It is not the same as intuition but is grounded in intuition, in the immediate grasp of external realities and first principles and, more profoundly, in a palpable sense of the rationality of the universe and a kind of harmony with nature, conceived in ancient Chinese thought in terms of the Tao. Socrates, in Plato’s Meno, speaks of the harmony as a kinship with nature.99 This affinity with nature is the life of common sense and the root of natural law. True, we have a palpable sense of absurdity, too, but absurdity can only be known in contrast to rationality. An awareness of absurdity is awareness of


45

rationality (though this is often not noticed) and proves that there is rationality in the universe, if only in our minds. But rationality is discernible in nature at large for anyone paying attention. Indeed, the concept of “nature” presupposes certain regularities, a certain intelligible order within the flux of things, and we notice these orderly operations all the time, in human and animal behavior, in the motions of the planets, and so on. None of the sciences would be possible otherwise. The remarkable feature of postmodern thought is its fixation on the absurd and the chaotic and its refusal to notice the equally real order and meaning inherent in things. Contrary to prevailing philosophical opinion, order and meaning are not only created but also discovered. The trustand-kinship-with-nature ingredient in common sense, then, is countered by distrust and alienation from nature, the hallmarks of postmodernity. What has not been sufficiently appreciated is that this distrust and alienation were already present in the Enlightenment, in the thought of men such as Hume, and Kant as well. Distrust is obviously at the heart of skepticism, but so also is alienation. Perhaps the deepest question concerning modernity and postmodernity is whether the distrust and the alienation are a product or a cause of skepticism—and if a cause, then what is the source of these afflictions?

Reid’s Common Sense and Ethical-Political Foundations It was observed before that Aristotle was arguably the first and greatest common sense philosopher and that Thomas Reid, perhaps the greatest modern common sense philosopher, could be described as a kind of latter-day Aristotelian.100 Despite finding some inadequacies in Aristotle’s moral philosophy (see below), Reid is deeply Aristotelian in his analysis of common sense intuition, common sense rationality, the common humanity manifested in that basic rationality, and the practical (moral and political) ramifications of common sense. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers Reid says, “We ascribe to reason two offices, or two degrees. The first is to judge of things self-evident, the second to draw conclusions that are not self-evident from those that are. The first of these is the province, and the sole province of common sense; and therefore it coincides with reason in its whole extent, and is only another name for one branch or one degree of reason.”101 The “branches” of reason here correspond exactly to Aristotle’s nous and dianoia.102 Nous (reason proper) was that faculty of mind capable of intellection, the immediate intuitive grasp of indemonstrable first or fundamental principles that constitute the basis of all reasoning.103 Dianoia (literally, “second nous”) was the part of the mind that reasons discursively, making deductions from first and secondary principles. In Reid’s analysis, some first principles are “necessary” and some are “contingent,”

46


the latter depending on certain situations of fact, such as the constitution of human nature. Examples of necessary first principles would include the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of causation. Among the most fundamental contingent first principles concerning human beings, according to Reid, are “that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be,” and “that the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious.”104 It may be helpful to note that, on Aristotle and Reid’s accounts, “inductive reasoning” is something of a misnomer. Induction and reasoning for them are categorically different mental operations. Induction gives way to a discovery of first principles, self-evident principles discerned on awareness or examination of contingent empirical phenomena. This does not mean they are concluded from the phenomena, which could never happen, but rather, as Kant would later say, the phenomena are the occasion for a penetration beneath or a leap beyond the phenomena to conclusions inexplicable but nonetheless certain. Reasoning about phenomena takes place only after induction has activated an intellection of first principles.105 Reid calls these “contingent” when they depend on certain prior conditions (existence and the peculiar ways existing things are constituted, for example) and when things might conceivably have been otherwise than they are. But things being what they are, an acquaintance with the facts prompts a recognition of certain conclusions as self-evident. Some of these conclusions seem to precede any deliberate examination of the facts, such as, “That the thoughts of which I am conscious are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person,” or “That we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will.”106 Other conclusions follow from more intentional observation. Both kinds of conclusions, however, are preceded by induction, which seems to be a spontaneous process that may be extended and systematically applied with an effort of attention. For both Reid and Aristotle, systematic reasoning about contingent matters cannot begin without prior induction, essentially the recognizing of commonalities, tendencies, and regularities in phenomena (mental or physical). Induction, then, in Aristotle’s reckoning, is noetic, while reasoning on the basis of induction is dianoetic. Commonalities in real-world phenomena become the basis of what could be called empirical concepts, for example, “chair” or “courage.” Persistent tendencies in the operations of nature become recognizable as regularities. When regularities in natural operations emerge as fixed, as admitting of no exceptions or only of exceptions that may be accounted for by some intervening event or change in conditions, we call them “laws” of nature, as, for example, the law of gravity or the laws of human behavior and function.107 These laws or


47

principles become the basis of all our reasoning about nature and of all empirical science. For our purposes the key point on dianoetic reasoning about contingent matters is that the commonalities, tendencies, and regularities, once recognized, are self-evident. This does not mean we can explain them or know for certain that they will continue permanently (they are, after all, contingent), but it does mean that the patterns, on being detected, are unmistakable. The self-evident commonalities, tendencies, and regularities are not first principles, however, any more than the existence of a particular object before us is a first principle. Were this the case, first principles would multiply without end, undermining their status as the absolute foundation of reasoning. First principles are higher up the chain of induction. They are what makes us certain that our conclusions (about tendencies and regularities, for instance) are not delusive. The first principle grounding our belief that what appear to be tendencies are in fact tendencies and that regularities, if nature is not fundamentally altered, will hold is, in Reid’s formulation, “that, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances.”108 The capacity of common sense in the wider sense, then, is the capacity to recognize things that are self-evident. It is indeed, as Reid says, the capacity to recognize first principles, but included within this is a capacity for recognizing all things that are self-evident (including empirical phenomena) and a capacity for induction, which is really the recognition of the self-evident tendency of particulars. One begins to see why Reid describes his philosophic method as inductive.109 Of course, mistakes in reasoning are legion, and the simple account just offered should not be taken to suggest that finding the truth is an easy matter, even for the most able and careful thinkers. If self-evident principles may be discovered, then, and necessary implications drawn, how is it that such mistakes are so common? First, the point that self-evident propositions are evident only to those acquainted with the relevant experiences and who understand the terms of the propositions derived therefrom cannot be overemphasized. Men may, to the end of life [as Reid says] be ignorant of self-evident truths. They may, to the end of life, entertain gross absurdities. Experience shows that this happens often in matters that are indifferent. Much more may it happen in matters where interest, passion, prejudice, and fashion, are so apt to pervert the judgment. . . . Judgment, even in things self-evident, requires a clear, distinct, and steady conception of the things about which we judge. Our conceptions are at first obscure and wavering. The habit of attending to them is necessary to make them distinct and steady; and this habit requires an exertion of mind to which many of our animal principles are unfriendly.110

48


Philosophers as well as ordinary folk are misled by interest, passion, prejudice, and fashion. Professional and personal interests, desire to be celebrated for some unique contribution, zealous attachment to pet theories, prejudice for or against old or unfashionable ways of thinking, a desire to be cutting-edge and popular with one’s peers can cause a philosopher to fixate on certain facts and considerations and ignore others that are inconvenient to his plans and purposes.111 Second, it is hard in problems of great scope and complexity to keep track of all the relevant details. The further removed one is from the first principles in the chain of reasoning, the harder it is to remember all the links in the chain; the more complex the problem the harder to see all the relevant considerations. Moreover, some of the problems involve such subtle considerations that great genius is required to detect and work them all out. Finally, in many cases relevant points are unknown or simply undiscoverable, and the significance even of well-known matters and the best way to respond to them are very often uncertain, anything but self-evident. The wisest thinkers are correspondingly tentative in their conclusions, humbly accepting that they must learn to live with mystery and, like Socrates, know and admit what they don’t know. In fact, the mystery is self-evident to anyone with open eyes and broad experience. This is what it means to know that you don’t know. It is in embracing both the mystery and the reality we know perfectly well that common sense may be spoken of as the middle way. In any case, grasping first principles of both the necessary and contingent kinds is of the most profound importance for politics. To begin, there are necessary first principles of morality, such as “That an unjust action has more demerit than an ungenerous one: That a generous action has more merit than a merely just one: That no man ought to be blamed for what it was not in his power to hinder: That we ought not to do to others what we would think unjust or unfair to be done to us in like circumstances.”112 This last, in its positive form (Do to others what you would have them do to you), Reid takes to be the most fundamental of all moral principles and, “of all the rules of morality, the most comprehensive. It comprehends every rule of justice without exception. It comprehends all the relative duties [from the various relations in which we find ourselves]. It comprehends every duty of charity and humanity, and even of courtesy and good manners.” Attention and adherence to these principles, says Reid, is central to the moral life: “Men who have made the greatest advance in self-government, are governed, in their practice, by general fixed purposes” based on rationally discerned “fixed principles.”113 Significantly, this does not mean that only those skilled in reasoning can live exemplary moral lives. Reid’s greatest difference with Aristotle is his emphasis on the role of conscience in the making of moral judgments. Conscience as


49

Reid understands it is an intellectual as well as an active power; it judges as well as moves.114 It is, in its intellectual aspect, the moral dimension of common sense or, to use Aristotle’s term, nous. In its motive aspect, it is the sense of moral obligation that is produced spontaneously on the intuition of right principle. The first principles of morality, though he may never have thought of them in propositional form, are not hard to discern for the ordinary man, provided (and this is a critical qualification) he has not been “misled by prejudices of education, or by wrong instruction . . . by . . . appetites and passions, by fashion, [or] by the contagion of evil example.”115 And this man can be led to virtue and right conduct as surely by obeying his sense of moral obligation, if rightly informed, as the philosopher can by good reasoning.116 Indeed, Reid seems to think that adherence to moral obligation is as crucial for the philosopher’s attainment of moral excellence as it is for the man of humble capacity. In fact, moral obligation in the full sense involves not only feeling but judgment. We not only feel obliged to do what’s right and resist what’s wrong; we also judge that this is right and this other is wrong and that we must embrace the first and reject the last. The feeling of obligation follows recognition of secondary as well as first principles and of what is self-evidently the right kind of response in given circumstances.117 Intuitive judgment is involved at every turn in the moral life. What separates Reid from the other leading British moralists, in fact, was his clarity about and emphasis on the central part of intuitive judgment in practical ethics. This clarity comes out most strikingly in his dispute with Hume over the nature of moral “approbation.” Hume wants to reduce all moral perceptions to feeling: approbation amounting to a certain peculiar “agreeable” sensation, and disapprobation to a disagreeable one.118 But Reid insists that moral approval or disapproval involves a “real judgment . . . which, like all other judgments, must be true or false.”119 Hume had eliminated judgment in this sense from his account of sense perception as well. He is representative of the tendency of modern philosophers to reduce all mental phenomena to feeling.120 On Reid’s analysis, conversely, all acts of perception of whatever kind include judgment within them. Perception (in contrast to mere sensation) involves apprehension plus judgment. We don’t merely apprehend the image of a table but judge it to exist independently of us; in like manner, we don’t merely apprehend moral qualities (greed, kindness, and so on) but judge them to be good or bad, right or wrong. These judgments must be true or false. Hume guts moral perception of its most important ingredient. Crucial to Hume’s logical argument is that one can never determine “the ought” from “the is”; specifically, one cannot determine ought from the relations among our impressions and ideas. Reid’s response is terse and penetrating. In

50


essence: The ought needs no explanation because it is intuitive. It is not a deduction; it is a self-evident first principle. Moral first principles, like others, are “perceived without reasoning or deduction,” and “moral truths that are not self-evident are deduced, not from relations quite different from them, but from the first principles of morals.”121 The end result of the modern reduction of intuition to feeling is a near eclipse of “the cognitive part of our nature.”122 Modern philosophers have increasingly lost sight of first principles or denigrated their significance and in consequence have increasingly lost faith in reason, because sound reasoning depends on rational intuition. As Friedrich Jacobi observed: “Since Aristotle, there has been manifested a continual and increasing tendency in the philosophical schools to subordinate, in general, immediate to mediate knowledge—the powers of primary apprehension, on which all is founded, to the powers of reflexion as determined by abstraction.”123 This tendency ended, Reid thinks, in the theory of ideas, the adoption of which made judgment analytically superfluous—indeed, unintelligible.124 Determining the probable cause or causes of this neglect of intuition and first principles is beyond the scope of the present book. Certainly the late Scholastic detachment from practical life, hopeless obscurantism, and ludicrous speculation (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and so on) played a role.125 But the fact of this neglect should be borne in mind, as it goes to the heart of the estrangement of philosophy from common sense. Grasping contingent first principles is as critical for politics as intuiting the necessary ones. The aforementioned principle “that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will” is necessary for the reasonableness of holding people accountable for their actions. Rational speech, without which human community would not be possible, depends on the self-evident fact that human beings are possessed of some degree of intelligence, and language was facilitated by the human capacity to communicate by certain “natural signs,” including “certain features of the countenance, sounds of the voice, and gestures of the body [that] indicate certain thoughts and dispositions of the mind.” These facts can easily be formulated as first principles. It is a self-evident truth “that there is a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of opinion,” and the natural trust we have in our fellows—insofar as they have not betrayed our trust, and especially in those of great knowledge, experience, and character—is the glue that holds society together and what makes us willing to engage in the exchanges of material and ideas that make society functional and, with a modicum of virtue, prosperous. Deliberation about how society may achieve its chosen ends would be fruitless were it not the case that “there are many events dependent upon the will of man, in which there is a self-evident probability,


51

greater or less, according to the circumstances,” and “that, in the phenomena of nature [including human nature], what is to be, will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances.”126 The necessary and contingent principles mentioned above (and perhaps some others) are the rudiments of natural law. Reid is not explicit about this, and some extrapolation is required to trace out the foundation he has laid. But all the elements for a systematic elaboration are there. Here is a basic account: Reid’s method of philosophizing about human nature is very much like Aristotle’s. He starts from common opinions or beliefs and penetrates to the intuitions that underlie them. His appeal to common sense is not, as Kant charged, an appeal to what we call popular opinion or cultural belief, which are influenced by “interest, passion, prejudice, and fashion” and whatever else may “pervert the judgment,” but rather an appeal to universal human intuitions. Reid’s favorite way of illustrating the universality of these intuitions is to point to features common to the structure of all known languages. One striking example of this is the distinction made in all languages between moral feeling and moral judgment. Reid thinks the universality of this distinction alone is enough to “sink” Hume’s opinion, considered above, about the nature of moral approbation: This doctrine . . . that moral approbation is merely a feeling without judgment, necessarily carries along with it this consequence, that a form of speech, upon one of the most common topics of discourse, which either has no meaning or a meaning irreconcilable to all rules of grammar or rhetoric, is found to be common and familiar in all languages and in all ages of the world, while every man knows how to express the meaning, if it have any, in plain and proper language . . . . A particular language may have some oddity, or even absurdity, introduced by some man of eminence, from caprice or wrong judgment, and followed by servile imitators, for a time, till it be detected, and, of consequence, discountenanced and dropt; but that the same absurdity should pervade all languages, through all ages, and that, after being detected and exposed, it should still keep its countenance and its place in language as much as before, this can never be while men have understanding.127

Everyone talks about judgment as if it were something different from mere feeling, and this strongly suggests there is a real difference to be found. The belief that there is a difference is itself a judgment and something more than feeling alone. Reid concludes that “there must be a great presumption that the judgment of mankind . . . is the natural issue of those faculties which God hath given them. Such a judgment can be erroneous only when there is some cause of the error, as general as the error is.”128

52


The universal intuitions are the possibility ground of sensus communis in Vico’s sense, or what Aristotle called homonoia, a like-mindedness of a community about what’s right and good, which is the deepest foundation of social cohesion and functionality. The basic political problem is that the baser passions of men tend to keep their intuitions about what is right and good out of focus so that they are neglected or their authority denied. Communal perceptions of justice and the common good are correspondingly distorted, and homonoia degenerates into mere common prejudice. Nonetheless, the reality of universal intuitions gives grounds for hope that a just, or at least relatively just, society may be formed under the right circumstances and with the proper cultivation. The common intuitions are made possible by a common constitution of human nature. Reid agrees with Aristotle that the human constitution is partly irrational and partly rational, that the rational part has authority, and that “all wisdom and virtue consist in following its dictates [and] all vice and folly in disobeying them.”129 These “dictates,” which the constitution of our minds somehow enables us to grasp, are the necessary and contingent first principles apprehended by common sense or nous, the secondary conclusions derived therefrom, and the corresponding recognition of how we ought to order and conduct ourselves. Reid agrees with Aristotle also that man is a political animal, as shown by his natural “social affections” and the “social operations” of his mind. All these features of human nature and conclusions about it, in fact, are as self-evident as the principles the mind’s structure allows us to grasp.130 Human nature, which Reid describes in terms of human “powers” or capacities, is the basis of the contingent first principles of human nature and the laws of human operations. The moral laws discerned in the necessary first principles of morals are not contingent on human nature. They would necessarily hold for all rational, moral agents in principle, whatever shape or composition these might take, whether the specifically human form existed or not.131 Human nature in its mature form is the standard of good in the sense of human functionality and the fulfillment of human powers, as Aristotle suggested; the necessary moral laws are the standard of moral good in general, which concerns the right relations of things that would obtain in any moral universe.132 In all, human beings ought to be regulated by a conception of the “good upon the whole,” human and otherwise, as determined by reason and conscience.133 According to Reid’s understanding of human moral goodness, Aristotle’s notion of morality as a matter of moderation, of achieving the mean between excess and deficiency in feeling and action, while true as far as it goes, is inadequate.134 What Aristotle lacks, specifically, is a full appreciation of the nature of obligation and duty.135 Reid does agree with Aristotle that, in Reid’s words, “the fundamental maxim of prudence, and of all good morals [is] that the passions ought, in all cases, to be under the dominion of reason,” but for Reid


53

submitting to the rule of reason is not only wise, it is obligatory.136 This is not to deny that an element of obligation is implied in the Aristotelian account, but Reid seems right to think that Aristotle lacks clarity about the lawlike, binding character of obligation, perhaps the reason Aristotle does not push beyond his notion of natural right to a full-blooded conception of natural law. On the matter of the “social operations” of the human mind Reid adds something interesting to the Aristotelian account. Aristotle observes that what makes man capable of political society is his capacity for rational speech, for communication in particular about good and bad, right and wrong.137 Reid concurs, but he points to these other faculties as equally essential: the capacities for command, testimony, promise, and contract. Reid gives special attention to testimony and promise, taking them to be especially foundational. It is not enough that men can rationally discuss what is good and bad for them and what is right and wrong in character and action. For political society to exist, they must be capable of making mutual promises (this is contract) and of keeping them. For the promises to be meaningful, men must also be capable of testifying reliably to facts (what their intuitions show, including basic principles of value and right) and to recognize and examine the facts attested by others: for instance, that the agreeing parties are who they claim to be, that they understand the terms of the agreement and see the mutual advantages, that they appreciate the moral obligations involved, and that they have the means of carrying out their promises. Reliable promise and testimony continue to be fundamental throughout the life of society, in the making and keeping of contracts and in the maintenance of justice, whether in enforcing the contracts or in determining the guilt or innocence of wrongdoers.138 Legitimate command, presumably, would involve rulers’ making and keeping promises to their people about securing, as much as depends on them, justice and the good of the community. The people in turn would be obliged to keep their implicit promise of allegiance to and support of the government. Hobbes and Locke are right, then, in seeing contract as foundational to society. They failed, however, to appreciate that the human tendency to make contracts (formal or informal) suggests men are social creatures and not, as Hobbes and Locke would have it, solitary beings who contract merely out of self-interest. The capacities for and tendencies toward promise and testimony are inherently and irreducibly social operations. As Reid explained, “it will be found extremely difficult, if not impossible, to resolve our social operations into any modification or composition of the solitary [those which may be performed in solitude]; and . . . an attempt to do this would prove as ineffectual as the attempts that have been made [by Hobbes and Locke, for instance] to resolve all our social affections into the selfish.” Man is indeed a political animal. Correspondingly, the civilized state of man is as natural as the savage state, and in fact the fulfillment of nature.139

54


Fidelity and trust, Reid suggests, are the practical basis of society and the glue that holds it together.140 The ground of that trust is homonoia or the common sense of good men about the common good and what is required morally and practically to achieve it, together with fidelity in promise and testimony. There are two great obstacles to pursuing the good and keeping faith: passions and false opinions.141 False opinion comes from misdirected passion, which distorts the judgment of those who should know better, or prevents the deeper experiences of rationality to those who do not. If passions can be moderated and the right experiences can take place, the right kind of homonoia in the Aristotelian sense is possible. The key experiences here are the experience of truth—in particular the truth about human beings, our place in the scheme of things, and our corresponding obligations, all intuitively discerned—and the conviction of what we should do and become that follows from the experience of truth. Faithfulness to this conviction through changing circumstances makes one worthy of trust. From this conviction we make promises to each other, and keeping such promises in the most prudent way is essential to good politics. Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the significance of the point that intuition of larger realities like the nature of man and the human condition and the way we ought to think, feel, and act toward others is an experience of truth. Truth is not often thought of as something experienced. It is usually treated as if it were something “out there” like a planet viewed through a telescope rather than something to which we may be vitally connected. The objectivity of truth is so accentuated we forget that the known requires a knower. The great achievement of Scottish Common Sense and particularly of Reid, in relation to the natural law tradition, is to bring back into focus the existential ground of natural law, which is common sense. Most of that tradition has fixated on the principles intuited and by forgetting and so failing to highlight the existential roots of those principles has rendered them opaque to those not already convinced of their truth. The intuition of the principles is the vital connecting link between natural law and “real life,” or ordinary experience. So, it is perfectly consistent with the rest of his philosophy for Reid to say, as he does in the Intellectual Powers, that we should “try every opinion by the touchstone of fact and experience.”142 Reid and the Scottish Common Sense philosophers treat natural law most directly under the heading of “natural jurisprudence.” At the heart of natural law is the question of justice, and Reid, like Aristotle, emphasizes that justice is natural and not man-made, though it is instantiated through human action. As with so many matters in the Inquiry and Essays, Reid develops his position in response to Hume who, like Hobbes, argued that justice is an artificial virtue


55

and a function of social utility. But the naturalness of justice is proved by the fact that our sense and judgment of the justice or injustice of an action is immediate and spontaneous and prior to considerations of social consequence. In fact, “the common good of society . . . hardly ever enters into the thoughts of the far greatest part of mankind,” who are preoccupied with their own needs and desires. Hume had it exactly backward to hold that justice is a remote concern and social utility an immediate concern.143 Moreover, Hume’s notion of justice was both thin and severely “confined,” thin because having in it no element of moral obligation, which Reid takes as the root of justice, and confined in being “restricted . . . to a regard to property and fidelity in contracts.”144 Here again Hume is essentially Hobbesian.145 Although the keeping of contracts is a key concern of justice, for Reid as for Aristotle the domain of justice extends far beyond contract to embrace all human relations and interactions. The practical problem with utility as the basis for justice is that utility, carrying no obligation, cannot bind. Self-interest will not be enough to keep people committed to their agreements; if it is the sole bond, some outside force like Hobbes’s sovereign will be required to make the contracts hold. (Hume does not, apparently, appreciate the power of Hobbes’s logic on this point.) By contrast, a sense of obligation, in a decent society, will keep most people honest without the constant threat of punishment. Thus, even in the restricted sense of fidelity to contracts Hume’s theory of justice is deeply inadequate. In making justice “derive its whole merit from utility, [Hume] has laid down some principles which . . . have a tendency to subvert all faith and fair-dealing among mankind.” In fact, Hume goes so far as to suggest that, in Reid’s words, “the principles of honesty and fidelity [as traditionally understood] are at bottom a bundle of contradictions.” This draws from Reid the harshest criticism of Hume that appears in any of Reid’s works: “This is one part of his moral system which, I cannot help thinking, borders upon licentiousness.”146 The centrality of obligation to justice has profound implications for modern natural rights theory, what Reid and the Scottish philosophers call “natural jurisprudence.” It means that rights are inseparably connected to duties, that every right corresponds to a duty of just treatment.147 By extension, natural rights imply natural laws. Historically, Reid observes, the notion of human rights came out of the Western theory of law. “The rights of man,” he explains, “is a term of art in law [contrived by the practitioners of Roman Civil Law], and signifies all that a man may lawfully do, all that he may lawfully possess and use, and all that he may lawfully claim of any other person.” These categories of rights correspond directly to the key concerns of human law, the purpose of which is to protect these freedoms, possessions, usages, and demands. The right of doing is called the right of “liberty,” that of ownership and use

56


of possessions the right of “property,” and that of demand (as by a petitioner or plaintiff) “personal right.”148 But that the purpose of the law is to protect these rights suggests that the rights exist prior to the law and are a standard by which the law may be judged. Therefore, Reid avers, “human laws may be unjust.”149 If they provide protections for these rights, the laws are just; if not, they are unjust. But if the rights are prior to human law, they are not prior to natural law. Natural rights and natural law are coeval. The rights of the people imply a corresponding obligation on the part of human government to respect those rights and preserve their enjoyment, and obligation implies law. If the obligation, as the right, is prior to human law, there must be a higher law than the human. Natural rights imply a natural law. Cicero called this, as Reid paraphrases, the “law of nature; a law, not wrote on tables of stone or brass, but on the heart of man; a law of greater antiquity and higher authority than the laws of particular states; a law which is binding upon all men of all nations.”150 The Scottish Common Sense school—and notably, the American founders as well—hewed more to the older Western tradition of natural law than Locke and other modern natural law theorists. Theirs was a thicker conception of natural law, involving more than an obligation merely to respect others’ selfpreservation. This is seen most clearly in their embrace of Grotius’s notion of “imperfect” rights, rights not merely of protection but of dignity. “Perfect” rights, Reid explains, relate to “the claims of strict justice,” to protection from injustice; “imperfect” rights relate to “the claims of charity and humanity,” evoking obligations to things like benevolence, gratitude, and compassion.151 (The term “imperfect” here denotes not deficiency but a category of rights human government is inadequate or inappropriate to guarantee.) This more expansive treatment of rights and obligations affirms, with a Christian twist, Aristotle’s view that the aim of human community is not mere survival but living well.152 Reid again distinguishes himself from the prior Scottish as well as from the British moralists generally in his emphasis on the part of intuition in determinations of right. Natural rights and obligations are intuitively perceived. So is also (Hume’s definition of justice notwithstanding) the distinction between public and private wrongs.153 Intuitive judgment is involved in every phase of justice on every level of human relations, in determining what is required generally and in discerning what kind of action is appropriate to each situation. Intuitive judgment is central to deliberation about how to achieve justice, as “the general rules of deliberation” are “axioms in morals,” “perfectly evident to reason” at first sight.154 This does not mean that knowing what to do in any given circumstance is always easy: though the first principles are simple, their application is often


57

complicated.155 Moreover, regard to the truth of moral judgments is absolutely essential to moral living.156 It is not enough to act, as Hume prescribes, according to instinct, in fidelity to our natural moral sentiments; one must act in the belief that the aim of the act is the true aim; the sentiments cannot be a standard of right unless the judgments they endorse are true judgments. The picture of natural law portrayed in Reid’s moral philosophy and natural jurisprudence suggests that modern thinking about human nature and human rights is radically defective. Modern philosophy—Scottish Common Sense and American thought in the spirit of the founding era excepted—reduces man to a clever animal guided not by reason (Aristotle’s nous, Reid’s common sense) but solely by calculation of what will best conduce to survival. This abolition of reason was, to use C. S. Lewis’s felicitous phrase, an abolition of man (from his book by that title), an annihilation of most of what constitutes human dignity and value. The destructive work was complete with the Darwinian revolution in philosophy, since few post-Darwinians saw, as James McCosh did, that there is no ground for concluding material evolution implies spiritual vacuity.157 Reid’s elucidation of common sense and the intuition of first principles, which remain accessible to us, stands as a powerful challenge to the materialist theory, in our own time as well as his. Modern thinkers cannot account for those principles on materialist terms any more than Hume could on his, nor can they reasonably dismiss them, as all their reasoning depends on them. And if the principles are both necessary and true, if they constitute not merely the logical predicate to reasoning but a genuine grasp of reality, then the obligations we manifestly perceive maintain their full force, and natural law in its older, more expansive meaning proves to be as relevant today as it was for Aquinas or the American founders.

Common Sense Philosophy in America Thomas Reid has been given special attention in this short history of the Western common sense tradition partly because he was a giant of modern common sense philosophy who stood at the pivotal point in Western philosophy where philosophers began to assault common sense directly, and whose philosophy pointed the way to effective resistance; partly because he captured with superior clarity the essence of common sense—in a word, the intuitive grasp of reality; and partly because he was the greatest representative of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which constituted the most direct connection between the larger common sense tradition and American thought. As noted, Scottish Common Sense dominated American academic philosophy for the better part of a century. John Witherspoon, himself a Scot, brought

58


the movement to prominence in America, entrenching it at Princeton, which he made, in terms of political and academic influence, the leading American institution of higher learning during the first decades of the republic. Witherspoon was well acquainted with the works of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, Kames, and others of or philosophically akin to the movement, discussed them in his “Lectures on Moral Philosophy,” and recommended them to his students for closer study.158 The “Lectures” were distributed far and wide (though in unpublished form until after his death) among the leading American academics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of whom took them as a model for their programs of ethical and political philosophy.159 Harvard joined Princeton as a leading center of Scottish Common Sense in the nineteenth century, and leading academics across the country promoted and defended the movement enthusiastically, and with considerable effect. James McCosh, still today a leading authority on Scottish philosophy, continued the tradition at Princeton. He was especially impressed and influenced by Reid.160 The influence of Scottish Common Sense was not restricted to the universities, however. Our American founders’ education steeped them in classics of ethics and politics, both ancient and modern, and prominent among the modern classics were the works of the Scottish realists. Among other things, those works informed and conditioned the founders’ thinking about natural law and natural rights that they so manifestly applied in founding the republic. As Knud Haakonssen demonstrates, Scottish realism emerged out of the larger Protestant natural law tradition that can be traced back to Grotius’s seventeenthcentury classic De iure belli ac pacis (The Rights of War and Peace) and extends to the American founding and beyond, and which was itself preoccupied with overcoming modern skeptical tendencies. The “continuing ambition of modern natural law . . . to overcome such skepticism” manifestly animated Scottish natural jurisprudence and moral philosophy, and common sense for the Scottish Common Sense philosophers contained within itself the rudiments of natural right and natural law.161 Whether consciously or by osmosis, the Americans seem to have absorbed the Scottish understanding of these matters. Their thinking on natural rights in particular, as reflected in Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy (to be examined shortly) mirrored the Scottish version much more than the Lockean in its communitarian bent and its greater emphasis on the duties correspondent to rights. The most influential of the later Scottish realists was Sir William Hamilton, who deserves mention here both for his importance in the history of the Scottish realist movement and for his influence on McCosh, who studied with him at the University of Edinburgh. McCosh called Hamilton “the most learned


59

of all the Scottish metaphysicians,” almost certainly an accurate description.162 Perhaps Hamilton’s greatest contribution to common sense philosophy was his remarkable scholarly essay “On the Philosophy of Common Sense; or Our Primary Beliefs Considered as the Ultimate Criterion of Truth,” perhaps the best short account of the subject ever written.163 Its compendium of common sense–related terminology and concepts in ancient and modern philosophical texts provides much of the seed material that would be required for developing a complete history of Western common sense philosophy. Hamilton’s place in the historical development of common sense philosophy is ironic: On the one hand he augmented its respectability during his career by his erudition and his efforts to synthesize the insights of Reid and Kant at a time when Kant was widely revered in the philosophic world; on the other hand John Stuart Mill’s critique of his thought in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy was widely thought to be devastating and gravely injured the reputation and influence of Scottish realism, giving it a blow from which it has yet to recover fully. Even more ironic, McCosh’s analysis of Mill’s book in his Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy dismantles Mill’s critique of realism and the psychological approach to philosophy with which he hoped to replace it, and might well have damaged Mill’s philosophical reputation had anyone still been paying attention (see Chapter 4). One substantive point of Hamilton’s work is worth noting here for its illumination of the essence of Scottish realism, as indicated in his guidelines for keeping philosophy true to common sense and for producing a fully developed common sense philosophy: 1) That we admit nothing, not either an original datum of consciousness, or the legitimate consequence of such a datum; 2) That we embrace all the original data of consciousness, and all their legitimate consequences; and 3) That we exhibit each of these in its individual integrity, neither distorted nor mutilated, and in its relative place, whether of pre-eminence or subordination.164

This account of the proper method for common sense philosophizing reveals the thoroughgoing empiricism implicit in Scottish Common Sense. As he and the other Scottish realists continually remind us, the intuitions that are the focus of that philosophy are themselves facts. The basic Scottish realist response to Humean skepticism is to show that the intuitions of which they speak are as much a part of the furniture of human consciousness as Hume’s “impressions” and deserve to be treated as seriously, indeed more seriously, because they are what give the phenomena meaning.

60


In America, early Pragmatism stressed even more forcefully the point that truth is an experience, a living engagement with reality, indeed, as the Pragmatists construed it, a process within reality. It is significant that they did not sufficiently appreciate the intuitive experience described at such length by Reid, the grasp of first principles, and the pivoting away from attention to first principles is in fact the heart of the Pragmatist turn in common sense philosophy. It is significant also, however, that William James arrived at similar destinations by a different route. James said at the outset of his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh on The Varieties of Religious Experience that his philosophic imagination had been lastingly animated by Scottish Common Sense: “The glories of the philosophic chair of this university [Edinburgh] were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s class-room therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown” (VRE 11). This vignette is especially interesting in light of the similarity between Hamilton’s guidelines for philosophizing (quoted above) and James’s own account of the fundamental “postulate” underlying his own radical empiricism: “The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate]” (MT 7; James’s brackets). Elsewhere James describes his “methodical postulate” this way: “Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality. In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real” (ERE 81). The resemblance of James’s philosophic method as expressed here to Hamilton’s is remarkable. Was the germ of James’s vision for a radically empirical philosophy caught in his early study of Hamilton? In any case, the common sense attitude expressed in Hamilton’s guidelines is unmistakably the same attitude that James adopts as fundamental to his philosophic enterprise. James’s attitude toward skepticism, moreover, bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Reid’s. In effect, Reid’s skeptic says, “There is nothing so shameful in a philosopher as to be deceived and deluded; and therefore you ought to resolve firmly to withhold assent, and to throw off all this belief of external objects, which


61

may be all delusion.”165 This sounds very much like the skeptical posture James challenges in “The Will to Believe,” where James responds to W. K. Clifford’s claim that “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (WB 18).166 Like Reid, James suggests that such commitments are passional rather than rational and reflect an unaccountable privileging of the desire to avoid error over the desire to discover truth, whatever the risk. Clifford’s position, James thinks, stems from a “horror of becoming a dupe.” But James “can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world,” and he finds “a certain lightness of heart [about the possibility of error] healthier than this excessive nervousness” about it (WB 24–25). James’s attitude here exhibits the playful seriousness that Shaftesbury called for, an attitude perhaps nowhere more poignantly modeled than by Socrates in the Phaedo, in which he tries (waiting for his own death by execution!) to encourage his friends to adopt a more playful mood in exploring such uncertain matters as what happens to a man after he dies. After making an educated guess, Socrates says to them, “Of course, no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them. But that either this or something very like it is a true account of our souls and their future habitations—since we have clear evidence [from the preceding argument] that the soul is immortal—this, I think, is both a reasonable contention and a belief worth risking, for the risk is a noble one.”167 James himself doubted the existence of the soul as classically conceived, but he shared Socrates’ attitude toward the possibility of immortality. More to the point, he took the “risk” of believing for the sake of discovering true goods to be more reasonable than a cringing withdrawal from the search for fear of going astray. In the end, “Scepticism . . . is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faithvetoer’s exact position” (WB 30). James concludes, “A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule,” and “this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion [and by implication, a greater meaning of human life] were not true—till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave” (WB 31–32). One of the things for James worth the risk of believing, both because the probabilities seem to lie that way and because the payoff for being right could be enormous, was that a deeper moral order guaranteeing our highest ideals is available to us, though it cannot be proved beyond all doubt. He was

62


cautiously confident, with Witherspoon and McCosh, that he had found in moral and religious experience sufficient grounding for a robust, rich, and well-ordered moral life.

The Civilizational Tradition If cultivated common sense is indeed foundational for civilized society, it stands to reason that the common sense philosophical tradition in Western civilization is matched by a common sense cultural and political tradition, or rather traditions, as the particular form of common sense must surely vary with varying circumstances. No fully developed history of the relation of common sense and civilization has ever been written. Eric Voegelin’s Order and History advanced the cause considerably, in terms of the political outworking of nous, but not usually explicitly in terms of common sense and certainly not in the language of common sense.168 (Voegelin’s formulations are notoriously difficult and highly technical, although if you can master the terminology they are superlatively clarifying.) Vico is the only classic philosopher to have attempted, in his New Science, a systematic theory of common sense in relation to civilization, but this is only a bare beginning for any full theoretization of the subject (Voegelin in fact goes further). Vico’s theory does look to history, or more precisely to paradigmatic human experiences historically revealed, and is loaded with scraps of illuminating material of this kind, apparently material from which to draw a coherent historical account and a more adequate theory, but this account and fully developed theory are never traced out. The New Science is packed with common sense aphorisms, but the links between them are frequently unclear, and their importance to the larger theory even less so. No unifying narrative is provided. We certainly cannot discern the outlines of an actual common sense tradition here. An adequate account of the Western common sense civilizational tradition would require a kind of empirical analysis of common sense principles adopted in Western societies and their related political developments. This would amount to an empirical history of the Western natural law tradition, a history of the experiences to which or through which natural law theorists and their predecessors looked in deriving their principles, the concrete process of reasoning (intuitive or noetic as well as logical) that led them to their conclusions, and the traditions and institutions that came to embody and enforce the natural right thus made intelligible. The term “empirical analysis” is employed here to stress the need for a full accounting of the existential and experiential basis for natural law and its instantiation in concrete social practices and forms of governance.169


63

Proto- and full-fledged natural law theorists from Plato to modern times have thought and theorized in response to real-world problems that led them to a consideration of basic human needs and drives, hoping that coming to terms with these needs and drives would prepare them to speak meaningfully to the problems. Plato, for instance, wrote in the post–Peloponnesian War period, in a time of Athenian social and moral disintegration, illustrated poignantly, he thought, by the Athenians’ execution of Socrates. What was the nature of the moral and spiritual crisis that brought Athens to reject and kill the best man among them, precisely for what he was and the help he tried to give them? What were the sources of Athenian corruption? What is the nature of human corruption generally, and how do we escape it? Answering such questions adequately requires an understanding of humanity (in both senses of that word) and the principles of right, but such an understanding cannot be gained without careful reflection on the basic experiences that make human nature and its potential nobility or degradation known—experiences of selfishness, passion, obligation, and the aspiration for a better life, but also, more fundamental, the experiences of awakened consciousness and intuition that make all these clear and intelligible—and without also, critically, a sense of how the resulting common sense understanding and the human potentialities may take concrete form in historical experience. Then we would be prepared to understand comprehensively the foundations of the justice and dignified living that constitute civilization.170

3 Witherspoon’s “Plain Common Sense”

The Western common sense tradition connects to American thought most directly in the form of Scottish Common Sense, and John Witherspoon was the key figure in making that philosophy a major force in American academia and in the minds of the many young men he sent out from Princeton to lead the country.1 More to the point for our purposes, Witherspoon constitutes a model— both of the American mind, in the way he thinks about practical matters, and of common sense philosophy in its active mode. He is representative of founding period thinking about human nature, social life, religion, law, rights and duties, which paralleled on all essential points the Scottish Common Sense understanding, and he applied this thinking directly in the political arena. The first great phase of American thought may be described without distortion as Scottish realist, in part because of the commanding position that tradition occupied so long in American academe, but more fundamentally because Scottish realism articulated what Americans unreflectively had so long taken for granted. As the founders gravitated to Locke’s politics because he seemed to express in theory what they had known in practice, so they and their intellectual progeny gravitated to Scottish Common Sense because it confirmed their deepest intuitions about man, God, and the world, especially their ideas about conscience and what it requires of us. Witherspoon’s writings, with their overtly Scottish character, provide a rare opportunity to observe in telescope but also systematically the American mind at work. Witherspoon is a model of active common sense philosophy in his application of it to circumstances of the American Revolution. No other American founder excepting Paine appealed so directly to common sense in confronting that crisis, and Paine, though more famously connected with the term, did not use it with anything like the philosophic awareness that Witherspoon did. In

64

Witherspoon’s “Plain Common Sense”

65

the person of Witherspoon as in no other American we can see a common sense philosopher as a political practitioner. Along the way of his philosophizing and statesmanship, he reveals in simple terms something not simple, what common sense is and how it grounds right order and the good life. He is not always explicit about the common sense angle, but his judgments and conclusions are Scottish Common Sense through and through. The Lectures on Moral Philosophy are patterned (sometimes very closely) after Francis Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy, and where Witherspoon disagrees with Hutcheson, as he frequently does, he does so in unmistakably Reidian terms. My aim in the following review is that Witherspoon’s common sense assumptions will be uncovered, when they are not obvious on the surface, and the Scottish connections traced out.

Common Sense Philosophy in Action Witherspoon reveals his mind on common sense most directly in a series of essays that he published in the thick of the Revolutionary War under the pseudonym “Druid.” He chose this moniker, he tells cryptically, because he then resided in a house “surrounded with woods, in all the simple majesty of their uncultivated state” and because at age fifty, “a cool and contemplative season,” he has seen enough of the world to “understand well enough what is passing in it.”2 The old Celtic druids, it seems, were the wise men of their day, and they are believed to have gathered their communities in sacred oak groves to divine the right path for them. According to one modern scholar, “they served the tribes and clans as judges, prophets, soothsayers, wise men and as keepers of the collective memory.”3 Perhaps Witherspoon, American sage and counselor to statesmen, envisaged himself as a kind of philosopher-prophet, moved to conjure and give form to the as-yet-uncultivated common sense of his tribe, that cluster of aspirants who had discovered and declared in their Declaration of Independence that they were “one people” now, thrown into a state of nature by the tyranny of King George. It is clear that he indeed found a kind of majesty in that rough crowd. “Though error, prejudice, and partiality, are very universal,” he reflects, these vices “shew themselves chiefly in the smaller interests of particulars; but there is a candor and impartiality in a diffusive public, which may be in a great measure depended upon, and which will both hear truth and obey it” (WJW 4:428). But this basic good judgment needs cultivating and directing, and this is the work to which Witherspoon sets himself in the essays. Some might object that the Druid’s learned advice is ill suited to the occasion, the great war in which the community is engulfed; that “the time calls not

66


for speculation but action.” He answers that, while the time indeed demands decisive action, there is in fact no better time for a few reflective words, for “in times of public commotion the human mind is roused, and shakes off the incumbrances of sloth and self-indulgence” (WJW 4:429–30). The prospect of death, as someone said, concentrates the mind and imposes a kind of clarity rarely present in ordinary times. As the embattled Achaeans were glad of wise old Nestor’s counsel, so might Americans be of the Druid’s. He reflects first on the nature of war, and the way to wage it. He lays out the elements of just war, including the justice of the cause, the purity of intention, and the right manner of waging war.4 Nations are, as Locke said, in a state of nature in relation to other nations, because “when they disagree, they have no common umpire or judge to resort to, but must decide their quarrels by the sword.”5 Is there any law to which they are bound, to which they may appeal against the conduct of their enemies, by which they may regulate their own conduct, which may carry some meaningful sanction? There is. We know there is a law because nations, as individuals, may have just claims against others. The sanction of this law is seen in the same way its existence is seen, by the natural human “sense of duty.” The sanction, moreover, points to a sanctioner, “the supreme Judge,” God of all men, and it is buttressed by another intuition, “a sense of general utility, as makes men fear, that if they notoriously trample upon [the natural law], reproach and infamy among all nations will be the effect, and probably resentment and indignation by common consent.” The last resort in the face of war is, then (to borrow again from Locke), “an appeal to Heaven” and to the common sense of mankind “by some public declaration, to convince other nations of the justice of the cause” (WJW 4:432–34). Americans had made such appeals, we observe, in their own Declaration of Independence, in the name of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” This reading of natural law was typical of the time. As countless public sermons, pamphlets, and proclamations of the period attest, for Americans the “appeal to Heaven” was not euphemistic. “Nature’s God” was as much the object of appeal as the “laws of nature.” They made their Declaration “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Like Witherspoon, they generally understood the root of natural law to be conscience, and conscience to be apprehensive of divine expectations, that the laws of nature were laid down by a Supreme Lawgiver who enforced his commands through conviction and judgment. Jefferson expressed the consensus when he asked rhetorically, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his


67

wrath? Indeed [reflecting on American slavery] I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”6 Liberty was, the Declaration suggested, the central natural right endowed by the Creator and guaranteed by divine and natural law.7 This understanding of natural law and conscience, Witherspoon will suggest, is the common sense view, not only for Americans but for human beings as such.8 The Druid expands on the nature of just war and what means are unjust in its conduct. The essence of injustice in waging war is violation of “the principles of natural equity,” a portion of the natural law, by “acts of cruelty and inhumanity.” Naming the kinds of things forbidden, he applies the principles to the current facts on the ground, and in particular to the brutal actions of British troops that were widely denounced by the American public as savage and barbarous but without a clear sense of why they were barbarous. Witherspoon specifically points to the British army’s use of Indian tribes known to employ methods of warfare that may be described as terroristic; British efforts to provoke and facilitate a slave rebellion; and their “burning and destroying houses, where there is no fortress,” that is, that are not being used as fortifications (WJW 4:436–38). Providing such understanding “with as much simplicity as possible, that it may be useful to persons of the lowest rank, and most common understanding” is the task of the common sense philosopherstatesman, and this our druidic Witherspoon tries to do by his explication of the basic principles of just war under, borrowing Grotius’s formulation, “the law of nature and nations” (WJW 4:432–33).9 When Witherspoon takes up the theme of common sense explicitly in the fourth Druid essay, his aim and the motive of his efforts as public philosopher and counselor to statesmen become clearer. So also does the nature of common sense itself. The term as commonly used, he says, has two very different meanings: “In the first of them it signifies, that sense that is really common to all men, or at least nearly universal: in the second it signifies either something totally different, or at least a degree of that sense which is not possessed by the plurality, but is perhaps called common, because it may be found in some persons of every rank” (WJW 4:447). If common sense in one intention is the capacity for judgment common to all men, that capacity is not equal in all. Not everyone is capable of “plain common sense,” which denotes a certain clarity of vision and sharpness of judgment that most, even with practice, can never attain. Yet, we may extrapolate considering Witherspoon’s own example, all persons of ordinary sense can recognize this superior kind of judgment in others, and if ruled by their own measure of sense will defer to it. The operation of society under this double rule of common sense is the essence of good politics. Common sense in the superlative is to be distinguished from refinement, science, and genius, Witherspoon continues. We have all met highly talented or

68


educated persons who have no sense of what is appropriate to the practical occasion and seen masters of various arts and sciences “who are notwithstanding very defective in common sense, and after their learned acquisitions, the defect is either greater in itself, or at least more visible than before” (WJW 4:448). Few people in general are more bereft of common sense than poets, and often, the more brilliant they are, the farther removed from it. Indeed, “many . . . men of great genius, have actually claimed it as their right, not to be confined to common forms” (WJW 4:450–51). Yet taste, learning, and imagination all are improved when joined to “plain common sense.” The essence of this common sense is good judgment. “A man of memory without judgment,” the Druid tells us, “is a fool; and a man of imagination, without judgment, is mad; but when this great quality takes the government of both, they acquire lustre, and command universal esteem. No human accomplishment, unless it has this as its foundation and ground-work, can reach perfection, even in its own kind. . . . There is something in the application and direction of all these accomplishments which judgment must supply, and which neither instruction, example, nor even experience will bestow” (WJW 4:452–53).10 Common sense, then, is to be distinguished also “from what is acquired by study or application.” It is a “gift of nature” (WJW 4:447). But this gift, though it “can neither be augmented or destroyed,” may be misapplied or “neglected and despised, or overgrown by the rank weeds of ostentation and self-sufficiency,” that is to say, by arrogance and self-satisfaction (WJW 4:456, also 454), and it may be strengthened by exercise and directed by education. Specifically, it needs for its full flowering a moral education and an education in “the useful parts of science” (WJW 4:456–67), among which is the science of politics. Such an education Witherspoon tried to provide at Princeton, the “School of Statesmen.”11 If common sense is the groundwork of every human accomplishment, it must be the groundwork of every political accomplishment worthy of the name. The Druid explicitly mentions politics in this vein (WJW 4:453) but did not elaborate on the theme, and we are left to glean the full political import of common sense from Witherspoon’s other moral and political writings. But the Druid does tell us that “sobriety, prudence and patient industry . . . are the genuine dictates of plain common sense” (WJW 457). Witherspoon recognizes elsewhere, at least implicitly, that these qualities are essential for sound political rule. Moral seriousness, prudence in the conduct of public affairs, and patient labor in the building of civilization are the hallmarks of common sense politics. Witherspoon exhibits these traits in all his writings and public addresses, and nowhere more poignantly than in his landmark political sermon, The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men, preached at Princeton and published


69

in Philadelphia in 1776.12 Sobriety is evinced in his analysis of the human dimension of the crisis, of American claims and prospects, and of the mysterious part of Providence in human affairs. War, Witherspoon suggests, reveals human nature as nothing else. The full range of human possibilities is shown, from the greatest depravity to the highest nobility and purity (Dominion 537, 542). This revelation of man, Witherspoon believes, is a work of Providence, though he is no credulous blind believer and does not pretend to understand the ways of God with the world: “There is an unsearchable depth in the divine counsels, which it is impossible for us to penetrate.” However, “where revelation and experience enables us to discover the wisdom, equity, or mercy of divine providence, nothing can be more delightful or profitable to a serious mind” (Dominion 535). The most direct indication of providence in times of extreme crisis, when life and death hang in the balance, is the way the crisis awakens men to the truth of their existence, its precariousness, its contingency, its meaning in the face of annihilation; how the crisis spurs them to take care for their souls, to think about what is important in life, to reach out in hope to a divine mercy, the need for which they may never before have realized, and to really understand, perhaps for the first time, that the world is greater than themselves. The preacher addresses American claims and prospects in the war under the aspect not only of providence but of natural law as well. He repeats in the sermon, more explicitly and more elaborately than in the Druid letters, the elements of just war. He imagines American faith as presaging American prosperity but leaves this “as a matter rather of conjecture than certainty.” However, he asserts confidently “that if your cause is just, if your principles are pure, and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitude of opposing hosts.” The justice of the Americans’ cause he does not doubt, for they fight against tyranny, and resistance to tyranny is necessary for justice to survive. The heart of British tyranny over Americans is the British claim (articulated by Parliament) “of making laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever.” What Americans fight for is their “civil and religious liberties, and consequently in a great measure the temporal and eternal happiness of us and our posterity.” The stakes are exceedingly high, for “there is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage” (Dominion, 549–50). Although their cause is just, however, Americans must take care to keep their principles pure amid the swirling passions of war. Their “opposition to the claims of the British ministry [should] not arise from a seditious and turbulent spirit, or a wanton contempt of legal authority; from a blind and factious attachment to particular persons or parties; or from a selfish rapacious

70


disposition, and a desire to turn public confusion to private profit.” You should rather act, he tells them, “from a concern for the interest of your country, and the safety of yourselves and your posterity” (Dominion 551). And Americans must be prudent as well as just in their conduct, not allowing unity to be broken, resolute in adherence to duty, and undaunted by setbacks. In his evocation of duty and principle Witherspoon recalls the Aristotelian notion of prudence as the application of right principles to the circumstances. People of faith should not hesitate to make such applications forcefully. Trusting in Providence does not imply passivity or blind faith. “The blessing of God,” the preacher says, “is only to be looked for by those who are not wanting in the discharge of their own duty. I would neither have you to trust in an arm of flesh, nor sit with folded hands and expect that miracles should be wrought in your defence—this is a sin which is in scripture stiled tempting God” (Dominion 552–53).

Common Sense and Christianity Witherspoon’s case highlights something not yet considered in our analysis. His Dominion is straightforwardly Christian, and his fusion of common sense and Christian faith is an instance of the larger convergence of Christianity and the Greek-inspired common sense tradition, a merger whose significance can hardly be overstated. Toynbee has called Christianity the chrysalis of Western civilization.13 It would be closer to the truth to say that Christian common sense was the chrysalis. One might go even further and say Christian common sense was for a long time the very substance of Western civilization, its civilizing force. Witherspoon in his sermons touches indirectly a dimension of common sense or nous that has no part in Thomas Reid’s analysis, but that is even more profound and more basic to human formation than the intuition of first principles. This is the noetic grasp of the ground of existence. Plato and Aristotle had a sense of it, but its full significance became apparent only with the advent of Christianity. Plato symbolized the apprehension of the ground in terms of the Form of the Good that grounds all goodness and even all being, perceived by nous only after being mysteriously broken from captivity to darkening passions and pulled into a questing ascent beyond its old world of illusions and half-truths. The Christians described this noetic awakening in terms of faith. The classic formulation given in Hebrews 11:1 is that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is a spiritual substance, not a mere feeling but a Something There, the experience of which awakens hope


71

in a higher Good. The faith experience itself is the evidence that the Good is there to be found. The substance of faith may be described as a divine-human encounter, but no verbal formulation can do justice to the phenomenon. “The divine” itself is a symbol whose meaning can never adequately be grasped. But as with Reid’s mysterious “cause,” we know what we mean by it. This will be hard for many readers to assimilate. Few things are taken less seriously by contemporary intellectuals than faith. Those who have not abandoned reason for feeling will still tend to resist the notion that reason and faith can be associated modes of consciousness. Part of the difficulty is that “faith” is so closely identified for most with adherence to one or another set of religious doctrines that in the end have, or seem to them to have, no solid rational support. But the faith experience just spoken of is predoctrinal, antecedent to any verbal symbolizations, to say nothing of hardened dogmatic creeds, and its rational basis is intuitive rather than argumentative. We fail to see the connection between faith and reason because we forget the intuitive dimension of reason. Faith as described in Hebrews is only a particular kind of rational intuition.14 If this analysis is correct, it helps to make sense of Socrates’ description of philosophy and philosophic ignorance in Plato’s Apology. We don’t search for ultimate meaning, for the truth of what’s most important, because we have no knowledge of it—but because we don’t understand what we know. The nature of the philosophic quest is clearer in Plato’s Meno (79c–86e), where the goal of the quest is described as both known and not known, known in the sense that we know something’s there, not known in that we haven’t yet fully grasped it. This looks very much like a quest of faith, a going out without knowing the destination but with a grounded conviction that the trip will lead somewhere. Philosophy cannot get off the ground without a faith that truth is discoverable. The Christian symbol “faith” seems closely aligned to Plato’s notion, expressed in The Meno, of a kinship with nature, the experience of which engenders trust. This trust in the intuition of that kinship is the core of the common sense attitude. The significance of the noetic grasp of higher being for the Western common sense tradition is threefold. First, it gives some sense, however dim, of the reason of our intuitions, of the Logos of things, in light of which our intuitional nature becomes intelligible. Second, the quest for higher being reveals the dynamic quality of nous, showing it to be not static but active. Nous moves. Understanding this is necessary for grasping the historical dimension of common sense and the part of common sense in the process of civilization. Plato indicated the basic elements of the process and of its undoing in Books 7–9 of The Republic. The civilizing effect, he suggested, comes from the restraint of the lower passions in order to maintain a living connection with the Good, and the right ordering of values that comes from understanding which good is the

72


highest. Third, it points, to use William James’s formulation (VRE 302), to the “noetic quality” of religious experience of the more profound sort, or to the religious quality of noesis. Witherspoon describes the faith experience in the terms of his day, but what he describes is recognizably the same phenomenon as just outlined. In a sermon called The Object of a Christian’s Desire in Religious Worship he says, “true piety is the same in substance in all ages, and points at one thing as its centre and its rest, the knowledge and enjoyment of God” (WJW 2:9). By this he does not mean merely an intellectual appreciation of God’s nature but an experience of his “presence” (WJW 2:13), a “real, inward, and sensible communion with God.” “The real and proper knowledge of the glory of God,” he explains, “is by inward and spiritual illumination. . . . It is one thing to think, and speak, and reason on the perfections of God, as an object of science, and another to glorify him as God, or to have a deep and awful impression of him upon our hearts. Real believers will know this by experience. A discovery of the glory of God, is not to inform them of a truth which they never heard before, but to give lively and penetrating views of the meaning and importance of those truths which they had, perhaps, heard and spoken times without number” (WJW 2:10, 12). The consequences for life are profound. By this divine light everything is illuminated, not least the nature of man. Somehow, a great hidden need is uncovered, and those who know the experience begin to understand that “man was made for living upon God” (WJW 2:15). This sense of religion—“vital religion” Witherspoon liked to call it—was widespread in founding America, a lingering effect of the country’s religious origins and of the Great Awakenings that had shaken it just decades prior. This sense of religion lingers still today in American churches, confounding the intellectuals here and abroad who expected modern man to get past all that kind of thing. In describing the experience Witherspoon again expresses a quinâ•‚ tessentially American perspective and at the same time defines an experience recognizable to seekers and mystics everywhere.

Common Sense Moral Philosophy Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy are not explicitly framed in terms of common sense, but in form and substance the theory described is a common sense scheme. Patently, moral understanding is for Witherspoon a function of common sense, and he sees moral rationality in distinctly Scottish realist terms as a product of intuition and the principles drawn from intuition. He accepts Francis Hutcheson’s view that all moral understanding depends on perception of moral qualities in moral agents. You see the moral quality of human intentions as indicated by words and actions. Simultaneously you recognize certain


73

moral relations involved. Reflection on the moral qualities and relations leads to a further intuition of principles and rules that should guide will and behavior. Where Witherspoon diverges from Hutcheson, he does so in the manner of Thomas Reid, emphasizing more than Hutcheson the element of rational judgment in moral perceptions and determinations. In particular, and in contrast to Hutcheson, Witherspoon stresses the element of obligation as distinct from interest in our moral judgments. Hutcheson, like Plato and Aristotle, makes the good in the sense of what’s good for us the criterion of right. The first principle of morality, Hutcheson says, is “benevolence” or love, and to love someone is to seek and pursue his or her good and true interest. Stated thus, Witherspoon would not dispute the point, but it is not, he thinks, the whole truth. The decisive point for Witherspoon is that duty is primary, and interest secondary, in specifically moral judgments concerning both what is moral and what implications to draw from basic moral intuitions. To emphasize interest, as Hutcheson and the classic Greek philosophers do, obscures the wrongness of not seeking the good. They make it seem as though neglecting or turning away from the good is merely unwise rather than wicked, a mere mistake, never a willful rejection of the higher good. In this, ironically, they abandon rationality, for common sense clearly tells that wrongdoing is more than a mistake. In fact, the wrongness of wrongdoing is precisely in the fact that it is not a mistake, that it involves conscious violence against or neglect of a higher good for the sake of some immediate gratification. In recognizing this, Witherspoon shows himself true to a key Christian insight, expressed in the concept of “sin,” one of Christianity’s greatest contributions to the support of common sense. This is not to suggest that duty is for Witherspoon the highest motivation for doing good. As Hutcheson said, love is. Indeed, for Witherspoon the heart of all duty is love, and duty is not truly done without it. But he thinks it important to recognize the imperative of love, as opposed to merely its desirability, that the imperatives are what we see most immediately in moral intuition, and that consideration of the imperatives reveals the standards of right more clearly than considerations of happiness alone. Consistent with the Aristotelian model, Witherspoon derives his ethics from human nature, and his politics from his ethics. In the first of his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Witherspoon defines “moral philosophy” as “that branch of Science which treats of the principles and laws of Duty or Morals.”15 It is the “superior science” to which all other sciences (including even mathematics and natural science) are “but hand-maids” (LMP 186) and includes under its rubric both ethics and politics. At its most fundamental level, moral philosophy is really “nothing else but the knowledge of human nature” (LMP 64). Duty is subjection to “some law [or] to some superior, to whom we are accountable,”

74


and the “principles of duty . . . must be drawn from the nature of man. That is to say, if we can discover how his Maker formed him, or for what he intended him, that certainly is what [he] ought to be” (LMP 91, 66).16 How can we discover this? Witherspoon’s presentation of the problem implies a certain preexisting knowledge: there could be no concept of “man” or “duty” or a “Maker” to whom the duty is owed were there not already some sense of the matter. If there is knowledge at the outset of the inquiry, even if only of forms in the dark, it makes no sense epistemologically, like the skeptic, to pretend sheer ignorance. But if we in some sense know, it is a meager kind of knowledge. We would be wise, then, to proceed cautiously. Common sense philosophy has historically always been concerned with exploring a middle way between skepticism and dogmatism, and Witherspoon’s version is no exception. Skepticism in his day was represented most formidably by David Hume. The skeptic denies the knowledge we have and so earns our distrust. Following his lead would be worse than the blind chasing the blind. Hume denies we have knowledge of spiritual things, but what are these “perceptions” he admits we know? And what does the perceiving? And can he affirm physical reality any more than spiritual? The very concept “real” seems to lose intelligibility in his philosophy. Philosophic dogmatism in Witherspoon’s day took the shape of Bishop George Berkeley’s “immaterialism” or spiritualism, an early form of idealism that made the universe a constellation of ideas in the minds of its inhabitants. But the idealist, too, denies what we know, and know even better than spirit, for that the physical world is not merely in our heads is as plain as anything can be. In the Lectures Witherspoon tries to forge a via media between skepticism and idealism, leading him, with respect to human nature, to reaffirm the mind’s spiritual quality and capacity to know truth, on the one hand, and its rootedness in the body and the material world on the other.17 Reducing man to his simplest elements, then, he “is a compound of body and spirit” (LMP 70; Witherspoon uses “spirit” interchangeably with “mind” and “soul”). This was a contested point even before Hume. Hobbes had already reduced man to an organic machine. For him nature, human nature included, was nothing more than matter-in-motion.18 Locke through his sensationalist epistemology had made questionable the possibility of knowing spiritual things, provoking a heroic but unsuccessful effort by Berkeley to restore “spiritual substance” to the theoretic centrality it assumed in premodern Christian philosophy.19 Witherspoon does not pretend to understand the spiritual dimension—he admits “we cannot at present form any complete or adequate ideas of a spirit.”20 But he thinks that “mind or intelligence must be a substance altogether distinct


75

from matter,” given that “all the known properties of matter are incapable of producing thought” (LMP 98). This last is a puzzle that philosophy and science have to this day been unable to solve.21 But if body and spirit are distinct, he says, they are connected. We may not be able to explain the connection, but we know it by experience. Witherspoon expressly rejects attempts (like those of Descartes and Kant) to separate starkly the physical and spiritual parts of man. “Body and spirit,” whatever they are in substance, self-evidently “have a great reciprocal influence one upon another” functionally. The body influences “the temper and disposition of the soul,” and the soul impacts “the state and habit of the body” (LMP 70). All these facts and distinctions are to Witherspoon perfectly self-evident, though spirit, body, and the nature of their connection remain in themselves utterly mysterious. This thing called “spirit,” he later implies, is the substance of man socially as well as personally. Politics deals primarily with outward behavior, but its quality is determined by the spiritual condition of those who make up society, for no political system can facilitate a good life for them if they lack the inward integrity to carry out their duties and respect the rights of others (see below). Religion, as Witherspoon often stressed, has a decisive role to play here. “[T]rue religion” (presumably he means the kind that flows from the faith experience described above) is the only sure ground of good morals.22 In expressing this view, Witherspoon was preaching to the choir. The assumption was commonplace among his countrymen—commonsensical. The Father of the Country himself had said it.23 John Adams expressed the point poignantly in relation to the American regime: “We [having a republic] have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”24 Church and state were to be kept strictly separate, and sectarian appeals were to be avoided in political debate (Witherspoon fiercely advocated these points, and acted accordingly), but on a deeper level, if religion remained uncorrupted by political power and wealth, it was the essential ground of social moral formation. As Witherspoon expresses it in Lecture 14, “to promote true religion is the best, and most effectual way of making a virtuous and regular people. Love to God, and love to man, is the substance of religion; when these prevail, civil laws will have little to do” (LMP 159). If moral formation were a simple natural development, it might be an easy process. But it is not an easy process, Witherspoon stresses, because man is deformed by corruption, and this is indeed why religion is needed to bring the process along. We don’t have to look to the Bible to see the deformity; we can find it easily, our preacher-scholar notes in Man in His Natural State, in “the

76


visible state of the world, and our experience.” He surveys the evidence: the difficulty of raising a child well and the fact that wrongdoing does not need to be taught but requires only “license” to learn it; the endless stories about the vicious behavior and attitudes of others and the testimony of conscience about one’s own; the misery so pervasive in the human experience, not least from the “pernicious effects” of immorality; the difficulty of overcoming the propensity to evil even for the religiously committed; the universal practice among ancient peoples of offering sacrifices to propitiate the higher powers, and the “natural terror and fear, with which men are possest of the presence of God, or any remarkable token of his power, which is an indication of guilt, or an apprehension of wrath” (WJW 2:162–66). The empirical evidence for sin and its consequences is overwhelming. It would be a mistake, however, despite its prevalence, to take corruption as the standard of normality. Because of “the depravity and corruption of our nature,” Witherspoon says, we are “apt” to take “many things as dictates of human nature, which are in reality propensities of nature in its present state, but at the same time the fruit and evidence of its departure from its original purity” (LMP 66).25 The very notion that man is corrupt, that he is not what he should be, suggests a standard by which he may be judged and against which he falls short. A common theme in the philosophy of man in Witherspoon’s day, derived most directly from Hobbes but appearing as early as Machiavelli, was that man’s selfishness is what is most basic to his nature and is therefore the proper foundation for a theory of politics. But the lives of good men prove the possibility of overcoming selfishness; and aiming high, though we fall short of the standard, we end up better than if we had not aimed at all. Witherspoon would have agreed with Aristotle: The individual and the statesman should take their moral and political bearings from the uncorrupted form rather than from the corrupted if they are to reach the best life possible in the circumstances. What is the form of man? Body and spirit, as noted, but the spiritual side is the distinctly human element. Following the classic Christian thinkers, Witherspoon finds three basic “faculties” of soul or “mind”: “the understanding, the will, and the affections.” These faculties are not discrete, insular parts of the mind but rather distinct “qualities” of the one substance, “different ways of exerting the same simple principle. It is the soul or mind that understands, wills, or is affected with pleasure or pain.” This is an important point, as the traditional notion of the soul defended by the Scottish realists is often caricatured. “Faculty psychology,” at least Witherspoon’s version of it, does not imply separate mental compartments. The understanding “seems to have truth for its object”; its function is, to put it precisely, “the discovering of things as they really are in themselves, and in their natural relations one to another” (LMP 71).


77

The acts of will can be reduced to “desire and aversion, or in other words, chusing [sic] and refusing,” and the function of the will seems to be to choose the true and the good, or the best of available alternatives, and to refuse the false and bad. Affections are “strong propensities, implanted in our nature, which of themselves contribute not a little to bias the judgment, or incline the will,” and their appropriate function, implicitly, is to support judgment and will in favoring what’s right and best (LMP 72). Witherspoon’s description implies that (just as Plato and Aristotle had averred) misplaced affections are the source of human corruption—clouding the understanding, misdirecting the will, in short, undermining the normal functioning of the soul. Righting them would then be key to a man’s reformation. The most critical feature of the mind as far as ethics and politics are concerned, Witherspoon says, is the “moral sense.” Following Hutcheson, he speaks of the moral capacity as a kind of “internal sense” that “intimates and enforces duty, previous to all reasoning.” The moral sense is analogous to “external” senses (sight, smell, touch, and so on) in that, like them, it grasps its objects immediately and spontaneously. The moral sense is, to be specific, “a sense and perception of moral excellence, and our obligation to conform ourselves to it in our conduct,” and is “precisely the same thing with what, in scripture and common language, we call conscience . . . the law which our Maker has written upon our hearts” (LMP 78). Conscience, it seems, points to a higher law and a higher lawgiver. The sense of this law, Witherspoon suggests, is brought home to us most powerfully and lastingly through the “deep and awful impression” of divine excellence and judgment we have sometimes in a quiet or solemn moment, when we know by conscience what is most good and how we stand in light of it (WJW 2:12).26 The formulation here is significant: the moral sense “intimates and enforces duty previous to all reasoning.” This means that moral meaning is not achieved but rather clarified through reasoning. Moral reasoning and moral deliberation, Witherspoon’s account implies, are essentially struggles to make sense of the judgments of conscience. The concern to be moral in the first place, the conviction to adhere to the right and the good, would not exist apart from its intimations and commands. To say moral sense precedes reasoning, however (the point cannot be overstressed), is not to say it is irrational. The conscience seems to be a function of the understanding rather than of the will or the affections. In fact, although he does not apply the terminology, the moral sense as Witherspoon describes it is clearly noetic, a function of rational intuition, in the style of Reid’s common sense.27 The sense of obligation inherent in the moral sense is not to be confused with the “sense of honor and shame.” While this latter may support virtue, it

78


is no guarantor of it, because others may be mistaken in their sentiments and views on what is, in fact, blameworthy or praiseworthy (LMP 79).28 Conversely, the obligation of conscience, “the law which our Maker has written on our hearts,” is authoritative and should be obeyed even at the cost of public disapprobation. This law is the natural law, the law of human nature, adherence to which makes man what his Maker intended. In general form, Witherspoon’s understanding of conscience expressed here, with its sense of obligation or duty to God, was shared by the leading American founders and is representative of general American understanding. Given the modern obsession with “rights talk” this emphasis on duty might seem counterâ•‚ intuitive, but in light of the “Protestant work ethic” and our Puritan origins it should not be surprising that the sense of higher obligation has exerted a powerful influence and, though considerably weakened, continues with some force outside the circles of the secular elite. Regarding the founding generation, Jefferson again is illustrative. He described the function of conscience various places in similar terms, notably his 1787 letter to Peter Carr. As secretary of state he asserted, in his 1793 “Opinion on French Treaties,” that “the moral law of our nature . . . [is] the moral law to which man has been subjected by his Creator, and of which his feelings or conscience, as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him.” His suggestion in the Declaration of a connection between the will of the Maker, natural law, and natural rights was apparently not anomalous, for he goes on in this same paper to say, “Questions of natural right are triable [sic] by their conformity with the moral sense and reason.”29 Notably, Jefferson’s conception of the moral sense limned here is thoroughly and probably consciously Scottish realist. Lord Kames, a leader of the school, seems to have been a primary influence on Jefferson’s thinking on the matter.30 Jefferson was joined in these sentiments, it appears, by every one of the founding philosophers. A few examples: John Adams wrote to him that “the most abandoned scoundrel that ever existed, never yet wholly extinguished his conscience, and while conscience remains there is some religion.”31 Washington had capped his “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior” with the admonition “Labor to keep alive in your breast the little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”32 Hamilton, in “The Farmer Refuted,” intimated the equivalent of conscience—a “rational faculty” that discerns duties—as the register of the “law of nature” upon which “depend the natural rights of mankind.”33 James Wilson, the other great Scottish founder (in addition to Witherspoon), expounded the moral sense at length along Witherspoonian lines in his Lectures on Law, with explicit appeals to Reid and, like Jefferson, made it the root of natural law.34 It seems likely that Witherspoon’s protégé Madison understood


79

conscience, the freedom of which he made the first of all our rights, in much the same way as his old master.35 If this was the perspective of the founding elite, it was much more that of the regular folk of the time, most of whom relied heavily on their pastors and priests for guidance in worldly affairs as much as in spiritual, as Alice Baldwin and others have so ably shown.36 Few themes were so central in the sermon literature of those days as duty to God, neighbor, and country.37

Ethics Ethics concerns moral principles and their application, Witherspoon suggests, and he understands moral principles as Reid does. Later in the Lectures he cites Reid’s discovery of “certain first principles or dictates of common sense, which are either simple perceptions, or seen with intuitive evidence. These are the foundation of all reasoning, and without them, to reason is a word without a meaning. They can no more be proved than you can prove an axiom in mathematical science” (LMP 97). Moral first principles, then, would be a variety of common sense principles. Witherspoon takes some care in the Lectures to show exactly how they are derived. As indicated, the fundamental moral concern is to understand our obligations. Our great obligation is to conform ourselves to the higher law somehow grasped in the mind’s eye, but what are the ramifications of that law? What more specific obligations does it entail? Discovering these obligations, Witherspoon suggests, will be decisive for determining our moral principles. One way often taken to understand the natural law, he notes, “is to consider what indications we have from our nature of the way that leads to the truest happiness.” Our nature, as Hutcheson rightly said, indicates three possible paths to human happiness: (1) sensual pleasure, (2) the delights of the intellect and imagination, and (3) the delight in “moral excellence” as revealed in the dictates of conscience. Witherspoon agrees with Hutcheson that the last is the superior kind of pleasure, “being most noble, pure, and durable” (LMP 79), and therefore that the way leading to the truest happiness is a life of contemplating and acting in accord with moral excellence.38 He finds unconvincing, however, Hutcheson’s thesis that our natural delight in moral excellence is the essence of moral sense.39 It seems to Witherspoon: the moral sense carries a good deal more in it than merely an approbation of a certain class of actions as beautiful, praiseworthy, or delightful. . . . The moral sense implies also a sense of obligation, that such and such things are right and others wrong; that we are bound in duty to the one, and that our conduct is

80


hateful, blamable, and deserving of punishment, if we do the contrary; and there is also in the moral sense or conscience, an apprehension or belief that reward and punishment will follow, according as we shall act in the one way, or in the other. (LMP 80)

Hutcheson’s notion of moral approbation as delight in moral excellence or Hume’s “agreeable feeling” cannot be adequate. However elegant it may be from a speculative standpoint to make happiness the sole motivation of right behavior, the empirical fact is that we are usually and more reliably moved to moral conduct by a sense of duty, a sense that we will be unworthy if we do otherwise. Key to understanding the obligation of duty, Witherspoon thinks, is recognizing the “sanction” implied in moral judgments. Ingredient in our awareness of obligation is a “sense of self-approbation and remorse,” and the approvals and condemnations we perceive when embracing or violating our obligations are what show us to be under a higher law—and one with teeth.40 More precisely, conscience intimates “a natural sense of dependence” and “belief of a Divine Being” who is “not only . . . our Maker, preserver and benefactor, but . . . our righteous governor and supreme judge.” The obligation of duty ultimately rests in “the being and perfections of God,” which excite admiration and urge recognition and honor by their intrinsic excellence (LMP 92). The other side of the coin, however, is that refusing to recognize and honor them has serious consequences: there is a sense, too, that this all-perfect being rightfully makes demands of us and will hold us to account (LMP 92–93). These experiences of conviction, dependence, and belief in ultimate accountability suggest the higher law is not merely an abstract principle but a living presence in the soul. Witherspoon does not want, Kant-like, to remove considerations of happiness from ethical theory altogether—this too would be unfaithful to the facts of human nature—but rather to clarify issues and establish priorities. To live well we need a “rule by which [to] try every disputed practice,” a standard (LMP 83). The rule, Witherspoon has suggested, is human nature at its best, or to put it another way, the rule is virtue. But what does virtue consist of? The leading moral systems of Witherspoon’s day located the foundation of virtue either in the will of God, “the reason and nature of things,” the public interest, or private interest. Witherspoon briefly evaluates the adequacy of each as a foundation and, evincing a common sense balance and resistance to formulaic dogmatism, judges that “there is something true in every one of them” but that “they may be easily pushed to an error by excess” (LMP 85–86). His conclusion is that “we ought to take the rule of our duty from conscience enlightened by reason, experience, and every way by which we can be supposed to learn


81

the will of our Maker, and his intention in creating us such as we are. And we ought to believe that it is as deeply founded as the nature of God himself, being a transcript of his moral excellence, and that it is productive of the greatest good” (LMP 87).41 Witherspoon’s conclusion here suggests that conscience needs help in clarifying the right way of life. Conscience, as the “transcript” of God’s character, is the authoritative rule of our duty, but we do not always see its dictates squarely, so that it needs further illumination. Reasoning about our nature helps us to see it for what it is, to see in it the evidences of design, to trace its outlines, to understand how the human being is meant to function in light of it. Experience—our own and that of others, as learned through observation, reading, and other forms of testimony—shows us that we are often misled in our moral choices by strong desires, uncontrolled passions, bad advice, or distorted thinking. Revelation adds further light. Through all of those means, the obligation felt by the moral sense takes shape and meaning, the vaguely discerned becomes sharper and surer. How do public and private interests factor in? Each of them, properly understood, is inseparable from duty and implied in the obligation to virtue. Duty “implies that we are under some law, or subject to some superior, to whom we are accountable.” True interest, the deeper kind, “implies that nature points [virtue] out to us as our own greatest happiness” (LMP 91), and our happiness as Aristotle said is complete only in community. However, the nature of the case, Witherspoon suggests, requires a ranking of obligations. Duty must come first, then the public interest, and then the private. The ranking does not imply opposition. The public interest and private interest are harmonious and should not be opposed any more than interest should be opposed to duty. In particular, contra Bernard Mandeville (author of Fable of the Bees), the public interest neither necessitates nor justifies private vice.42 It is true, as Hutcheson says, that one’s narrow personal concerns must sometimes be sacrificed to the public interest, but in such cases the real private interest is the public interest and the individual would not be serving his own true good, his eternal good, to do otherwise. Even so, the common good cannot be, as Hutcheson suggests, the only moral standard. “To make the good of the whole our immediate principle of action,” Witherspoon says, “is putting ourselves in God’s place, and actually superseding the necessity and use of the particular principles of duty which he hath impressed upon the conscience” (LMP 87). It is foolish and arrogant to think we can understand the dynamics of the public interest well enough to try to regulate all behavior by this principle. In thinking virtuous rulers could by themselves succeed in molding society after the “divine pattern,” Witherspoon would say, Plato was simply wrong.43 Certainly we should pursue the common

82


good as far as it can be known, but duty, being more recognizable, must remain the immediate rule of conduct. The same indeed may be said of private interest: we do not know what’s good for us well enough to regulate ourselves solely by that standard. In personal and social matters alike, conscience is the surest guide. But again, we should not make a false opposition. The priority of duty does not diminish the value of interest. Again, interest and duty are inseparably tied. The expectation of rewards and punishments inherent in the sense of duty, for example, necessarily raises a concern for our own good; conversely, awareness of the good awakens a duty as well as a desire to pursue it. Against Shaftesbury’s claim that consideration of rewards and punishments reduces virtuous living to a “mercenary” enterprise, Witherspoon insists that anticipation of rewards and punishments provides an important “secondary motive” to virtue. After a sense of virtue’s intrinsic excellence and the sense of duty this evokes, this “secondary motive” to virtue is “absolutely necessary to reclaim men from vice and impiety” and to encourage them in the hope of the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Of course, the benefits of virtue are not restricted to the afterlife: there is a “manifest tendency of a virtuous conduct to promote even our present happiness” (LMP 92–93). For Witherspoon, the obligation of virtue in the end includes all the following: “A sense of its own intrinsic excellence—of its happy consequences in the present life—a sense of duty and subjection to the Supreme Being—and a hope of future happiness, and fear of future misery from his decision” (LMP 94). These are the grounds of the principles that constitute the natural law and the base of any adequate ethics. Witherspoon does not in fact lay out the principles explicitly, proceeding instead directly to precepts and classes of duty. We may infer from his account, however, that the ethical first principles would be essentially AristotelianChristian. All human beings aim at the good; the human good is to function as designed; men are designed for loving others and enjoying God and his creation; their ultimate end is eternal, and love and happiness are finally complete in the life beyond this life; so men should live by love and in line with their natural and eternal ends. As all the foregoing suggests, these natural law principles are found out, and can only be found out, through experience. Common sense experience—that sense of excellence, consequences, and duty, enlightened by the further experiences of reasoning and inspiration—reveals them. Apart from this experience the natural law is unintelligible. Considered purely in the abstract, natural law cannot move us, and if always considered abstractly it ceases first to command respect, then even belief. Attention must be paid to the intuitions themselves. Severed from these, even the best reasoning will lead us astray.44


83

The Fundamental Human Duties Ethics for Witherspoon, again, is about moral principles and their application. Application, his prior analysis suggests, involves recognizing and acting on the particular duties implied by—or rather seen in—our situation. Following Hutcheson again, Witherspoon considers the particular human duties in light of the fundamental “states of man,” subsumable under the two general categories of “natural” and “adventitious.” The ethical imperatives of natural states are “necessary and universal,” and they apply to all, everywhere, at all times, while those of adventitious states apply only in special circumstances (LMP 95). Implicitly, the situation of man shows him to be part of a web of moral relations. Human ethics are not based solely on man’s inward structure but also on his relation to the larger reality in which he participates, and while some relations in the moral universe are permanent, others are shifting. To live rightly, man must both respect the first kind and adjust appropriately to the last. The fundamental human relations, Witherspoon tells us, are man’s relations to God, to his fellow man, and with himself, and he correspondingly classes our basic duties as those to God, to others, and to self.45 Together, the sense of these duties gives us a concrete sense of the natural law. Witherspoon’s treatment of them also gives a concrete sense of founding Americans’ understanding of higher law and the duties we owe. The duties to God and others are comprehensible in terms of their respective claims on us. Appropriately enough, Witherspoon takes God’s claims first. The duties to God are founded on his status as Creator, his Providence, and his moral “perfections.” As God is our Maker and Preserver, we owe him gratitude and service. As he is perfectly wise, just, and good, he deserves our allegiance from sheer merit. The duty to God in fact encompasses “every branch of moral duty to our neighbor and ourselves, as well as to God. . . . Every good action,” Witherspoon explains, “is an act of obedience to God,” because God is the source of goodness and the standard of right. In this sense, God himself is the law to us (LMP 104). There are “special” duties to God, owed immediately to him, some “internal” and some “external.” The basic internal duties, Witherspoon says, are “love, fear, and trust” (LMP 104). The first involves both “a disinterested love of God” for who he is and a “desire” for him as the source of good and the one above all whose favor is meaningful (LMP 104–5). The fear we owe God is not a “servile fear” of divine punishment, which is only appropriate for those living in defiance of God, but a “veneration” of divine perfection and greatness. Trust is “a continual dependence on God for every thing we need, together with an approbation of, and absolute resignation to, his providence.” Together, these

84


seem to describe the soul or spirit rightly oriented to God. On the other hand, the external special duties to God include “all proper and natural expressions of the internal sentiments,” including prayer and, notably, “public and social worship” (LMP 105). As some of his sermons, essays, and speeches indicate, for Witherspoon both the internal and external special duties to God are foundational for sound political order. Private prayer and churchgoing maintain the vital religion that grounds morality. Public calls to worship and prayer provide chances for expressions of that love, fear, and trust just mentioned by the people at large. This view of the political significance of religion gives us our first indication of founding Americans’ ideas of particular duties. We have already noted the common sense of the time that religious conviction was the ground of good morals. What is less appreciated today is that Americans then largely took for granted that religion’s work would not be confined to church and study. The ubiquity of private observance was matched by pervasive public expression, though shorn in public of sectarian embellishments. The Continental Congress, for instance, made several calls for national prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving in the course of the Revolutionary War, and some of those calls were written by Witherspoon himself.46 In fact, similar events of public devotion had been a long and venerable practice in America and would continue long after the war was over. From the early seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, American colonial and state governments and the national government, too, on officially sanctioned days of prayer, election days, and commemorations, commissioned select clergymen to speak on what the Bible might say to the subject at hand.47 Witherspoon’s own wartime Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men and a later sermon Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving after Peace, after cessation of hostilities with Britain in 1781 (WJW 3:84), are examples of the genre. These “political sermons,” as they have come to be called—both Witherspoon’s and many others’—played an important role in shaping American public opinion for a full two centuries, as a growing contemporary literature tells us.48 The second great class of duties is man’s duties to man. In general, says Witherspoon, the duty to man “may be reduced to a short sum, by ascending [after Reid’s fashion, presumably] to its principle. Love to others, sincere and active, is the sum of our duty. Benevolence,” he reminds us, “ought not to be considered [with Hutcheson] as the whole of virtue, but it certainly is the principle and sum of that branch of duty which regards others” (LMP 109). This love to others, to be specific, “ought to have for its object their greatest and best interest and therefore implies wishing and doing them good in soul and body” (LMP 110).49 The application of this general principle to particular duties seems to Witherspoon to require an examination of “the rights or claims that one man has


85

upon another,” and his account of the relation of rights and duties gives another clue about American moral understanding. Witherspoon stresses, as Reid did, that “rights and obligations are correlative terms. Whatever others have a just right or title to claim from me, that is my duty, or what I am obliged to do to them” (LMP 110). Some contemporary claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Witherspoon’s countrymen generally took this correspondence of rights and duties as given, as recent scholarship and comments above by founding figures as diverse as Hamilton and Jefferson suggest.50 His elaboration of the point is revealing: Right in general may be reduced, as to its source, to the supreme law of moral duty; for whatever men are in duty obliged to do, that they have a claim to, and other men are considered as under an obligation to permit them. Again, as our own happiness is a lawful object or end, we are supposed to have each a right to prosecute this; but as our prosecutions may interfere, we limit each other’s rights; and a man is said to have a right or power to promote his own happiness by those means which are not in themselves criminal or injurious to others. (LMP 110)

As Abraham Lincoln was later to observe, one “cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”51 The “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness come to light as rights to receive just treatment from others, implying a duty to treat them likewise.52 Witherspoon’s extended treatment of rights further illuminates. Having defined “rights” in general, he presents, after Hutcheson’s example, several overlapping categories of rights we have a duty to respect in others.53 The first classification is “natural or acquired” rights, corresponding, apparently, to the “natural” and “adventitious” states of man. “Natural rights,” Witherspoon explains, “are such as are essential to man, and universal—acquired are those that are the fruits of industry, the effects of accident or conquest.” The second class of rights are “perfect and imperfect” rights, the former being rights so critical to social order or personal well-being that “we may make use of force to obtain them when they are denied us,” and the latter “such as we may demand, and others ought to give us,” but which do not justify the use of force to guarantee (LMP 110). Self-preservation is an example of a perfect right, gratitude in return for a favor of an imperfect right (LMP 110–11). “Alienable and inalienable” rights comprise the third category. Alienable rights “we may, according to justice and prudence, surrender or give up by our own act; the others we may not.” One may rightly surrender his “goods, lands, money” for his own good and the good of others. He may also, for the common good, give up some measure of self-defense and the handling of property disputes for the

86


greater protection of all through the more powerful and impartial apparatus of the state.54 One either cannot or should not, however, surrender the “right to judge for himself in all matters of religion” or renounce the claim to life, liberty, and property altogether. Finally, rights may be grouped according to their object: those pertaining to one’s own person and actions are called “liberty”; to personal possessions “property”; over the persons and actions of others “authority.” There are also rights “in the things which are the property of others”: contract rights (LMP 111). The inclusion of the imperfect rights in Hutcheson and Witherspoon’s theory of rights sets it apart from Locke’s. As we might say today, their view is more “communitarian” than his. Locke’s rights, as expressed in his Two Treatises of Government, imply primarily (some might say only) negative duties, duties not to interfere with others. Imperfect rights, in contrast, correlate to positive duties, requiring action on others’ behalf. Witherspoon characterizes the negative duties in terms of “justice,” and the positive ones in terms of “mercy.” He earlier defined justice in the broadest sense as “an invariable determination to render to all their due” (LMP 102). He now describes justice more narrowly as “giving or permitting others to enjoy whatever they have a perfect right to—and making such an use of our own rights as not to encroach on the rights of others” (LMP 111–12); and mercy as “the exercise of the benevolent principle in general, and of the several particular kind affections,” springing from “a readiness to do all the good offices to others that they stand in need of, and are in our power.”55 Claims of mercy, Witherspoon explains, generally “belong to the class of imperfect rights, which are strongly binding upon the conscience, and absolutely necessary to the subsistence of human society; yet such as cannot be enforced with rigor and precision by human laws” (LMP 112). Mercy, it appears, completes justice by reaching to those relations, attitudes, and actions that human laws cannot adequately address.56 This idea of mercy and its social significance was familiar to Americans of the founding period through Christianity and the obligation to show mercy (as well as justice) Christianity assumed. Moreover, the founders would not have lost sight of positive obligations when they turned to think on rights, familiar with and respectful as most of them were toward the rights theories of Grotius and Hutcheson that included the “imperfect” rights in their schemes. The suspicion lurks that the importance of duty in the founders’ moral and political outlook has been greatly underestimated. The tendency of modern scholarship is to focus on early thinking about rights as a forerunner to our own, and perhaps this focus has tended to obscure the other side of their moral universe. The last great class of duties consists of the duties to self, a “branch of duty,” Witherspoon insists, “as real and as much founded in the moral principle,


87

as any of the former.” His explanation of the duty to self sheds still further light on the American moral perspective. There are two varieties of it, he says: “self-government” and “self-interest.” Self-government involves keeping “our thoughts, desires and affections, in due moderation.” Moderation is transgressed when personal indulgence interferes with our duties to God, others, or ourselves (LMP 114). The duty of self-interest is generally the duty to seek our own good, in soul and body. With regard to the soul, it requires attention to our relation to God and winning his favor, and guarding against whatever may damage our “moral character, or religious hopes.” While the care of the soul takes priority, the care of the body is essential as well. In general, our duty to ourselves requires that we “take all proper methods to preserve and acquire the goods both of mind and body. . . . to acquire knowledge, to preserve health, reputation, possessions” (LMP 115). In context, the obligation to pursue the goods of the body is clearly not an endorsement of unlimited acquisition. The pursuit of bodily well-being is limited by the duty of self-government (to moderate our passions) and the larger duty to care for our souls, as well as to respect the rights of others and love them actively. Genuine self-interest as Witherspoon understands it is emphatically not selfish. This presentation again cuts against the caricature of early Americans as being narrowly self-interested and obsessed with money. In fact, a constant theme in the sermon literature of the time was warning against the temptations of “luxury,” and conspicuous consumption was widely frowned on, particularly in the Northeast, where capitalism is supposed to have run rampant.57 Calvinistic austerity continued to have its effect. It reminds us, too, that the political ideal of self-government was for Americans rooted in the notion of personal self-government, and that the practice of self-government on both levels, as the term implies, presupposed moral restraint.58 To the extent Americans did agree with Witherspoon on all these points of duty, he would have said, they agreed with common sense, for these duties are only what conscience tells us.

Political Theory Politics is for Witherspoon as for Aristotle, we noticed, simply an extension of ethics; it is, in his words, “but another and more complete view of the same things drawn out more fully, and applied to particular cases.” Political theory specifically concerns, he says, “the principles of social union, and the rules of duty in a state of society.” Witherspoon’s ethics aimed at the integrity of the person; his politics aims at the integrity of society. Social cohesion for him specially depends on moral order, and for this reason the civil law should aim ultimately at reinforcing the laws of conscience. As he puts it, “Political law is the authority of any society, stampt upon moral duty” (LMP 122). Conscience

88


as understood above, as common sense moral rationality, continues to be the ground of order. Since the good of society depends on a mutual observance of duty, establishing laws encouraging such observance and making them effective must be central political concerns.59 Like Locke, and like most eighteenth-century political theorists, Witherspoon tries to arrive at the “principles” upon which a “society is formed” by imaginatively considering what man would be like outside the “social state.” That is, he looks to the so-called state of nature. Comparing Hobbes’s view of the state of nature as a state of perpetual war of all against all with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s view that it is a “state of society,” that men are naturally drawn into society by their built-in social affections, Witherspoon again stakes out a middling position. He agrees with the latter two, and (though not explicitly) with Aristotle, “that the principles of our nature lead to society—that our happiness and the improvement of our powers are only to be had in society,” and going with them beyond Aristotle, “that in our nature, as it is the work of God, there is a real good-will and benevolence to others” (LMP 122). But he also accepts Hobbes’s argument, “that our nature as it is now, when free and independent, is prone to injury, and consequently to war . . . that in a state of natural liberty, there is no other way but force, for preserving security and repelling injury,” making “the inconveniences of the natural state” onerous. Even outside a formalized and adequate political order, then, man is sociable and drawn to live and commerce with others by natural social feeling and desire for personal improvement; at the same time, in his corrupted condition he has within him a countervailing tendency toward injustice, toward pursuing his own happiness (the baser sort) at the expense of the happiness and well-being of others. Hence, it is “equally true” “that nature prompts to society, and . . . that necessity and interest oblige us to it” (LMP 123). If politics extends the arc of duties, it also extends the arc of rights, and Witherspoon’s thinking on rights reaches maximal clarity in his further discussion of them here. Prior to political society, natural rights obtain: both “perfect” and “imperfect” rights can be found in the natural state. The perfect natural rights are the absolute foundation of political order; the imperfect rights point to its completion. The Lockean theory is recognizable in Witherspoon’s list of the perfect rights: (1.) a right to life. (2.) A right to employ [one’s] faculties and industry for his own use. (3.) A right to things that are common and necessary, as air, water, earth. (4.) A right to personal liberty. (5.) A power over his own life, not to throw it away unnecessarily, but for a good reason [such as in a just war]. (6.) A right of private judgment in matters of opinion. (7.) A right to associate, if he so incline,


89

with any person or persons, whom he can persuade (not force)—under this is contained the right to marriage. (8.) A right to character, that is to say, innocence (not fame). (LMP 123)

The list seems reducible to a general right to the free and just use of one’s mind and body. In any case, defending these rights justifies the use of force, within the bounds of prudence and due concern for the well-being of all involved. Witherspoon further reminds us that some natural liberties may in some degree be given up by consent for the sake of a greater good, and he suggests additionally that one can forfeit some or all of one’s natural liberties by inflicting criminal injury on others. Imperfect natural rights include the rights to “gratitude, compassion, mutual good offices.” Unlike perfect rights, which may in some cases be curtailed, the imperfect rights “must be the same in a natural and in a social state, because the very definition of an imperfect right is such as you cannot use force to obtain” (LMP 123). In sum, political society is “an association or compact of any number of persons, to deliver up or abridge some part of their natural rights, in order to have the strength of the united body, to protect the remaining, and to bestow others” (LMP 123). Political society, as Locke and the Declaration said, is established by contract, and its purpose is to protect natural rights. And Witherspoon with Locke and the founders made liberty the central right, “the end of the [social] union . . . as far as it is a blessing” (LMP 124). It is worth asking, Why is liberty so important? In what sense can liberty be said to be the good? If we could understand this, we would seem to get at the essence of the American character, the very core of American identity. Witherspoon again provides unusual insight. He says later that the value of liberty “chiefly consists in its tendency to put in motion all the human powers. Therefore it promotes industry, and in this respect happiness—produces every latent quality, and improves the human mind” (LMP 147). At stake, then, in the protection of liberty is nothing less than the maximizing of human potential. That qualification “as far as it is a blessing” is important: it points to the distinction, frequently made in the founding period, between liberty and license.60 Freedom is limited by justice and turned by mercy, and license is not liberty because it enslaves rather than liberates, creating a tyranny of the passions that destroys soul and body. If the “blessings of liberty” are the final end of the U.S. Constitution as its Preamble suggests, only the prior ends of union, justice, and peace make them possible. Witherspoon had said earlier that “reason teaches natural liberty, and common utility recommends it” (LMP 125). The dual impetus of reason and utility in political formation becomes a central theme in the remainder of the

90


Lectures. He consistently links “reason” to “nature” throughout, suggesting by contrast that he means “utility” to indicate the shifting artifices required for handling “adventitious” matters, to recall a prior term, although in another sense utilitarian calculation is natural.61 This dualism of reason and utility points to other dualisms in his moral philosophy that seem to run parallel, and considering them together helps connect his conception of human nature, his ethics, and his politics. Although we did not take notice of it before, in his account of the psychic faculty of understanding, which he said “seems to have truth for its object,” Witherspoon had raised the question of whether “goodness” might instead be the true object. He there mused on what connection might obtain between goodness and truth. His tentative conclusion was that truth is the proper object of the understanding, and goodness of the “heart” or affections (LMP 71). The relation between the truth and the good, then, has its counterpart in human nature and seems to be the ultimate ground for Witherspoon of the relation between duty and interest in ethics, and thereafter reason and utility in politics. The understanding recognizes the truth about human nature and human society and unfolds ethical and political principles on the basis of the truth perceived. The basic laws for man and society are recognized specifically in the moral sense. Conscience, again, is a function of common sense, more akin to the understanding than the affections. But the dictates of conscience powerfully move the affections—the heart greets them as good and is affected by them. Unfortunately, it is also true that the understanding is sometimes deceived, and the affections drawn away by unworthy objects. The great trick, ethically speaking, is to attach affections to what is right and best—or in other words to connect interest with duty by showing what duty demands to be in fact what is most desirable in its own right.62 Politically, the trick is to wed in the popular mind public utility to what is right according to nature (by “the reason and nature of things”), to show that a firm attachment to the latter is in fact more useful and more satisfying than any of the alternatives. Witherspoon’s continuing treatment of liberty follows this track, further illuminating along the way the founders’ thinking on the subject. Critical to the maintenance of liberty, Witherspoon believes, is the protection of material property. The foundation of property, he says, is “every particular person’s having a confessed and exclusive right to a certain portion of the goods which serve for the support and conveniency of life.” Private property is “essentially necessary” in civil societies of any size, and the foundation just mentioned is two-dimensional, according with “the reason of things and public utility” (LMP 126). Witherspoon gives four reasons why private property is so essential, in both utilitarian and natural terms:


91

Without private property [1.] No laws would be sufficient to compel universal industry. 2. There is no reason to expect in the present [corrupted] state of human nature, that there would be a just and equal distribution to every one according to his necessity, nor any room for distinction according to merit. 3. There would be no place for the exercise of some of the noblest affections of the human mind, as charity, compassion, beneficence, &c. 4. [There would be] little or no incitement to the active virtues, labor, ingenuity, bravery, patience, &c. (LMP 126–27)

The precise way of establishing and protecting property is determined solely by “common utility,” according to convention, but common utility requires securing “a right to the fullest use” of property, short of causing injury to others; “a right of exclusion,” prohibiting others from “any way intermeddling with what is our property”; and “a power to alienate,” that is, to alter, exchange, or donate (LMP 127–28). Making a connection of property and liberty was not an unusual suggestion. The link was indicated in the common seventeenth- and eighteenth-century description of the foundational rights as “life, liberty, and property,” mentioned in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and implicit in the Second, Third, and Fourth, reformulated by Jefferson in the Declaration to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in order to capture the large portion of liberty extending beyond material possession, namely, as Witherspoon presently suggested, the free use of our faculties. Madison in Federalist 10 points out that in fact property rights originate in this deeper freedom. In his account of liberty, Witherspoon has again expressed the common founding era understanding with remarkable clarity. Having indicated the basic function of society (protecting natural rights) and the primary local means by which this function is rendered effective (private property), Witherspoon proceeds to examine more closely society’s basic constitution. In the manner of Aristotle in the Politics, he works up from the bottom. Society is divisible into two fundamental parts: domestic and civil. Everything starts with the household, which is the base of property, and the household (not the individual as Locke would have it) is the basic natural unit of the political regime. Domestic society involves the relations, as Aristotle said, “of marriage, . . . of parents and children, . . . of master and servant” (LMP 133). Civil society is “the union of a number of families in one state, for their mutual benefit” (LMP 140). The departure here from Locke is significant and reminds that the founding generation was less individualistic than advertised, more Scottish communitarian than atomistic. It is easy to

92


forget in today’s world of soaring divorce rates that, for the founding generation, the family was everything.63 Witherspoon examines all the relations of domestic and civil society in terms of their naturalness, their utility, and especially the rights and duties of the different persons involved, which like Reid he understands in terms of natural as well as contractual relations (see Chapter 2). At each step along the way he gives, as so often, greater definition to founding perspectives. In the domestic domain, marriage is natural for human beings, as they are more than bestial creatures, for keeping them “reined in by modesty” and for promoting “reason and friendship, and some of the noblest affections” in the human experience (LMP 133). According to Witherspoon, reflecting the general founding view, “reason and nature” suggest the following about the nature of “the marriage contract.” (1) It should be “between one man and one woman.” (2) Fostering “fidelity and chastity” are “essential to the purpose of the union,” along with, in most cases, providing for the nurture of children, though the latter is not necessarily part of the reason couples unite. Beyond its naturalness, this support of childbearing is useful for the “public good” of having a well-bred and educated population (LMP 133). (3) “The contract should be for life—otherwise it would be short, uncertain, and mutual love and industry greatly weakened.” Although there are some legitimate occasions for it, divorce should generally be discouraged.64 (4) “If superiority and authority be given to the man [a policy Witherspoon does not explicitly insist on], it should be used with so much gentleness and love as to make it a state of as great equality as possible,” recalling Aristotle’s claim that any rule of husband over wife should be political rather than despotic (LMP 134).65 The naturalness of the relation of parents and children is indicated, Witherspoon observes, in the “instinct of parental affection,” which “seems necessary, as the education of children is a duty requiring so much time, care and expense, which nothing but the most rooted affection would submit to” (LMP 135). Parents and children each have certain natural rights against the other. Parents have a right of authority, requiring the obedience of the children, and a right to the children’s gratitude. The first, according to Witherspoon, is a perfect right, justifying the use of corporal punishment, while the second is an imperfect one. He stresses that the “end” of parents’ right of authority is the “instruction and protection” of the children and is “limited by the advantage of the children.” Parents do not, therefore, have a rightful power of life and death over them nor to abuse them in any way. Children, for their part, implicitly have a right to protection and care, and when they come of age, he stresses explicitly, they have a right to exercise their own judgment in religious matters (LMP 135–36).


93

In speaking of the relation between “master and servant,” Witherspoon intends both employee-employer relations and those between slaves and slaveholders. The inclusion of the slaveholder-slave relation in the discussion is significant, because in the discussion he places careful limits on the rights of masters and gives important rights to the servants. The master-servant relation is natural, he suggests, in that “some are superior to others in mental powers and intellectual improvement,” while “some make it their choice, finding they cannot live otherwise better, to let out their labor to others for hire.”66 The relation, Witherspoon implies, is useful as well as natural: the enterprising need help in executing their schemes, and more ordinary folk need jobs. Significantly, the naturalness of hierarchal work relations does not suggest any kind of right to domination. The master’s right over the servant is restricted to “a right to the labors and ingenuity of the servant, for a limited time, or at most for life,” and the master has “no right either to take away life, or to make it insupportable by excessive labor.” The servant, while he is obligated to contribute his labors and ingenuity pursuant to the terms of his contract, “retains all his other natural rights” (LMP 137). With this stipulation Witherspoon would seem bound to reject chattel slavery in principle as necessarily illegitimate. This impression is reinforced by his comments in Lecture 10 that “it is certainly unlawful to make inroads upon others, unprovoked, and take away their liberty by no better right than superior power,” and that “it is very doubtful whether any original cause of servitude can be defended, but legal punishment for the commission of crimes” (LMP 125– 26). It is disappointing to learn that Witherspoon himself owned slaves despite these conclusions.67 Even in contradiction to common sense he seems to have been representative of founding habits. All of the aforementioned domestic relations imply some kind of contract—either formal or informal, partly natural and partly conventional. The social contract is similar in kind. A valid social contract involves, at a minimum, (1) “The consent of every individual to live in, and be a member of that society”; (2) “A consent to some particular plan of government”; and (3) “A mutual agreement between the subjects and rulers; of subjection on the one hand, or protection on the other” (LMP 140). Consent and mutual agreement are part of the natural basis of any just society (natural rights imply an imperative of consent), but the particular form of society is conventionally determined according to perceived utility. Every society consists of at least two classes, rulers and ruled, each having their own peculiar rights and duties. The “essential” rights of rulers, “such as in general must be vested in rulers in every society,” include powers of legislation, taxation for public expenditures, administration, and representation.68 Some “less essential”

94


rights of rulers, less essential “because they may be more varied than the others,” include “coining of money—possessing or managing public edifices— conferring honors on officers, &c.” The rights of subjects, Witherspoon tells us, “cannot be enumerated, but they may all be summed up in protection, that is to say, those who have surrendered part of their natural rights expect the strength of the public arm to defend and improve what remains” (LMP 141). The people do retain a right of revolution, but this right obtains only when government exercises its power in a “manifestly tyrannical manner,” and then “only when it becomes manifestly more advantageous to unsettle the government altogether, than to submit to tyranny” (LMP 145). These Lockean points were representative of American sentiments, though Witherspoon again expresses them with unusual lucidity. His formulation of the rights of subjects catches the essence of the Lockean social contract even more concisely than does the Declaration of Independence. The point about the impossibility of enumerating the people’s rights foreshadowed Hamilton’s argument against adding a Bill of Rights, that a listing of rights might lead people to think their rights come from government and to believe these were all the rights they had.69 The same point is reflected in the language of the Ninth Amendment, meant to answer such concerns. The imperative of consent for political legitimacy was taken for granted and stressed in the Declaration, which also claimed a right of revolution and also held itself against making revolution lightly.70 Concerning the principles of the Declaration in general, if Jefferson indeed captured the “American mind” in that document, as he meant to do, then Witherspoon had captured it already years before, with similar elegance. As the Declaration and Witherspoon both suggest, the “plan of government” adopted matters. How should the people decide which form of government will best serve to protect their rights? Witherspoon considers the usual categories (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and mixed forms) in the Aristotelian manner, that is, qualitatively as well as pragmatically. As Montesquieu indicated, in The Spirit of the Laws, none of the simple forms will do, including democracy. Even a republican form—a rule of law, representative democracy—will not suffice. The virtues of monarchy and aristocracy as well as republics are indispensable. The penetrating wisdom of extraordinary persons and the downto-earth wisdom of popular common sense are equally essential, for the people are poor judges of excellent policy, and great men are inclined to lose sight of the basics. Functionally, government needs the unity and executive capacity for “secrecy, expedition, and dispatch” characteristic of monarchy and the deliberative tendency of aristocracy as well as democratic accountability. As for securing rights, even good laws will not prevent tyranny if the majority goes


95

unchecked. The trick is, as Montesquieu said, to combine the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements in such a way as to exploit their virtues and cancel out their vices. The basic solution, in Witherspoon’s terms, is to devise a mixed or “complex” form of government so that each element has its own domain and “the one principle may check the other” (LMP 143–44). This is the general plan of government, one that might be recommended to any society where it is possible. The particular plan will depend on local circumstances, on considerations of utility. Taken altogether, Witherspoon implies, you need two things for decent political society: good government and good people. You can’t rely solely on the government, because the temptations of power make abuse all but inevitable. You can’t rely entirely on the people, for they won’t always be sufficiently informed, involved, or virtuous to keep liberty safe from the tyranny of power, on the one hand, or of license on the other. You can’t rely even on a good plan of government, because in the end government is only as good as the people and the governors they choose. As Witherspoon wrote in Dominion, on the eve of revolution, “Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue” (WJW 3:41). Yet, as Madison was to write in Federalist 51, echoing his old master’s judgment, while “dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government . . . experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” We need backup to prevent everything from coming apart when the people’s virtue and vigilance are at low ebb. Madison’s description in Federalist 51 of the mechanism required is a mirror image of Witherspoon’s. Compare the language: In Madison’s words, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place”; in Witherspoon’s, those “who have a share in managing it [must be] so balanced, that when every one draws to his own interest or inclination, there may be an over poise upon the whole” (LMP 144).71 As with Hamilton’s “secrecy, expedition, and dispatch” in Federalist 70, Witherspoon said it first.72 The last concern about rights and duties, after those among individuals within society, are the reciprocal claims and obligations of nations. Witherspoon’s account of this is once more reflective of the prevailing American understanding of the time. The case, as Witherspoon has it, is very similar between individuals and nations. As “reason [and] conscience” pointed to a higher law governing individuals, so also they point to “a law of nature and nations.”73 Nations have, according to Witherspoon, essentially the same perfect

96


and imperfect rights as individuals, “save that there is usually less occasion [in international relations] for the imperfect rights” (LMP 150).74 The only manner of enforcing the law of nature in international relations, when nations are not willing to abide by it, is the use of force, and so, the “chief or only object” of this law is “the manner of making war and peace” (LMP 151).75 In order to avoid the evils of international war, joining reason and conscience to “common utility” is again imperative, and all three together point to the desirability of formalized rules of international conduct. The main considerations on the question of just war, says Witherspoon, are the legitimate occasions for war, the timing of commencing hostilities, a war’s duration, and the means of prosecuting it.76 The first two, we observe, are addressed implicitly in America’s Declaration of Independence from Britain, which was meant in part as a moral justification for armed revolution from “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Witherspoon lays bare here the natural law principles assumed in the case made there. Conscience and reason suggest that just cause for war is generally “the violation of any perfect right—as taking away the property of the other state, or the lives of its subjects, or restraining them in their industry, or hindering them in the use of things common, &c.,” with the exception of the “right to character” (that is, the right of a nation not to have its reputation falsely maligned), which does not justify sending young citizens to their death (LMP 151).77 The middle section of the Declaration is comprehensible as a listing of perfect rights violated by King George. On the second point, from the standpoint of reason alone, any time after receiving an injury is an acceptable time to commence hostilities, but the custom of making declarations of war first, having been established, should be honored. Implicitly, tradition gives form to natural right. The Declaration honored that tradition in the very act of making a declaration before mobilizing for war. On the third point, the duration of war “should be according to natural equity, till the injury be completely redressed, and reasonable security given against future attacks: therefore the practice, too common, of continuing a war for the acquisition of empire is to be condemned.” Finally, it is generally legitimate to wage war “by force or open violence” against “the person and goods, not only of the rulers, but of every member of the hostile state” (LMP 152). However, as Witherspoon observed in Dominion and the Druid letters, “acts of cruelty and inhumanity” are to be scrupulously avoided, “and all severity that has not an immediate effect in weakening the national strength of the enemy is certainly inhumanity—Such as killing prisoners whom you can keep safely—killing women and children—burning and destroying everything that could be of use in life” (LMP 153).78 Moreover, war should be conducted in good faith; treachery is condemnable even against enemies (LMP 153–54).79


97

Witherspoon treats the two stipulations on conducting war in terms of both justice and utility. Violating these stipulations is not only wrong, it tends to backfire. Anticipating the Machiavellian objection that “strict adherence to all the laws [of war] above laid down, would give any party a great advantage who should take the liberty of transgressing them,” Witherspoon answers that, while cruelty and treachery may achieve a short-term tactical advantage, they undermine the respect of both enemies and allies, and this could prove devastating in the long run. They provoke outrage, giving enemies new and powerful motivations for fighting and making them more willing to resort to such means in response; and they make allies less willing to defend a partner who seems morally indefensible and potentially dangerous to them (LMP 154). Making peace even more than making war, it would seem, “ought to be [done] with the utmost sincerity.” Ambushing, for example, under the false pretense of making peace negotiations is deeply immoral. The basic guidelines for making peace follow from the ends of making war: repairing damages and providing for future security (LMP 155). Taking care not to exceed these guidelines is again a matter not only of justice but of interest, as a victorious nation’s using its advantage for plunder and gratuitous conquest will produce grievances not soon forgotten and powerful motives for future aggression in return. Every part of politics, then, from household management to international affairs, should be guided by reason/conscience and utility, or in other words by common sense, which intuits both what is right and what is needful. The people’s common sense and the more refined common sense of good statesmen together make political society decent and keep it free. To the extent America has retained a virtuous liberty it is thanks to well-developed noetic and practical reason.

Jurisprudence The last concern of Witherspoon’s moral philosophy is “Jurisprudence,” which he considers separately from his general ethical and political theory. In his review of ethics, Witherspoon founded ethical virtue on conscience enlightened by reason, revelation, and the experience of mankind; tried to establish the fundamental human rights and duties; and argued that the cultivation of virtue and performance of duty is very much in our best interest. In the lectures on politics, he considered the natural basis and constitution of society, the basic social rights and duties, and the political utility of justice and mercy. Jurisprudence is really a branch of politics, but Witherspoon takes it up separately, apparently, to emphasize its importance. Man cannot live well merely by his wits. Freedom and the good life depend on good laws that guide, check, and

98


habituate so that reason doesn’t have to do everything by itself, which would be exhausting and ultimately ineffectual given human limitations and the tendency to corruption and abuse of power. Yet the laws themselves, if they are good, are incarnations of moral reason, political authority “stampt upon moral duty” (LMP 122). In fact, the main business of politics within a state, as Witherspoon sees it, is the administration of such law, and this is jurisprudence. Good jurisprudence like good government depends on a good constitution, and so before turning to the method of administering justice Witherspoon returns to the question of regime. His account is distinctly Aristotelian-Thomistic. “A constitution is excellent,” Witherspoon says, “when the spirit of the civil laws is such as to have a tendency to prevent offences and make men good, as much as to punish them when they do evil.” This preventive and formative role of law “is necessary in some measure” because “when the general disposition of a people is against the laws, they cannot long subsist, even by a strict and rigorous execution on the part of the rulers” (LMP 159). A good political constitution will therefore aim at forming the people well, that is, ordering their relations and inclining them to virtue. But how can law make men good? Isn’t it true as we so often hear today that “you can’t legislate morality”? Witherspoon’s answer, implicitly, is the same as that of Aquinas: “Not directly, but indirectly, yes.” It is a necessary support of the direct work of conscience and faith, those dual sources of morality. Obeying the laws makes a habit of doing the right thing, and the sanction of law—the threat of punishment for its violation—keeps the wavering on the right path. The civil laws, Witherspoon says, really have three fundamental aims: (1) “To ratify,” as noticed, “the moral laws by the sanction of the society”; (2) “To lay down a plan for all contracts in the commerce or intercourse between man and man”; and (3) “To limit and direct persons in the exercise of their own rights, and oblige them to show respect to the interfering rights of others” (LMP 162–63). The man-made laws are to reflect and practically enforce natural law. Enforcement is done through civil “punishments annexed to the transgression of the moral laws” (LMP 163). Of course, not all immoral acts come under the purview of civil law, only those involving relatively serious wrongdoing, and it is essential that acts punishable by law are clearly defined, that some standard or uniform method be adopted for determining when crimes have actually been committed, and that guidelines for setting punishments be established (LMP 163–65). Witherspoon devotes more space in the Lectures to the law of contracts than to any other part of the law, presumably because contract as he understands it is so foundational to political order. A contract is a “stipulation between two


99

parties before at liberty, to make some alteration of property, or to bind one or both parties to the performance of some service.” The “at liberty” part points to the fact that in order to be valid the arrangement must have the consent of all involved. Witherspoon’s notion of contracts is expansive: “Every transaction almost,” from implied commitments between individuals to the social contract forming political society, “may be considered as a contract, either more or less explicit” (LMP 168). Contracting, though its specific form is artificial, is natural; it is a natural form of human interaction. The obligation of contracts “rests ultimately on the obligation to sincerity in the social life,” which itself “arises from the testimony of conscience, and from the manifest utility and even necessity of sincerity to social intercourse” (LMP 171).80 Once again, in the case of contracts, nature and utility are inseparable, and conscience is the rule. The last category of civil laws concerns pure public utilities. Its object is to secure the good of the people by limiting the ways they may exercise their rights, so that no one’s rights are trampled. To this end, the laws give “directions in what way arts and commerce may be carried on,” establishing “the manner of traveling, building, marketing, time and manner of holding all sorts of assemblies,” and the like. Morally speaking, the particular form of these laws is indifferent, as they deal with matters “in themselves arbitrary and mutable” (LMP 181). Nevertheless, once made, laws of strictly public utility are binding in conscience, being necessary for the common good (LMP 182). The special consideration Witherspoon gives to law and its administration reminds of the importance of law in American political self-understanding and illuminates how that law was originally understood. We have, it is said, a “government of laws,” from the fundamental law of the Constitution to the municipal laws for public safety and convenience, and critical to the founders’ understanding of the rule of law was the idea that all men on whatever level of society were under a higher law indicated in the dictates of conscience. The need for rulers as well as subjects to be bound by the civil laws was not for them merely a utilitarian calculation in the service of narrow self-interest but a moral imperative imposed by the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

A Model of Common Sense Politics Conscience is almost literally the last word in Witherspoon’s Lectures (LMP 182), and it certainly is the last word in his moral philosophy. The moral sense, or moral common sense we might call it, is for Witherspoon the decisive faculty of the mind, the foundation of virtue, and the source of duty in ethics and politics. It is the ultimate basis of the civil laws, and only a firm adherence to its dictates, he believes, will ensure the success of those laws. The good man, the

100


good citizen, and the good society will take due account of interest and utility but will, in the end, always make these legitimate concerns conform to what conscience demands. In common sense theory and practice alike, Witherspoon can be taken as a representative man. His writings just reviewed lay out for us a complete— though mostly undifferentiated—common sense theory of politics, making the moral dimension of common sense the foundation of the whole and connecting it to every part of moral and political life. His theory could serve as an outline for a more complete version examining more directly and thoroughly the workings of common sense in civil life. In terms of American common sense, Witherspoon provides with remarkable compactness and comprehensiveness a picture of the American mind at the Republic’s foundation. All its essential features are here: its religious orientation; its veneration of family and country; its sense of natural law and the rights and obligations of conscience, and its conception of justice in terms of rights and duties; its sensitivity to human limitations and suspicion of power; and its practical sense of social needs and political arrangements. It is an irony of history that one of the most representative founding Americans was a late émigré with a thick Scottish brogue. Finally, more directly than any other American founder, Witherspoon embodies the ideal of a common sense philosopher-statesman. Through his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Scottish Common Sense and the quasi-Aristotelian Scottish version of natural law, as contrasted with the simplistically liberal version of the Lockeans, was disseminated widely. In Witherspoon’s political sermons, public papers, and speeches, his leadership in New Jersey politics, his creation of a “School of Statesmen,” and his advice to political leaders, he applied his learning and philosophy directly to American political circumstances.81 To learn common sense politics, you could do worse than to have, like Madison, John Witherspoon as mentor.

4 McCosh’s Scientific Intuitionism

The features of American moral consciousness that Witherspoon represented continued essentially unchanged to James McCosh’s presidency at Princeton, approximately the time that outlook transitioned to something new (though not entirely new). American religious understanding had not suddenly transmogrified since Tocqueville marveled at American religiosity in the 1830s. The language of duty to God, neighbor, and country was still ubiquitous, as even a cursory review of Civil War literature makes clear. In terms of American outlook, Witherspoon and McCosh can be taken as symbols of the age: this phase of the American mind corresponds closely in time and substance with the reign of Scottish realism in the American academy. Given the historical continuity, McCosh’s writings with respect to American common sense are of interest primarily as a further differentiation of Witherspoon’s version, and no effort is made here to point out American correspondences at every step. And although McCosh was a public intellectual of consequence, he was not a statesman as Witherspoon was, nor could his public commentary on social affairs match the reach and power of that founder.1 So we won’t bother to consider McCosh as common sense practitioner, either. On this score, Witherspoon’s example is quite sufficient. Rather, we will focus here on McCosh’s extraordinary account of the nature and operation of certain intuitions and how they ground his ethical theory; on his illuminating treatment of the relation between conscience and the larger natural order; and on how his thought reveals on other points certain fatal weaknesses of Scottish realism as it stood in the late nineteenth century, weaknesses that made a turn in American thought all but inevitable. H. G. Townsend wrote in 1934 that “Scottish realism . . . found in [McCosh] a culmination and a crystallization.”2 This is undoubtedly true. As J. David Hoeveler has said, McCosh was “clearly the last major voice of the Scottish

101

102


Enlightenment and the system of philosophical realism for which it is best known,” and his chief philosophical writings are collectively a monument to clarity and precision.3 His greatest work, The Intuitions of the Mind, certainly should be ranked among the more important in the Scottish realist tradition, as it contains perhaps the most thorough, lucid, and convincing analysis of the rudiments of rationality that tradition provides.4 McCosh did not himself like the moniker “common sense,” believing it vague and misleading. “The word sense seems to associate the faculty [of intuition] with the bodily organism, with which certainly it has no connection,” he says, and the stipulation (implied, for instance, by Hutcheson and Witherspoon, see “Common Sense Moral Philosophy” in Chapter 3, above) that “common sense” refers to a kind of internal mental sense does not come close to clearing matters up: In its connotation as an internal sense the term has been used variously to mean a “sense common to all mankind,” providing “an original inlet of knowledge”; “good sense” or “practical sense,” gained through cumulative intelligent experience; “the knowledge imparted by the senses in common” (Aristotle’s koine aesthesis); and “the aggregate of original principles planted in the minds of all, and in ordinary circumstances operating in the minds of all.”5 The ambiguity of the term, McCosh says, has bred confusion for those outside the Scottish Common Sense tradition, and even for those within it. As McCosh sees it, Reid wanted to make use of two meanings, both good sense and the mind’s original principles; but McCosh insists, “It is only in this last sense that [common sense] can be legitimately employed in overthrowing skepticism, or for any philosophic purpose” (SP 222).6 He observes that common sense as good sense is according to an old saying, the most uncommon of the senses. This valuable property is not common to all men, but is possessed only by a certain number; and there are others who can never acquire it, and it is always the result of a number of gifts and attainments, such as an originally sound judgment and a careful observation of mankind and the world. In this signification, common sense is not to be the final appeal in philosophy, science, or any other department of investigation; though in all it may keep us from much error (SP 221).

Common sense in this meaning, McCosh says, cannot be a final appeal because it can be wrong. “Practical sense, as it claimed to be, long opposed the doctrine of there being antipodes and of the earth moving; it spoke contemptuously in the first instance of some of the greatest achievements of our world, the deeds of philanthropists, and the sufferings of martyrs; it laughed at the early poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson. All that good sense can do in science

McCosh’s Scientific Intuitionism

103

and philosophy is to guard us against accepting any doctrine till it is settled by inductive proof ” (SP 221–22). The final appeal, for McCosh, must be to those original principles of the mind. Reid’s combination or conflation of those two meanings of common sense, McCosh thinks, was the undoing of Scottish Common Sense philosophy in Europe: “while perhaps contributing to the immediate popularity of Reid, and still more of Beattie, [it] turned in the end against them . . . in the estimation of philosophic thinkers, who, looking on the appeal as only to vulgar judgment, which may be prejudice, have denied the validity of the argument” (SP 222). As we have seen, Kant had dismissed the school of Reid for just this reason (see Chapter 2). Reid had also failed to express, says McCosh, “the precise nature of the principles of common sense, of their points of agreement and of difference, of their precise laws and varied modes of action” (SP 222–23). McCosh’s take here on the value of the term “common sense” and of Reid’s work on that topic, I suggest, is largely mistaken. Regarding the value of the term, all the meanings of common sense that he mentions are connected. Retaining the term helps keep us in mind of the connections, which may easily be forgotten without it (as they usually have been). It seems pretty clear from our analysis of Reid’s philosophy, moreover (see Chapter 2), that Reid used the term in the first as well as the second and fourth senses and thought it appropriate to consider sense perception under that heading as well, as indicated by the full title of his work on sensation, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. The way Reid used the term may indeed have been confused and confusing, with hard consequences for the Scottish realist movement, but his understanding of the phenomenon beneath the term, in recognizing its varying ramifications, was in fact more complete than that of McCosh or any other of the Scottish realists. Moreover, all the meanings of common sense, not only McCosh’s last, are essential for philosophic purposes and for defeating skepticism. First, “the common sense of mankind” as McCosh intends it—the “original inlet of knowledge,” or in other words the faculty of common sense (Aristotle’s nous)— is philosophically momentous in its conceptualization of consciousness as sensorium of reality. Understanding this is critical for understanding human nature—nous is the base of the rationality that separates human from merely animal nature—and indeed for understanding reality itself, since consciousness engages the outer world directly and since it is itself, as William James will say, perhaps the most important part of the reality to be understood. McCosh catches something of the nature of consciousness and its grasp of reality, but he sometimes seems to reduce that sense of reality to the apprehension of atomized particulars and principles.

104


Next, McCosh doesn’t seem to realize that the work of Aristotle’s koine aesthesis is precisely what McCosh calls intuitive “cognition” of physical objects, or to appreciate, as James did, the importance of simple sensation as a test of our perceptions (see Chapter 5). In any case, common sensation and the knowledge it imparts, in clarifying our relation to the physical world, is as consequential for understanding the human situation as our principles are (as McCosh would agree if common sensation is understood to involve cognition of physical objects), and appreciating this fully is essential for keeping ourselves and our politics grounded. Hence the importance of property, for example. Man does not live by principles alone. Finally, McCosh is right about the fallibility of “practical sense” as he means it here (a kind of probabilistic acuity based on past experience). But practical sense thus intended is only one aspect, though not unimportant, of the good sense we are concerned with. At a deeper level, good practical sense is identical to Aristotle’s phronesis, which by definition is the accurate sense of how right principle applies in action, though the applicant need not have the principles consciously in mind. The operation of conscience in McCosh’s rendering looks a lot like phronesis, in fact, but he never seems to get at the heart of the matter theoretically, to unpack the phenomenon philosophically. This failure to come to terms fully with the practical dimension of common sense may account in some measure for McCosh’s limited impact. And a similar neglect by leading like-minded contemporaries—call it the academicization of Scottish realism, to use an appropriately ugly word—may account in some measure for the movement’s rapidly diminishing influence at that moment, when the need for restoring a sense of philosophy’s relevance for living was urgent. In any case, the argument here is that both these kinds of practical sense depend on common sense intuition (of both particulars and principles), and that understanding the relations among these modes of common sense is critical, both for grasping practical reality and for making the most of practical sensibility in personal and political action. The root of McCosh’s problem seems to be a failure, shared by all the later Scottish realists, to appreciate the continuous and dynamic qualities of consciousness that James so well understood—that it is less like an aggregate of individual intuitions than a conscious field and that it is the place where, as James suggests, the real work of the universe is done. (The failure on this second point is evident in the undervaluing of the practical dimension of common sense just mentioned.) Whatever Reid’s infelicities of formulation, the static and disjointed notions of consciousness and the “principles of the mind” were the deeper cause of Scottish realism’s demise in the late nineteenth century.


105

This disjointed and relatively static notion of consciousness resulted in an inadequate conception of and approach to philosophy. Reality as a whole is, as James suggested, a continuum, and though we are not one with it, are discrete entities, there are no hard breaks between us and the world. We engage it directly, and not only by individual intuitions but also, more fundamentally, by our unbroken streams of consciousness. Reality and we as participants within it are a seamless web. An adequate grasp of reality must therefore involve more than a stringing together of intuitions and principles; it must involve a dynamic illumination of the conscious field, and in the light of that glow a revelation of the continuum of reality from within. Philosophy at its base is not, as the Scottish realists seemed to present it, a coordinating of intuitions and principles but, as James implied, an unfolding vision. Where McCosh is right in his criticism of Reid is in his last point—that Reid failed to clarify “the precise nature of the principles of common sense, of their points of agreement and of difference, of their precise laws and varied modes of action” (SP 222–23). Reid is indeed unclear on these matters. This genuine deficiency McCosh tries, with considerable success, to set right in his own philosophy.7

Epistemology The broadest outlines of McCosh’s scientific-philosophic approach are evident in his description of common characteristics of Scottish philosophy. In the book bearing that name, he says that the Scottish philosophers generally proceeded according to the method of observation and induction, employed self-consciousness as the instrument of observation, based their thinking on observations of consciousness, and arrived at principles “which are prior to and independent of experience.” The combination of these characteristics set Scottish philosophy apart, “on the one hand, from empiricism and sensationalism; and, on the other hand, from . . . dogmatism and a priori speculation” (SP 6).8 Once again, common sense philosophy occupies the middle position. “To the Scottish school,” McCosh avers, “belongs the merit of being the first, avowedly and knowingly, to follow the inductive method, and to employ it systematically in psychological investigation” (SP 3).9 This was a self-conscious attempt to follow the advice of Francis Bacon to apply the inductive method used in modern physical sciences (most famously by Newton) to other sciences, including logic, ethics, and politics (SP 2–3). Specifically, Scottish philosophers refused to follow the late medieval method of starting with unquestioned speculative principles and proceeding deductively from there. They insisted on beginning instead with the basic facts of consciousness, its content, capacities,

106


and activities (uncovered through introspection and the testimony of others), from which could be derived fundamental laws or principles of consciousness and nature. McCosh describes his own philosophic procedure in detail in Intuitions of the Mind and An Examination of J. S. Mill’s Philosophy. The fundamental facts of consciousness are the intuitions, which he defines as “original perceptions” of the mental faculties (for example, of sense, of reason, of conscience), formed by apprehending “immediately” some object or fact (IM 26, 30). By “consciousness” McCosh means not an entity but simple mental awareness, which “reveals only the present state of mind” in its particulars, and which must be carefully distinguished from the form of consciousness that is “derived from the individual exercises [of the mind] by a reflex process of abstraction and generalization.”10 There is no initial awareness of principles in consciousness, only of individual facts actually apprehended. Principles of whatever kind are derived by abstracting elements from the facts, collating abstracted elements into categories, and making generalizations about them, which then may be seen in some cases to be intuitively certain. McCosh gives his most concise description of this process in his Examination of Mill’s Philosophy. The process begins and ends, he stresses, with this consciousness, with simple awareness. Consciousness must turn to consider its own content, taking notice not only of what passes before it but also what is contained in memory, and it must also, “in order to correct the narrowness of . . . personal observations,” look at “the convictions of other men” as suggested by “their deeds, ever passing under our notice, and as recorded in history,” and by “their conversation and their writings, as the expression of human thought and sentiment” (EMP 31). Consciousness “has to take the first step, and the final step in the process [of arriving at fundamental principles or laws of the mind.] It has to observe and gather the original facts which suggest the law. It has again to collect and notice the verifying facts which establish the law. In comparison with these, the intermediate step, the ratiocination, is a subordinate and dependent one” (EMP 31–32). This intermediate step of ratiocination involves analysis and theorization of the facts presented by consciousness. “In order to . . . the discovery even of an ‘intuitive principle,’” McCosh explains, “there must be what Bacon calls ‘the necessary rejections and exclusions,’ or what Dr. Whewell calls the ‘decomposition of facts,’ and then the coordination of the facts into a law by induction.” Any “construction of metaphysics” will require “more . . . than a simple exercise of consciousness or introspection; there is need of discursive processes to work the facts into a science” (EMP 30). Ratiocination is nevertheless subordinate to and dependent on consciousness, because, “When we [analyze and theorize], all we can do is to dissect the con-


107

crete [by abstraction], to generalize the individual, or find out the producing cause. But the errors will only multiply on us in these steps if we have not commenced with accurate observations” (EMP 34). The point of thought, McCosh thinks, is to get at reality, and reality is got at first and last through consciousness, through immediate conscious experience. Ratiocination is critical for understanding, but the reality to be understood is the one given in experience. This is exactly William James’s position (see Chapter 5). Common sense—or as McCosh prefers, intuitional—philosophy thus insists on maintaining always, as he says, “the concrete” as the basis for theory. It is concerned not merely or even primarily with the logical consistency of ideas, but with hard realities, with existences or substances and their attributes and operations and relations to other substances. The enterprise of common sense philosophy is an exploration of reality in all its dimensions, and common sense has no use for calculations that have no ascertainable correspondence to fact. Intuitions themselves must not be exempted from this acid test of concreteness. In Method of the Divine Government, McCosh insists that “no intuition be admitted in philosophic or religious speculation, till it is proved by induction to be in the constitution of the mind.”11 James, while abandoning the categories of “substance” and “attributes,” describes his philosophy the same way, as proceeding by the same method and in the same language of “concreteness.” Strangely, his insistence that understanding reality was possible put McCosh at odds with powerful intellectual movements of his own time that were slowly rising to supremacy. Hume had held that the mind knows only impressions received mysteriously through sensation; it does not, technically speaking, know external realities at all but only guesses at them, and this without any reasonable hope of guessing right; much less does the mind have any knowledge of causes—the base of metaphysics, which aims to understand reality as a whole. Kant, after him (ironically, since Kant hoped to save us philosophically from the moral ignorance implied by Hume’s system), held similarly that the mind cannot know substance, either of mind or of matter, but only presentations or phenomena of substances supposed to exist but in themselves utterly mysterious. We cannot know the Ding an sich (the “thing in itself ”), but merely an appearance before the mind that may or may not resemble the thing. Furthermore, the mind, in Kant’s rendering, imposes subjective forms (space and time) on phenomena, so that even the phenomenal image itself may be distorted (see IM 111, 204). To McCosh, Kant’s reduction of space and time to mere mental forms with no more than subjective existence was

108


one of the most fatal heresies—that is, dogmas opposed to the revelations of consciousness—ever introduced into philosophy, and it lies at the basis of all the aberrations in the school of speculation which followed [most notably, he observes, in the thought of Fichte and Hegel]. For those who were taught that the mind could create space and time, soon learned to suppose that the mind could also create the objects and events cognized as in space and time, till the whole external universe became ideal, and all reality was supposed to lie in a series of connected mental forms. (IM 204)

Kant did say we know the necessity of causes for our experiences, but he understood these causes to be accessible only conceptually and logically, not experientially. This precludes, among other things, any direct knowledge of transcendent reality beyond particular a priori judgments. In particular, it rules out the experiences of “faith” and “philosophy” (see Chapter 3), though McCosh did not fully appreciate this problem. McCosh’s links to the real are the “intuitions.” He starts epistemologically with the facts of consciousness, and he takes the intuitions of fact and principle to be themselves the most important of these facts. His Examination of J. S. Mill’s Philosophy indicates how to approach them. The title of McCosh’s book mirrors Mill’s own book on Hamilton, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Although Hamilton was one of McCosh’s intellectual mentors (or at least, one of his teachers), McCosh in his response to Mill is not especially concerned with defending Hamilton’s philosophy, which he finds wanting in crucial respects.12 Rather, McCosh’s book is a direct and searching analysis of Mill’s philosophical system, presented in all its essential elements for the first time in Mill’s critique of Hamilton (EMP 10–11). McCosh agrees with Victor Cousin (a French common sense philosopher), against Mill, that you must first understand the nature of ideas before you can accurately trace their origin. Mill follows Locke, McCosh says, in reversing that order. With Locke, Mill makes the critical epistemological issue the origin of our ideas and adopts the “Psychological” rather than the “Introspective” method in examining consciousness because, he says, the original revelations of consciousness are not available to us “in their primitive purity,” having been “overlaid and buried under a mountainous heap of acquired notions and perceptions” (EMP 26, 27).13 Hamilton tended to portray the entire process of philosophy as a product of introspection, and Mill responds that because of the layers of “acquired notions and perceptions” obscuring our original perceptions, introspection could not produce any sound philosophy. But Mill overcompensates, McCosh says: “After he has shown that introspection cannot do everything, he leaves upon us


109

the impression that it can do nothing,” while in fact, as we have seen, introspection is the first and the last step in the philosophic process (EMP 30, 31). It may surprise readers to learn that, despite dedicating Pragmatism to Mill, William James also rejects, for this and other reasons, taking a purely psychological approach to understanding conscience experience, considering it wholly inadequate to the task (see the end of the section on “The Pragmatic Conception of Truth” in Chapter 5). Realizing this is critical for understanding the common sense dimension of James’s philosophy, and indeed for understanding common sense in general. Mill says in the book on Hamilton that “the proof that any of the alleged Universal Beliefs or principles of Common Sense are affirmations of consciousness, supposes two things—that the beliefs exist, and that they cannot possibly have been acquired” (EMP 35–36).14 McCosh agrees with Mill that a rigorous testing of the mind’s convictions is called for, but such an analysis must take into account all of the mind’s “perceptions, apprehensions, and beliefs,” and Mill unfortunately and rather egregiously ignores many of them. Mill steadfastly refuses to take seriously any ideas or convictions not derivable from sensation, but sensation manifestly cannot account, McCosh says, for our convictions about “mind and body, extension, personal identity, causation and moral obligation” (EMP 39). If Mill had taken these seriously, McCosh thinks, he would have seen this and been hard-pressed to argue against universal common sense beliefs. On Mill’s second point, that alleged “Universal Beliefs” may be acquired rather than primary (for example, that, as McCosh puts it, “our idea of moral good” might be capable of decomposition into simpler elements), McCosh says we should be open to the possibility, but that the question must be determined according to “the ordinary rules of evidence,” which he thinks Mill fails to observe (EMP 38). McCosh offers three particular rules for any such analysis. The first is that “No one is to be allowed to imagine that he has made a successful resolution into simpler elements, of an idea, belief, or conviction, unless he can explain all that is in the mental phenomenon” (EMP 39). As just noticed, Mill violates this rule in trying to explain all ideas by sensations, when sensations cannot account for all ideas, either their existence or their content. Mill’s case appears plausible, McCosh says, only because he has ignored all ideas that can’t be thus accounted for (EMP 36–40). The second evidentiary rule is that, “In resolving an alleged fundamental idea or conviction into certain elements, we must assume only known elements, and we must not ascribe to them more than can be shown to be in them” (EMP 44). Again, Mill assumes sensations to be involved in all of

110


them without showing they are. Where, McCosh asks, are the sensations in the ideas “of mind and body, of space and time, of personality and personal identity, of infinity and obligation to do good”? (EMP 46). The third evidentiary rule is that alleged “intuitive truths” should indeed be tested for veracity, lest mere prejudice be taken for genuine intuition, but Mill fails to apply the proper tests. McCosh finds three tests that are largely agreed on by great thinkers, from Aristotle until late modernity, but not always kept in clear focus or remembered together: those of self-evidence, necessity, and universality (EMP 47). He says he will take as fundamental elements of the mind those mental perceptions that Mill fails to reduce to simpler ones, “till some abler man (which is not likely to happen) makes the attempt and succeeds,” provided they stand the three tests (EMP 49). These tests of intuitions are fully explained in McCosh’s Intuitions of the Mind. “The primary mark of intuitive truth,” McCosh tells us there, “is selfevidence. It must be evident, and it must have its evidence in the object. The mind, on the bare contemplation of the object, must see it to be so and so, must see it to be so at once, without requiring any foreign evidence or mediate proof ” (IM 38). You sit reading a book now; there is no other evidence for the book’s existence or its attributes than the book itself; it is pointless and absurd to ask more evidence. Similarly, on contemplating a man’s ingratitude for a gift given at great sacrifice, you would immediately see this to be wrong, without any process of reasoning; no evidence is either necessary or possible beyond the fact itself; any explanation of why it is wrong must necessarily come after recognition of the fact of wrongness, and though all wrongs involve relations between two or more things, the perception cannot be reduced into simpler perceptions. Of course, for any object or truth to be self-evident, it must be clearly apprehended—it’s not self-evident if you haven’t observed it. Regarding the reliability of the test of self-evidence, McCosh freely admits “it is possible to fall into error in the application of this test, as in the application of any other; but this can take place,” he says, “only by negligence, by refusing to go round the object to which the conviction refers, and to look upon it as it is in itself, and in all its aspects” (IM 38–39). The “necessity” of the second test refers to the irresistibility of our convictions about the thing perceived. It is thus a secondary test, dependent on the first. These convictions or intuitions sometimes have the nature of knowledge, sometimes of belief, and sometimes of judgment, which compares objects known or believed. They are intuitions in McCosh’s sense when they are necessary, when the particular cognitions, beliefs, and judgments force themselves on us (IM 39). The third, universality, is only an auxiliary test of intuitive truth, for the reasons that “it is not easy to ascertain, or at least to settle absolutely, what truths may claim this com-


111

mon consent of humanity,” and that some things may be universal that are not necessary. This test is very useful, however, for social discourse: it gives us “confidence in addressing our fellow-men, for we know that there are grounds of thought common to them and to us, and to these we can appeal in reasoning with them” (IM 40, 41).15 What, specifically, are McCosh’s intuitions of the mind? What are the “primitive,” self-evident, necessary, and universal cognitions, beliefs, and judgments? Regarding cognitions, McCosh says, we know being in the sense that we know existences presented to us. Kant claimed we know not things, but appearances. McCosh answers, “What we know is the thing manifesting itself to us,—is the thing exercising particular qualities” (IM 163).16 Indeed, we rarely, if ever, know everything there is to know about a thing, but we do know the thing as presented to us, with the qualities it manifests. To apply McCosh’s definition in terms of sense perception: There is no reason to believe that when I look at my room, what I see is not the room itself but only the appearance of a room; the evidence of my sense is that I see directly a really existing room, with four walls, floor, furniture, and so on, all external to me. The confusion about appearance versus reality arises from a lack of clarity about the process by which one sees. I claim to see something directly, and someone objects that this vision requires an intermediary between the mind and the object seen, namely, the optical mechanism. But this objection turns out to be trivial: that the apparatus of the eyes is necessary for my vision does not in the least suggest that what I see with its aid is merely an image and not an object. It is objected further that my eyes can deceive me, but this (taken literally) is misleading as well: I am in fact deceived by misinterpreting what I see, not by my eyes. The old example of the oar appearing bent in the water does not undermine the point. The vision in this case is correct: you see the thing as refracted through water. Thinking the oar itself is bent is a misinterpretation based on ignorance of the properties of water, and one quickly dispelled by pulling the oar out of the water. So, we know—there seems no good reason to doubt—not mere images or representations, but real things as experienced. At the level of primary experience, we have genuine knowledge, but only of things as presented to us; as we experience further aspects of things, our knowledge increases, resulting often in new interpretations of their meaning, but the original, limited experience gives genuine, though limited knowledge. McCosh means his account of cognition to apply generally to anything we immediately apprehend. All the above, apart from the particular physical instrument, applies in principle not only to other sense perceptions but to all our perceptions without qualification. We know our own selves or other personalities, just as we know rooms and oars, through the things

112


manifesting themselves; they have to touch consciousness some way, directly or through intermediaries. Most relevant for our purposes, we know moral phenomena this way, recognizing moral qualities just as presented to us, they making their reality known in our own inward movements or through the media of others’ speech and external actions. The things a man thus knows directly and immediately, McCosh says, are his own body, external bodies, and his non-material self or personality. He could not escape the facts of his personality—his willing, evaluating, and so on—if he wanted to. Immediately cognizable qualities of bodies include extension (occupying space), number, motion, and power, their exercising influence on themselves and other things (IM 180–87). On the level of the individual human being, McCosh observes as a point of significance (as Witherspoon did) that mind and body are mutually affective. This, too, is known directly. Thanks to modern science we can say now that “coexistence” of the “mind” and the “bodily organism” is in fact, as William James will say in different terms (see “The Self,” Chapter 5), “necessary to any effect being produced, and the effect is the result of the two operating and cooperating. Thus in all perception through the senses there is a cerebral power and there is mental power, and without both there will be no result, no object perceived” (IM 191). But if this specific conclusion of modern science was not self-evident from the beginning, the conclusion that man is in some sense a complex of mutually influencing physical and mental factors was. However the terms “physical” and “mental” are defined, those terms or some equivalents will remain indispensable as long as the phenomena they denote continue to make their presence known. McCosh’s second class of intuitions, the primitive beliefs, are necessary beliefs following from the primitive cognitions. They are, precisely, beliefs in things not immediately before the mind but raised by things that have been. Examples are the beliefs in time and space and infinity (IM 196–209). The belief in space follows from perceptions of objects as having extension and separation from other extended objects. The belief in time follows from perceptions of actions as happening before and after other actions. The belief in infinity follows from the realization “that to whatever point we go, in reality or imagination, there must be a space and time beyond” (IM 209). In moral matters, the cognition of moral qualities in agents brings with it an irresistible belief in their rightness or wrongness not only in the particular case but in every case.17 The third kind of intuitions, primitive judgments, McCosh describes as necessary judgments arising on the comparison of known objects. The mind notices different objects and perceives certain relations among them; it then intuitively judges some of these as necessary relations. There is the relation


113

of identity (constituted by the continuing existence over time of a thing), of wholes and parts, of space, of time, of quantity, of resemblance, of active properties to substance, and of cause and effect (IM 236–78). Specifically moral judgments involve verdicts of right and wrong relations, between persons or within an individual.

Moral Intuitions Clearly, moral cognitions, beliefs, and judgments must be for McCosh the foundation of moral understanding. These are the specific functions, as he presents it, of conscience. In its cognitive mode, conscience recognizes certain qualities in known objects, specifically the moral qualities, the rightness or the wrongness, in the voluntary states and acts of rational creatures. Certain necessary beliefs and judgments follow: we spontaneously believe certain acts to be good and others bad everywhere, at all times; and in considering relations within or between persons or comparing moral cognitions and beliefs, we are led to certain necessary moral conclusions, not as a product of reasoning or ratiocination but as something “seen” as soon as the necessary relations are seen. Considering the relation between man and God, for instance, we immediately conclude we ought to obey God; or observing a wrong act and its painful consequences, we spontaneously judge the suffering as deserved (IM 286–87). McCosh in The Method of the Divine Government emphasizes the importance of distinguishing carefully between conscience and (discursive) reason and of recognizing their independent functions: “The understanding does not feel that it is called to justify itself to the conscience, nor is the conscience required to justify itself to the understanding. . . . A thousand errors have arisen from imagining that the conscience should give account of itself to the understanding, and that the understanding should give account of itself to the conscience” (MDG 295–96). Because awareness of right and wrong is intuitive and not a product of reasoning, insisting on rational arguments for moral behavior can actually have the effect of numbing the conscience, or rather making you numb to it, and of stunting moral development: a man should not wait for a reason to act on what he knows intuitively should be done. Hume and later Mill had both made the mistake of insisting that conscience give a rational account of itself because they failed to recognize the existence and nature of intuitions and self-evident truth. Conversely, reasoning would become intolerably burdensome, indeed impossible, if you demanded a moral justification for beginning any train of thought. McCosh’s “complete view of the conscience” posed in Divine Government reveals just how close his account is to Witherspoon’s. Such a view, McCosh

114


says, requires a consideration of conscience under three aspects: (1) “as proceeding upon and revealing a law [above itself] with authoritative obligations”; (2) “as pronouncing an authoritative judgment upon actions presented to it”; and (3) “as possessing a class of emotions, or as a sentiment” (MDG 296, 299, 302). The conscience, he explains, “though supreme within the mind . . . does not look upon itself as absolutely supreme. . . . It points to a law prior to itself, above itself, independent of itself, universal, unchangeable, and eternal. The conscience is not the law itself, it is merely the organ which makes it known to us—the eye that looks to it” (MDG 298). In its decisions, conscience does not distinguish between true and false, or discover relations or resemblances, but simply declares the right or wrong of orientations and the actions linked to them. These decisions call up certain emotions or sentiments for support, critical for making them practically effective. Contra Hume, Smith, and Mill, however, McCosh considers the decisions themselves, though not a product of reasoning, essentially rational rather than sentimental: while every act of conscience is in fact accompanied by sentiment, the sentiment is ancillary to the factual determination of rightness or wrongness (MDG 298–304).18 The “action” here, McCosh stresses, is spiritual. Conscience judges exclusively mental phenomena, not “outward” actions but acts of will and “the mind or agent manifested in these acts” (MDG 337). The key relations involved are those between the will and its objects and between the agent and what he ought to be, or between him and the higher law. No outward act in itself can be judged good or evil; it can only be so judged in its connection with the will of the actor. Likewise, inward affections become morally good or evil only in association with will.19 The good person has a rightly directed will and thus relates rightly to the law of his nature and of his Maker, while the bad person’s wrongly bent will puts him out of joint with it (MDG 337–38). Again echoing Witherspoon, McCosh finds four kinds of moral judgment: “First, it authoritatively demands that certain actions be done. Secondly, it authoritatively insists that certain actions be not done. Thirdly, it declares that the performance of the first class of actions is good, commendable, rewardable. Fourthly, it announces that the omission of the first, or commission of the second class is wrong, condemnable, punishable.” The fourth class of moral judgment, significantly, involves or gives rise to “fear of a supernatural power, and of coming judgments. . . . It is this sentiment,” McCosh says, “which, more than anything else, has retained the idea of God—in some cases very vaguely— among all nations” (MDG 341). Thus for McCosh, as for Witherspoon, the moral and the religious are very closely bound up. The conscience recognizes a “law” above it and associates


115

this law with a higher personal power, someone making demands with authority. Sometimes it’s called “natural” law, sometimes “divine,” but always its appeal is personal. William James will have similar ideas (see Chapter 6).

Human Nature The preceding account indicates McCosh’s understanding of human nature. For McCosh, it is primarily a matter of soul. The human body differs from the bodies of the lower animals only by a matter of degrees, but the soul makes man qualitatively different. McCosh accepts Darwinian evolution but does not think it changes the spiritual dynamic.20 Reflecting the Christian conception, he makes the soul to have not three as with Plato but four parts—intelligence or reason, conscience, will, and the “appetencies.” Conscience could in fact be considered just a certain mode of intuitive reason, but like Witherspoon McCosh treats them separately according to their different objects, intelligence being concerned with truth and falsehood, conscience with moral goodness and perversion. Intelligence involves the powers of rational cognition, belief, and judgment before outlined, and also the power of ratiocination. The will is the power of choosing. The conscience can be described summarily as the power of judging right and wrong will, through moral intuition. The appetencies are natural inclinations—appetites, desires, feelings.21 Collectively, the appetencies, the will, and the conscience are in McCosh’s lexicon the “motive powers,” in that all involve a tendency to move us. (Intelligence moves us only in tandem with one of these.) McCosh describes the relations among the parts with characteristically terse elegance. The will decides among the inclinations, and the conscience, addressing itself to the will, intuitively perceives “when a particular appetency should be allowed and when it should be restrained” (MDG 284–85). Conscience is, in a sense, capable of error, despite the self-evident, necessary, and universal character of its verdicts. This apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that, “while our decisions upon the acts presented may be intuitively certain, yet . . . the acts are not intuitively presented, and may be very inaccurately presented” (MDG 299–300). “If we look directly and fairly at moral excellence,” McCosh explains, “the mind must declare it to be good. But then first the mind may refuse to look at it at all, and secondly, it may not regard it in the right light” (MDG 299). The first error is a problem of will, the second a problem of reason. Conscience needs a good will and right reason to function properly, as well as access to all the relevant facts. Of the two, bad will is by far the deeper problem, because reason itself, bound as Plato said by the baser passions, can’t

116


be righted as long as the will, choosing to indulge them and keen to escape the pain of guilt, continues in its refusal to look at the good. McCosh describes the psychological dynamics in Divine Government: The conditions of responsibility seem to be conscience, will, and intelligence— the conscience being the law, the will the agent, and the intelligence the means of announcing the state of the case to the law. The will, as the agent, is the immediate seat of good or evil, and all evil may be traced primarily to it. But the will, if depraved, will soon come to sway the intelligence, and the intelligence gives a false report to the conscience, which utters, in consequence, a false judgment. [Thus,] the moral disorder, beginning in the will, lies all along essentially in the will, which corrupts intelligence, which, again, deceives the conscience (MDG 382).

In short, Augustine was right. The result is devastating, first for accurately judging ourselves, then for judging others, whose moral crimes we will let pass without objection. The will, then, must somehow be rectified for the soul to work as it should: “Give us but a corrected will, and the intelligence will give faithful reports, and the conscience will become an unerring guide” (MDG 382).22 The corruption of the will and the accordant disordering of the soul is precisely the problem of “sin.” The predicament is not only that we are disordered but that, even when conscience is functioning properly, we don’t always live according to its dictates; worse, when we want to live by them, we find ourselves unable to do so consistently and are racked by guilt for past and present wrongs.23 Nevertheless, McCosh agrees again with Witherspoon: human nature in its corruption is not natural. The true essence of human nature is not destroyed. Conscience, as Aquinas said, cannot be obliterated even in the most willful offender.24 Thus, McCosh as Witherspoon (despite their common Presbyterian debt to Calvin) rejects “total depravity.” He takes the Christian doctrine of sin to be thoroughly “established” by experience, but he recognizes important “limitations” to it. First, men generally have some good qualities, and though their love is “commonly misdirected and perverted” respecting both God and man, they show at least a capacity for loving well; and second, “every particular kind of sin is not practiced by every man, or natural to every man.” There is another, less encouraging implication to rejecting total depravity: man “is not so corrupt that he cannot become worse” (MDG 369, 370, 371).

Ethics Not surprisingly, McCosh holds that any sound ethical theory must begin with the moral intuitions. “It is the special office of ethical science,” he says,


117

“to generalize and express the cognitions, beliefs, and judgments of the moral power, and to derive rules from them by which to judge of actions” (IM 287). The ethical scientist should start at the level of the concrete, with particular intuitions: taking this wallet someone left on the table would be wrong, that woman’s sacrifice for her child is commendable, and the like. Such intuitions give way to more far-reaching intuitions, which may be put in the form of ethical propositions or of general or specific precepts—one should do good to others and not harm, “Thou shalt not steal,” and so on. “But a science of ethics fitted to serve any useful purpose,” McCosh warns, again in Witherspoonian fashion, “cannot be constructed from the mere native convictions of the mind. . . . In order to serve the ends intended by it, ethics must settle what are the duties of different classes of persons, according to the relation in which they stand to each other, such as rulers and subjects, parents and children, masters and servants; and what the path which individuals should follow in certain circumstances, it may be, very difficult and perplexing.” The complexity of human relations and circumstances, not to speak of the intricacy of human motives and states of mind, means, as Aristotle said, that ethics cannot be an exact science, that “demonstration [from first principles] can be carried but a very little way in ethics” (IM 407).25 Much gathering of experience and much reasoning, and perhaps a little divine assistance, will be required to work out any kind of complete ethical theory. To elaborate on the method, McCosh says explicitly that his ethical investigations are conducted “in the spirit and after the manner of Lord Bacon.” In mental sciences (of which ethics is one) as well as in the natural sciences, “there should be an orderly observation of facts, accompanied by analysis, or, as Bacon expresses, the ‘necessary exclusions’ of things indifferent, and this followed up by a process of generalization in which we seize on the points of agreement.” The difference between the material and the mental sciences is that, while the former relies on the senses for its information, the latter relies solely on consciousness. “Ethics,” as McCosh defines it, “is the science of the necessary laws of our nature.” These laws or principles exist a priori in the mind but are not known a priori. They have to be discovered reflexively, through a posteriori investigation of particular moral perceptions. “The historical method of inquiry” as employed by Schleiermacher “with whom ethics is an investigation of human nature, with its forms and tendencies developing itself in history,” is useful for the ethical theorist, but not, according to McCosh, sufficient: “as human nature is always presented in history as a complex web, in which good and evil are mixed together, it is needful to have a test to determine which is the one and which the other,” and only an inductive exploration of “man’s moral constitution,” as seen through the moral intuitions, will provide such a standard (MDG 289–91).26

118


In the comment on Schleiermacher and the hint of a need to recognize the permanent potentialities implicated in the human forms and tendencies historically unfolded, McCosh seems on the verge of realizing the full amplitude of common sense. The potentialities are for him anchored in a permanent human moral constitution at the core of which is a conscience discerning and affirming right order and right relations by intuition, or what Reid called common sense. But McCosh doesn’t get very far analyzing the possible outworkings of these potentialities. His treatment of them is primarily negative, showing the pernicious personal and social effects of a disordered conscience (see below). Had he similarly elaborated the effects of a healthy conscience, he could have helped forge a path to a more complete common sense moral and political philosophy than Witherspoon was able to suggest, uncovering not only how conscience works in recognizing a higher law but also how rightly oriented conscience manifests itself historically. McCosh’s failure to do this was more consequential than Witherspoon’s because of the time in which he lived, and it is at this point that the weaknesses of Scottish realism start to reveal themselves. Witherspoon lived in a time of American consensus on the nature of conscience, and a time of confidence in the authority and reliability of its judgments. In McCosh’s day that consensus and that confidence were rapidly eroding. Unfortunately it seems McCosh did not grasp the magnitude of the crisis. His inability to appreciate fully and to evaluate theoretically the phronetic dimension of common sense makes its impact felt right here. He in fact recognizes the practical limitations of ethical science as he has conceived it. “For the purposes of practical morality,” he says, “it is not needful to determine the nature of ethical principles; for these principles operate spontaneously, and act best when we are not thinking of them, but are simply desiring to do what is right” (MDG 291). As far as it goes, this statement is not problematic: what does it matter how we know what we should do, so long as we know it? The problem enters when the knowledge becomes questionable to us, when we begin to doubt what we know. This is precisely the problem of skepticism McCosh was so keen to overcome, and he had in fact employed his ethical science for the purpose: direct the skeptics to consider their moral intuitions, what they show, and what mental laws of operation they reveal, and maybe the skeptics will see the error of their ways. But while this should help, it does not go far enough, because it doesn’t get at the practical problems, and these more than the intellectual puzzles are the ground of skeptical doubt. Or to put it another way, the doubt is existential, not primarily intellectual. McCosh himself has pointed out the complexity of mental states, motives, and circumstances encountered in the moral world; and in a crisis of confidence these will seem overwhelming. This


119

is increasingly where people found themselves as the nineteenth century barreled forward, not only the intellectuals but more and more the common man, too. The poison had not yet gone far in America, but it was already eating the heart out of Europe. McCosh’s science or philosophy was not adequate to handle this. His definition of ethical science as the analytical elaboration of the principles or laws of the mind is too narrow. He needed a philosophically articulate practical critique of skepticism, but along with his contemporary Scottish realists, he let Reid’s practical criticism, itself woefully underdeveloped, drop out of the picture altogether. This is in part because those contemporaries all (like Kant) took it to be impertinent, an appeal to vulgar prejudice, and in part because (also like Kant) they couldn’t fully come to terms with the active, dynamic quality of moral consciousness. The philosophical inadequacy shows itself most revealingly in McCosh’s treatment of “practical rules.” He acknowledges that practical guidelines may help the spontaneous workings of conscience, but he thinks ethical science will be of little use here, that (and this is the critical line) they “may best be learned from the Word of God and treatises founded upon it” (MDG 291). McCosh means in part to indicate the common sense point, often eluding the eggheads, that you don’t need ethical treatises to live well, but in making practical ethics a mere adjunct of the Christian religion he undermines the objectivity of ethics and thereby contributes to the further erosion of moral confidence. At the very point where the right kind of philosophy would be most relevant, he retreats into his orthodox Presbyterianism. But if McCosh’s ethical science fell short at a critical juncture, it is still of great value for clarifying a few points of Witherspoon’s version, for exposing certain weaknesses of alternative theories of McCosh’s time, especially of utilitarian ethics, and for illuminating the essence of social disorder in relation to the natural order (see below). McCosh’s ethics is really remarkably close to Witherspoon’s and demonstrates again the consistency of Scottish realist moral philosophizing over the previous century. Both his account of the crucial underlying experiences and of their implications mirrors the founder’s. Like Witherspoon, McCosh has described conscience as grasping intuitively a law above us, and he says in regard to ethical science that reflecting on our moral nature may direct the soul upward to God, take us beyond the confines of our nature, “beyond mechanism to life, and beyond law to love,” to find “the traces of a living God whom we may admire and trust, and at the same time, revere and adore, and whose image, as we cherish it, assimilates our character to itself ” (MDG 456). The sense of divine excellence, love, trust, dependence, and corresponding obligation toward a living Person that Witherspoon highlighted (this obligation being implied in McCosh’s account of conscience) is all here.

120


McCosh goes on in similar Witherspoonian fashion to discuss also happiness, duty and interest, love and justice (his answer to Witherspoon’s justice and mercy), guilt and fear of bad consequences, drawing out from all these experiences the rudiments of his ethical theory. Ethical science, McCosh tells us, is concerned with four subjects: (1) “the mental process, the faculty or feeling, by which the distinction between vice and virtue is observed”; (2) “the common quality or qualities to be found in all virtuous action”; (3) “the rule by which we are to determine whether an action is virtuous”; and (4) “the consequences which follow from virtue and vice in the feelings of the mind and the experience of society” (MDG 287). The mental process we have seen already, in McCosh’s description of the functioning of conscience. Proceeding then to the next division, what are the qualities that make virtue in action recognizable? McCosh finds three to be essential: that it is voluntary, that it is right or lawful, and that it is done in respect to God as the lawgiver. Again, “there can be neither virtue nor vice where there is no exercise of the will” (MDG 310). McCosh includes as “exercises of will” not only positive volitions but also wish and desire, although he carefully distinguishes these from emotions: emotions, being involuntary, cannot be sinful; wishes and desires, as he describes them, can (MDG 309–12). On lawfulness, McCosh says, conscience recognizes the moral law to be “first, independent of it; secondly, binding upon it; and, thirdly, binding on all intelligent beings” (MDG 314). That is, conscience sees the law to be a universal standard, the specific basis (he might have said) of natural law. An action is virtuous if and only if it is both right (in accord with this law) and done because it is right.27 McCosh like Witherspoon does not agree with those like Francis Hutcheson who make benevolence or well-wishing the sum of virtue. Love is in fact essential, but to be virtuous love must be ordered and well directed, specifically by justice, giving to each what he deserves. Love is “the impellant of virtue,” justice is “the rule”: “Love, ever ready to flow out like waters from a fountain, has unchanging justice determining its measure and direction, and furnishing it with a channel in which to flow” (MDG 318). The “aboveness” of the moral law points to God as the lawgiver, the recognition of whom lends weight to the law and “opens up a new and higher class of duties.” It “turns morality into religion, and makes all duties, even those which we owe to our fellow-men, to be also duties which we owe to God” (MDG 321).28 Concerning the rule for determining the virtue of actions, the main problem is how to distinguish “between the voice of conscience and that of interest or passion” (MDG 324). Interest or passion can make things seem right that are not.29 The key for escaping deception, McCosh says, is to discover the law or principle of right action governing the action at hand. The extreme


121

difficulty of doing this consistently is one of the reasons he stresses so strongly the practical value of biblical revelation. “Those who possess the inward principle [of conscience],” he explains, “will find stability and consistency imparted to morality by embodying its dictates in a code of precepts. . . . But the work of forming a moral code without revelation has ever been felt to be encompassed with great difficulties, and the result of such an effort has invariably been a very imperfect and mutilated exhibition of the moral law itself ” (MDG 324–25). In light of the will’s perversion and the corresponding distortion of conscience, McCosh believes revelation “absolutely necessary” for consistency in virtue (MDG 326). More profoundly, he suggests, Christian revelation points the way to restoring the will itself so that the precepts once clearly perceived can be consistently obeyed.30 The law or principle of right action turns out to be that love tempered by justice and a righted will, or the “royal law of love” as he later calls it, and the way it ought to be applied constitutes the principle conscience intuits to be governing each particular case. Specifically, “the regulating principle of our conduct [is] love to God and love to man” (MDG 383), and the forms this love should take in varying relations give us our duties, both general and case-specific. With this understanding, McCosh touches the dynamic quality of the moral life, and the love he describes might be taken as an indication of the deeper essence of natural law, but as before, he leaves the matter philosophically undifferentiated. Nevertheless, we can see at least the form of the matter in the account given here and, reflecting on it, can begin to see more clearly why he emphasizes so insistently the limits of his kind of ethical science: the life of morality is a love we cannot work up by our own ingenuity or effort, something we rather give way to than control. Given this reality, the task of ethical science, which again McCosh’s version is not up to, is to show philosophically how this love originates, how we can facilitate it, and crucially for common sense, the intuitive dimension of the love experience, the sense in which we know through love what we ought to do. This would make ethical science fully practical again. The last concern of ethics, McCosh said, is the question of the consequences of moral acts, and here we begin to see the way common sense impacts personal development and social culture. McCosh finds it significant that a “correspondence” seems to obtain in nature between moral activity and certain effects, which points, it might be added, to a natural order that he delineates at some length later, in his comments on social order. Two correspondences in particular seem important: the internal linkage of pleasant and painful emotions with virtuous and vicious affections; and the external connection of social advantages and disadvantages with virtuous and vicious behavior. The virtuous affections are pleasant and include both the pleasure of right love,

122


something “far higher and deeper than mere animal gratification,” and the pleasure of contemplating virtuous actions; the vicious affections, by contrast (envy, malice, or revenge, for instance) are painful (MDG 327, 328). The various affections, moreover, raise in the mind associated ideas and feelings that, persistently engaged, influence the whole character. The external consequences of continuous virtuous action extend from the habits flowing from established character to social life, including a “multiplication of happiness” wrought by mutual justice and benevolence, an augmentation of confidence or trust, and very often, prosperity, or “the success which generally follows the exertions of excellence” (MDG 329). Although wrongdoing sometimes brings success in the short term, the results of sustained vice are precisely the opposite— misery, alienation, social and economic decay (MDG 326–28). The common sense angle in all this is that the relevant affections and behaviors depend heavily on the attention and deference we give or fail to give to the dictates of moral intuition.31 The key to virtue, McCosh has implied, is precisely faithfulness to these dictates. If we remain sensitive and responsive to them we can be sure positive results will follow. We see McCosh’s moral thought at its sharpest and at its peak of philosophical and social relevance in his critique of Utilitarian ethics, in which he applies the elements of his philosophy with great force. He accepts the Utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as an appropriate goal but finds the philosophical foundation Bentham and Mill provide for the principle grossly inadequate. Discussing Hume’s ethics in The Scottish Philosophy, McCosh summarized “the fundamental objections” to the utilitarian approach in a series of questions: “Whence the obligation lying on us to promote the happiness of others? to give to others their due? to keep our promises? From their utility, it is answered. But why are we bound to attend to what is useful? . . . why the reproach that follows, and which justifies itself when we have failed to keep our word? . . . These questionings bring us,” McCosh says, “to a justice which guards conventions, to a law which enjoins love” (SP 152). McCosh elaborates his position fully in Mill’s Philosophy. There he identifies four essential problems with Mill’s utilitarian theory. First, it fails to account for “the peculiar idea and conviction” we have regarding moral good and evil (EMP 360). Mill admits that in consciousness we find moral feelings or judgments, but he attributes these fully to interest and sympathy and their corresponding associations of ideas. McCosh concedes that “persons may be led by mere prudence to attend to the duties of an outward morality, and by a kind of disposition to relieve distress, altogether irrespective of a moral sense,” but we cannot ignore the imperative quality of the intuition of obligation and the corresponding sense that if we neglect the obligation we are “blameworthy” (EMP 363).32


123

Second, Mill’s utilitarianism does not provide “sufficient sanctions to induce us to approve virtue and condemn vice” or, in other words, does not “contain within itself a body of motives or motive powers, fitted to lead to virtuous conduct” (EMP 367). It recommends seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number but cannot say why anyone ought to do so, and it undermines religious sanction by ejecting both conscience and the motive of adhering to divine will. Mill says in his book on Hamilton that “the ultimate sanction . . . of all morality (external motives apart) [is] a subjective feeling in our minds,” which he thinks is as powerful a motive as can be had. But a faithful examination of consciousness, McCosh insists, shows that the feeling of pleasure or pain associated with moral questions arises “in consequence of a prior perception” (EMP 369) of good or evil: the feeling does not exist independently but derives from the perception. Mill describes moral feeling as “all encrusted over with collateral associations, derived from sympathy, from love, and still more from fear; from all the forms of religious feeling; from the recollections of childhood and of all our past life; from self-esteem, desire of the esteem of others, and occasionally even self-abasement.” This mass of feeling, Mill thinks, provides a kind of personal standard of right and simultaneously a powerful incentive not to violate it.33 Again, McCosh says, Mill is only half right. It is true “that other and secondary motives may and should gather and cling around our primary conviction of duty, to aid and strengthen it,” but the fact remains that at the center lies the conviction (EMP 370). The inherent deficiency of Mill’s emotive standard of morality will make itself felt, McCosh believes, when “the intelligent youth [who] comes to rise beyond his educational beliefs, and to think for himself, will not be satisfied with the mere existence of the mass of feeling” but will ask, “Is it justifiable, is it binding?” If this intelligent youth is taught that his associated moral feelings “have no obligation [beneath them] in the reason or nature of things, then why should he not uncoil them?” (EMP 371). Besides, even if he is satisfied with them, some of the feelings created by association may have a bad tendency when unregulated by conscience (EMP 372–73). The third problem with Mill’s approach is that it doesn’t furnish “a sufficient test” of the virtuousness of acts and agents. Mill’s test is the tendency of a person’s actions to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. An obvious practical problem with this test, as McCosh observes, is that “in the complicated affairs of this world, the most far-sighted cannot know for certain what may be the total consequences of any one act” (EMP 373).34 More fundamentally, Mill provides no test for the virtuousness of motives as distinguished from outward acts and, in consequence, cannot adequately explain what makes an action wrong. Nor does Mill give adequate suggestions for how defective motives might be corrected. “Mr. Mill speaks of ‘reproach’ being one of the checks on evil; but when,” McCosh asks, “is reproach justifiable? Not knowing

124


what to make of sin, the system provides no place for repentence.” In the end, “The boundary line [in Mill’s system] between moral good and evil is drawn so uncertainly, that persons will ever be tempted to cross it without allowing that they have done so,—the more so that they are not told what they should do when they have crossed it” (EMP 377). Finally, Mill’s utilitarian ethics fails to account for all the virtues. The virtue of devotion to God drops out entirely. The virtue of love disappears, because Mill doesn’t know what love is, reducing it to mere sympathy. The virtue of moral courage is undercut by laying so much stress on relief of suffering, when doing right often demands suffering in the short term, in the form of resistance to evil and forgoing lower goods for the sake of higher. The virtues of the soul in general vanish because Mill makes the consequences of acts alone the criterion of right—a person’s moral state of being is on his account merely incidental. Thus, Mill is right to suggest that all have a duty to promote the happiness of others, but he fails to establish it as a duty, to give obligation to it. Mill is right to look to the consequences of behavior as a crucial concern in moral deliberation, but he lacks any adequate measure of the true moral status of those consequences, or any appreciation for the fact that some actions are good and some bad in themselves, apart from any consequence. Mill is right, too, to recognize the importance of utility as a motive, but he leaves out other, more powerful motives for seeking others’ happiness and never gets to the quality of the person motivated. In short, as Witherspoon had suggested, while utility is a genuine good, it is not the only good, and by itself simply will not do as a moral standard (EMP 377–81). McCosh’s powerful critique of Utilitarian ethics here shows how philosophically effective Scottish moral realism could be at its best. In exposing the shortcomings of utilitarianism, it also points to problems of American common sense that would become increasingly apparent in the decades after his passing: the lack of reflection on what the common good might be, or even any thought of the common good; the reduction of care and service to providing comfort and relief, and of the argument for serving to “how good it makes you feel”; constant talk of the right to such provision and very little of duty; the complete disappearance of any talk of virtue; and very limited understanding of the nature of the obligation that makes duty and virtue intelligible. The vitality of American common sense in its moral dimension is not so strong now as it was in the era of Scottish realism. The nature of love and duty as McCosh sees them takes definition in his elaboration of the classes of duties. McCosh gives a summary account in a late, slim volume entitled Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics. Like


125

Witherspoon he groups them as duties to God, to man, and to self, and he describes them much in the spirit of Witherspoon. Duties, says McCosh, are “something due, something to be paid.” They are always, like obligations, to somebody. The duties to God, as Witherspoon had said, encompass the others, as all right is traceable ultimately to God, the architect of man’s moral constitution.35 But separating them into the three categories clarifies the varying forms these duties will take. McCosh describes the main duties specifically to God as public and private worship (cultivating a “reverent and devout feeling” and a willing dependence) and cooperating with divine causes (as communicating the Gospel, suppressing vice, and promoting morality), all from right love (OMN 33). “In general,” he says, we have a duty to obey God “whenever He has uttered a command, whatever be the sacrifice we are required to make” (OMN 35). Toward men, we generally owe honor, sympathy, and love. The “standard of love” to others is our own “instinctive love toward ourselves” (OMN 37): we should love our neighbors as ourselves. More specifically, we owe them (1) integrity or soundness of character, which includes both our own personal trustworthiness and charitableness, involving respect and support for their integrity; (2) veracity or honesty; and (3) respect for their “property,” including the precious cargo of their reputation and influence as well as their material possessions (OMN 38–41). Love, for McCosh, again entails much more than acts of sympathy. The duties to others can be further subdivided into the duties of communities, masters and servants, families, church, and state. “The moral law is binding on communities,” McCosh says, “as it is upon single persons.” He does not mention any special duties to the various communities such as “nations, towns, commercial companies, and clubs,” assuming them to involve the same duties to individuals applied on a larger scale. The other kinds of duties are specific to certain situations. Servants owe their masters “such service as was understood at their engagement, [as] determined by custom or the law of the country,” and masters “should give respect both to the best interests and feelings of their dependents,” above all respecting their right to “liberty of thought and of religious worship” (OMN 41–42). Within the family, father and mother are obliged to provide lovingly for their children’s welfare, seeing that they are not only raised to maturity but also trained for a future occupation; children in turn owe their parents affection and obedience, “except in cases where their commands are seen to be clearly contrary to the higher demands of God”; brothers and sisters and more distant blood relations owe to one another perpetual affection and kindness (OMN 43). Sexual relationships, McCosh insists, should be confined to marriage, and marriages supported by law; divorces should not be allowed except “from

126


causes which virtually abrogate the relationship: by unfaithfulness . . . or by willful and proven abandonment” (OMN 44). The church and the state owe to each other a solemn honoring of their respective sovereignties: “the church should not meddle with money or temporalities of any kind, except incidentally to secure buildings or stipends to its ministers,” and “the civil magistrate is not at liberty to interfere in spiritual matters, in the government or services of the church” (OMN 46).36 The state owes the people general protection of civil and religious rights, and the people owe the state “strict obedience,” so long as “the government keeps within its own province, having to do with [preserving] men’s lives and their property” (OMN 48, 47). In relation to other states, each state has a duty of considering “calmly and resolutely” whether its cause is just before it resorts to war (OMN 49). Finally, McCosh lists the duties to ourselves as attending to our bodily health and preservation, maintaining chastity, training and improving our mental faculties, cultivating “an independence in forming our opinions, and courage in carrying them out,” and developing personal character through virtuous habits, especially habits of “self-command,” “industry,” “perseverance,” “thorough integrity,” and “charity” (OMN 50, 51). In general, we are to love ourselves according to the situations in which we are placed (OMN 50). McCosh’s scheme of duties, again, is based on the intuitions of conscience. Understanding our duties presupposes a recognition of rights and wrongs, of how persons should and should not be treated. For moral guidelines to be effective, moreover, the obligations implied in them must hit home to you. You must see on some level the claims persons have on you, and respond.

Conscience, Nature, and Social Order McCosh does not, like Witherspoon, lay out a complete political theory, but he does suggest a conception of politics much like Witherspoon’s, a political approach grounded in conscience but alive to utilitarian considerations. His treatment of the social dimension of conscience or moral intuition is primarily negative, showing the consequences of not heeding it. More than Witherspoon, he treats utility in natural terms: Witherspoon had noted how nature has contrived to align our duties and interests, but McCosh goes much farther and tries to show systematically how it does so and also how it limits the harm man can do when he pushes duty aside. McCosh mentioned earlier that a malfunctioning conscience is caused by a bad will, which leads reason and conscience astray. But dysfunctionality, he observes, is only the beginning of the trouble. The mind, recoiling from the pain of guilt from the memory of wrongful acts, increasingly tries to push


127

the memories out and “learns to present the deeds which it wishes to do or to avoid in a false [that is, more or less attractive] light” (MDG 383). Reasoning increasingly is put in the service of base passion. Conscience then, misinformed by reason and judging an increasingly incomplete survey of moral facts, is able to provide less and less guidance. The perversity deepens. Eventually, if the soul continues down this path, conscience itself is corrupted, wreaking untold damage on itself and, inevitably, beyond itself. McCosh divides the process of this corruption analytically into four stages: First, there is the “unenlightened conscience,” in which “the mind avoids inquiry, because it does not wish to be disturbed,” and the individual acts “according to the prevailing views of the age and country, without making any nice inquiry into their accuracy” (MDG 383–84, 383). Next comes the “perverted conscience,” in which the mind is marked not only by ignorance but by “positive mistake,” “calling good evil, and evil good”; corrupt will has “succeeded in calling in the conscience” to its service, so that “men feel as if they did right to be [wrong]” (MDG 384, 385). Then follows the “unfaithful conscience,” when the conscience has simply ceased to inform of wrongs because of “the painful nature of the emotions which the contemplation of sin calls up, and the effort which the mind makes to avoid or deaden the sensation” (MDG 386). Finally, there is the “troubled conscience,” in which the mind is racked by “violent and convulsive movements of self-reproach which will at times break in upon the self-satisfaction of the most complacent” (OMN 387). McCosh is convinced that the psychological and social effects of bad conscience can be as devastating as those of bad will and thinks the social ramifications deserve much more attention among ethical and political theorists. He attributes much of the restlessness, anger, and anxiety in the world to “an unsatisfied conscience” (MDG 395). He is “inclined to refer not only much of human misery, but much more than is commonly supposed, of human sinfulness, to the working of an evil conscience. . . . It is possible for the conscience to become a deranging instead of a regulating power; and when it does so, it becomes the most corrupting of all agents” (MDG 396). A continued resistance to conscience ends in a desperate last resort of condemning God as cruel and unjust, and from this point there is endless internal war. As the soul increasingly alienates from the good, there is even a “drying up of the natural affections,” first toward God, and then toward people as well (MDG 405, 406). The deep perversity of tyrannical men, both large and small, McCosh thinks owes much to deranged conscience. Passions alone simply do not explain “the particular mode and intensity of human wickedness” (MDG 414). Given that corruption of conscience in some form is the prevailing human condition, as McCosh thinks, how is society kept from utter dissolution?

128


Fortunately, he says, there are countervailing natural arrangements that reinforce the natural order. Two critical ones are the family and civil government.37 The first counterbalances selfishness by familial affection and a corresponding sense of mutual duties (MDG 234–35), and the second reinforces restraint by its commands and compliance with law by the “palpable advantages” it affords to society. Obedience is further reinforced by “the feelings of allegiance, of loyalty, and nationality, which spring up in the human bosom” (MDG 235, 236). In addition to these positive natural arrangements, McCosh observes three salutary negative ones: “the physical dependence of man” on a properly functioning body, which puts definite limits on what he can do; the uncertainty and brevity of his life, which often prevents him from trying or successfully executing “bolder schemes of ambition and wickedness”; and his dependence on other human beings, which keeps him friendly to them, if not out of “true affection or righteous principle” (MDG 236, 237) then at least out of need. Moreover, McCosh says, nature makes evil to counteract evil at every level of society, even of civilization—a kind of natural checks and balances. For instance, advance of nation and civilization makes men in one sense capable of greater evil, because “the power of masses is greatly augmented by the intercommunication of ideas and sentiments,” but it brings with it new restraining forces, such as the greater awareness and augmented “independence of thinking and acting” that come with the advancement of learning and the spread of information. Society thus appears to be in the long run, in some measure at least, self-correcting: “Like the steam-engine, [society] has regulators and safety-valves, all self-acting, ready to meet the threatened evil, from whatever quarter it may proceed” (MDG 239). In all this McCosh perceives a beneficent providential order that is flouted only at great peril. In fact, modern man, conscience deranged, has moved in increasingly open revolt against this order, with disastrous results. McCosh’s analysis of the situation is penetrating. Given his description of the roles played by conscience and intuition, that movement could be called a revolt against common sense. The basic problem is the replacement of common sense with ideology, substituting, in place of our natural intuitions of reality, ideas of what we wish the world were. “It always happens,” McCosh explains, “that things advance most prosperously when there is no interference with them on the part of meddling [artificial] wisdom, which is folly differing from folly only in this, that it is more conceited.” Worse, it is exceedingly dangerous. Efforts to “alter the present [natural] constitution of things in favour of what might seem to human wisdom to be a better” will not end well. Nature will have its revenge (MDG 239).


129

McCosh is not surprised to find, then, that the experimental communities of the communists “invariably, and very speedily, become scenes of wretchedness and dissension.” The communist theories of his day propounded by St. Simon, Owen, and Fourier are based, after all, on a radically defective understanding of human nature and the human condition. In particular, those theories all assume that men are naturally directed by enlightened or extended selfinterest, when in fact men “are far more frequently swayed by feelings, sentiments, impulses, and passions” (MDG 239). Clearly, they fail also to recognize the naturalness of family and civil government. Most fundamentally, they fail to come to terms with human limitations. When the natural aids to virtue and restraints on vice are still more radically removed or rejected, the devastation can be shocking. As examples, McCosh mentions the aftermath of the Athenian plague, as recounted by Thucydides; the extremes of emperors and nobles in the late Roman Empire, so poignantly conveyed by Gibbon; and the first modern ideological catastrophe, the Reign of Terror in eighteenth-century France (MDG 248).38 McCosh later attributes the “never-ending [radical] schemes for the improvement of mankind” to a religious impulse (MDG 471), reminding us that in the end the revolt against conscience is a revolt against God. McCosh does not despair in the face of these horrors, however, for history also shows that the natural order wins out in the end. The very destruction wrought by the renegades from conscience itself proves a limit on their ambition. They destroy their base of power and wealth by destroying people and property, or waste it when they have it. Finally, the pendulum will swing the other way and they will provoke a backlash (MDG 257). More profoundly, human nature cannot be entirely undone. Man’s moral constitution cannot be obliterated and remains as a standard. Here McCosh exhibits again the common sense balance. Neo-Calvinist that he was, he neverâ•‚ theless fiercely rejected “the miserably low and groveling views of those who would represent all and each of mankind as utterly selfish and dishonest” (MDG 410). Anyone espousing such views has just as surely abandoned common sense as the lawless rebels who deny all sin. Whatever they say, “the original and indestructible structure of man’s moral nature” can still be discerned within the chaos (MDG 408): (1.) [T]he conscience retains in the human mind its original claims of authority. The law is broken, but it is still binding. Then, (2.) There is room in the depraved heart of man for the play and exercise of all the high talents and susceptibilities with which man was originally furnished. (3.) There are still in the human mind many amiable and benevolent

130


qualities. (4.) There are actions of moral honesty and integrity, and even of religion so called, performed in obedience to conscience. (MDG 390) The problem is not that moral sense is destroyed but that the claims of conscience “are not attended to,” the talents and susceptibilities “are abused and perverted,” the affections are not rightly directed, and the conscience actually obeyed is a partly “perverted” one (MDG 390). And yet conscience, despite the disrupting effects of corruption, remains the source of the “peace and decorum of society.” The genuine honesty, honor, and “disinterested philanthropy” that may be found among corrupt men result from “direct obedience, not indeed full and constant, but partial and occasional, to the dictates of conscience” (MDG 391). Generally, moral truth has its effect on corrupt minds when their wrongs, once committed, are forced on their attention through external circumstances or the natural social affections. Men typically “avoid those sins which after commission must be constantly recalled by events ever recurring” (MDG 392); they shy away from actions provoking sharp social disapproval; and their natural “sympathetic feelings” will not let them get easily accustomed to inflicting injury and pain (MDG 393–94). Other ordering tendencies also remain operational. First, there are the physical and mental appetencies inherent in human nature. The physical appetites (hunger, thirst, sexual desire) “compel man to be industrious and laborious, in order to obtain the food needful for their gratification” and “render him active on the one hand, and dependent on the other” (MDG 418). They encourage, in other words, productivity, discipline, and humility. Mental appetencies (the desires for knowledge, esteem, power, society, and property) also conduce to social well-being. The desire for knowledge fosters the learning and discovery necessary for social improvements and restrains human wickedness by bringing men under inspection and thereby under the sway of public opinion. The desire for honor, when not utterly perverted, engenders “amiability, or that spirit that leads us to study the temper, the tastes, and feelings of our fellow-men,” helping thus to bind society together and providing an added motive for public service and philanthropy. The inclination to power, when not excessive, unites men “who would otherwise be isolated in all their actions, and wavering and unsteady in their movements” around effective leaders, combining their actions to produce powerful results (MDG 420). The yearning for society gives rise to community and all the social offices and benefits of people’s living in near proximity (MDG 421). The desire for property, when it does not turn into raw greed, encourages work; and the habit of working lends “a steadiness of aim and a spirit of caution to individual minds” and issues in “the accumulation of wealth,” which


131

“tends to produce an elegance and a social order which cannot be found in communities stricken with poverty and constantly striving about the necessities of existence.” To these “primary impulses” may be added “the secondary principles” of “a calculating self-love” and a “habitual benevolence,” but “it is by the primary impulses fully as much as by the secondary . . . that mankind are induced to maintain an outward decency and deportment, and society at large is made to clothe itself in becoming decorum” (MDG 422).39 Various classes of natural emotions too, McCosh observes, tend to promote social order in some way. “Arrestive” emotions arising from the sense of potential harm (apprehension, fear, dread, terror) help to make men cautious and support the development of “all the hardy virtues which grow upon caution.” “Instigative” emotions following the recognition of possible benefit (hope, expectation) both stimulate constructive activity and promote happiness. “Adhesive and repulsive” emotions raised on encountering good or bad qualities (desire and aversion) draw men toward good and away from evil (MDG 424– 25). “Remunerative and punitive” emotions emerging with the knowledge of good or evil “already attained” (enjoyment and contentment, grief and depression) reinforce attraction to the one and repulsion from the other. Sympathetic emotions (responsiveness to the joy and sorrow of others) encourage men to help and protect one another (MDG 426). Finally, “aesthetic admiration and repugnance” produced on the observation of order, beauty, nobility, and their opposites help keep the mind focused on worthy objects and engender a sense of “propriety and decorum” that is highly beneficial to the maintenance of social mores (MDG 427). Even when appetites and emotions are corrupted into vanity, ambition, avarice, prodigality, anger, resentment, envy, and party spirit (the most dangerous ones), they are by providential arrangement made to have some good effects. Take away vanity and ambition, McCosh observes, “and it is impossible to calculate how much earthly excellence would be taken away, or rather to say how little would remain” (MDG 431). The ugly vices of avarice and prodigality too, as Smith and Malthus said, sometimes work in the public’s favor, avarice facilitating the accumulation of capital and prodigality burnishing the income of those producing what the extravagant purchase.40 “We see,” McCosh says, “how a nation may owe its commercial and political prosperity, not so much to the wisdom of its statesmen and citizens, as to the skillful adjustments of the government of God” (MDG 432). Anger and resentment, as destructive as they can be, also goad men to prevent and redress injustices, and violent conflicts “have been the means of checking other evils which would have spread inextricable disorder throughout society.” Envy, too, though “among the basest and most malignant of human passions,” often serves to check ambition and turn people

132


against extravagant projects (MDG 433–34). And partisanship in politics and religion, while sometimes a source of great tumult, has also led individuals to subject public measures to “sifting investigation” and fostered “reading, inquiry, and reflection” through the interest generated by controversy (MDG 435–36).

Toward Something Better McCosh makes a powerful case: the arrangement of human nature and the larger natural order together indeed seem to preserve mankind from utter depravity and self-destruction. However, if human beings personally and socially are ever to move beyond the minimal level of restraint and stability enforced by these arrangements to full, robust maturity, common sense must play a more vigorous role than is suggested in his account of it. Sound conscience must not be constantly on the defensive but must be energetically projective. McCosh lived in a reasonably robust common sense community (at Princeton and in America), but, although he knew it in the form of “love,” he was never able to capture philosophically what such moral energy looks like, how it works, or what effects it might have when fully activated. That philosophic work needed a William James, who only began it, but began it magnificently.

5 The Common Sense Basis of James’s Pragmatic Radical Empiricism

William James’s thought represents a remarkable new development in Western common sense philosophy. Jamesian Pragmatism is, rightly considered, a continuation of that tradition. As James himself put it in the subtitle to Pragmatism, it is really but “a new name for some old ways of thinking.” But some elements of the old way had never been adequately assimilated into the tradition’s mainstream. James’s version of Pragmatism in spirit and substance is much more akin to Vico’s common sense than to Aristotle’s or Reid’s or McCosh’s. Like Vico, James understands truth as an appropriation of the real through creative engagement. We do not know reality, suggest Vico and James, until we make it our own by active, direct confrontation, a confrontation that is necessarily creative in that, though reality is what it is, we must make our own way to it to know it truly, each of us coming from different directions, as we must, according to our particular situations and experiences.1 Scottish realists might rightly have accused them of neglecting intuition of first principles, but Vico and James could just as rightly have accused those realists of inadequately considering the creative process by which we know the concrete world. The Scots and the Aristotelians did not sufficiently reflect on the ways (beyond induction and intuition of necessaries) in which we achieve truth. A complete common sense philosophy would bring together the creative realism of Vico and James and the intuitional realism of Aristotle and McCosh. Indeed, though the two sides haven’t realized it, they cannot survive apart. James’s relation to the Scottish realists is interesting and illuminating. He had read and absorbed them, and though he went far beyond them in some respects, the residue of their common sense never left him. He was one of the last major American thinkers to construe obligation the way they did, although

133

134


with a better sense of its dynamic. He explicitly credits the “Intuitionists” with getting this part of moral understanding right. But he captures much better than they the practical dynamism of common sense. This is in fact the primary way James exemplifies the American mind—in reflecting its famous “can-do” practicality, manifested in everything from American entrepreneurship to the civil rights movements to Jane Addams’s Hull House. Understanding the practical mode of common sense that James uncovers is key to understanding the American way of thinking and its essential wholesomeness. But in addition to exhibiting something old about the American way, James also expresses something new: in a positive sense, a more open, less cramped, dynamic moral consciousness, a move away from neo-Calvinist, puritanical austerity; in a negative sense, a certain forgetfulness about moral first principles and precepts or the need to make them explicit. Despite the new form, the basic elements of the American mind remained intact—in particular, its religious understanding of conscience, its sense of practical possibilities and limitations, and its suspicion of power—although, correspondent to the lost sense of first principles, with a weakened sense of duty, natural law, and natural rights. That notion of conscience and that practical sensibility, especially, James elaborates with unparalleled precision and clarity. The place of common sense in James’s philosophy is not sufficiently appreciated. Some scholars have recognized it as a sort of touchstone for James, but none has given a systematic treatment of its meaning and its place in James’s philosophic weltanschauung. James always took the common sense perspective as his starting point and default position. Sometimes he did so explicitly; other times, common sense lurked in the background like a ghost. He often spoke of common sense as if confident his readers or auditors knew just what he meant by the term. Possibly he spoke of it this way because, as observed, Scottish Common Sense had been such a major force in British and American universities, and the largely philosophical public to which he committed his thoughts could be assumed to be generally familiar with Scottish realist thinking. James told his audience at the Gifford Lectures, delivering the text of what would become The Varieties of Religious Experience, that his first philosophical studies were of Scottish Common Sense, and an attentive reading of his Principles of Psychology shows he was well acquainted with the works of Reid, Stewart, Brown, Hamilton, and to some extent McCosh.2 He probably could have expected his communicants to be at least generally familiar with the basic ideas, if not the writings, of these Common Sense philosophers. He did not make frequent reference to them outside the Principles, but a close review of his corpus suggests that their notion of common sense profoundly affected his own thinking.

James’s Pragmatic Radical Empiricism

135

Pragmatism (especially the Jamesian version) is a philosophy grounded in and constantly checked by common sense. In “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” the central lecture of his work on that philosophy, James presents “common sense” as the most fundamental of three levels of truth generally accessible to human beings. Throughout his writings, common sense emerges repeatedly as something that must be taken into account if error and injury to human well-being are to be averted. Additionally, the pragmatic approach is motivated and driven by common sense concerns, above all by a concern for the good of man as it is concretely available to him. Pragmatism takes human needs and interests seriously, as being among the more important constituents of reality, and as potentially finding their fulfillment in the universe of which they are part.3 James’s pragmatic conception of truth has been and continues to be very badly misunderstood, and so some clarifying remarks about what he means by “truth” are in order before we consider his notion of common sense.

The Pragmatic Conception of Truth Truth is for James a matter of concrete relations between knower and known. The key to understanding James’s Pragmatism is to grasp what he means by the “true” and the “real,” and precisely how he sees the two to be connected. Truth, he says, “must obtain between an idea and a reality that is the idea’s object; and, as a predicate, it must apply to the idea and not to the object, for objective realities are not true . . . they are taken as simply being, while the ideas are true of them” (MT 87). For James, truth is by definition a relation of one concrete reality (thought) to another outside it (another thought or thing); the failure to realize or remember this simple fact lies at the root of most misunderstandings of his philosophy. The “pragmatic” elements in James’s approach to truth are the insistence that a hard criterion be supplied for speaking of any idea as “true,” and the conviction that the only hard criterion available is that an idea makes some discernable difference in experience. A true idea is one that can be verified some way in experience. James’s first public articulation of the pragmatic principle (before the Pragmatism lectures) remains one of his clearest.4 There James credits Charles S. Peirce with its first enunciation. “Peirce’s principle”—based on the insight that the aim of thought is belief and that belief is sought as a foundation for activity of some kind—is that the key to achieving clarity of thought is to consider what “possible difference of practice” a given idea makes. An idea’s concrete practical effects, according to the principle, are all that we can know of any substance about it. Its meaning is precisely its capacity to produce

136


just those effects it produces if believed and acted on. In Peirce’s words, “Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects. . . . Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”5 James extends the principle by making the criterion of meaning the possible difference of experience that an idea suggests: The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. . . . [Therefore,] the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active.6

The practical issue of truth, and thus its meaning, James suggests, is what manner of experience it suggests, and what is to be believed and what done in light of this foreseen experience. This leads James to the following assertion of what, on his accounting, a pragmatic philosophy should be: “the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that worldformula be the one which is true.”7 The foregoing extension of Peirce’s principle was too much for Peirce, who had applied it only to logic as a means of attaining maximal clarity and consistency of thought, and who believed that making experiential consequences the criterion of truth must end in radical subjectivism and relativism.8 That a friend and colleague of Peirce’s caliber could have concluded this is striking testimony to just how difficult James found it to make himself understood on the matter. For one of the primary aims of James’s philosophic work was precisely to refute subjectivism and relativism (as distinguished from relativity, which he both acknowledged and defended). The confusion revolves around James’s use of the term “experience.” He was misinterpreted on this point not because he failed to articulate his meaning clearly but, rather, because his conception of experience was so startlingly original, and because his fullest and clearest elaboration of it did not receive much public attention until after his death in 1910, when Ralph Barton Perry compiled James’s articles on the subject and published the collection as Essays in Radical Empiricism. For James, both reality and truth are to be found within experience, but according to his conception of experience, this does not imply either radical subjectivism or idealism in the Berkeleyan sense. There is indeed,


137

James thought, an element of subjectivity in all perceptions, but there is also an element of real objectivity in them. Subjectivity and objectivity in perception are two poles within one overarching “pure experience.” As Hunter Brown explains, “James understood subject and world to be simultaneously implicated in the constitution of experience.”9 Pure experience is essentially undifferentiated primary experience, “the instant field of the present” (ERE 13), “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories,” “a that” not yet abstracted through reflection into any what (ERE 46). James uses the term “pure experience” in two quite different ways, however, and this dual usage must be borne in mind to avoid misunderstanding. Sometimes he speaks of the pure experience of an individual, “the instant field of the present” as it appears to a personal consciousness. The germ of his notion of pure experience in its personal dimension is already present in the Principles. In hindsight it seems clear that pure experience in this sense is equivalent to the present moment of James’s “stream of consciousness.” The following statement from Chapter 13 of the Principles works well as a definition of pure experience on this level: “Experience, from the very first, preâ•‚ sents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts” (PoP 461). At other times, James employs the term “pure experience” to speak of the instant field of the present in general, as when he talks of a “world of pure experience.” Pure experience in this latter sense is essentially equivalent to what in the history of philosophy is more commonly called “being” or “what is,” or in James’s words, “plain, unqualified actuality or existence” (ERE 13). But James’s notion of being or existence differs from others in two ways. First, as James understands it, being is dynamic, not static. From one moment to the next, being is never exactly the same. There are continuities, to be sure, as James repeatedly insisted, though people didn’t seem to hear him on the point. As James observes in Pragmatism, “Our experience is all shot through with regularities” (Pr 99). But the stream of things is never entirely the same as it was before. Second, in James’s analysis, being must include the subjective within it. Our experiencing minds are as much a part of what is as the things we experience; the subject is as real as its objects. The implication of this for James is that “subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when [an] experience is ‘taken,’ i.e., talked-of, twice . . . by a new retrospective experience” (ERE 13). This “retrospective experience” is experience as constituted by selective attention and is what is usually meant by “experience.” When we talk of our experiences, we don’t ordinarily mean to include events undergone but unattended

138


to; rather, we mean only those we took specific notice of, happenings we remember, and remember as having some significance or at least some interest for us. Or if the question concerns what has just transpired, we typically mean by “this experience” not James’s “immediate flux of life” but some circumscribed matter within the flux—what an excellent concerto that was, for example, not the rate of our breathing, the objects in our peripheral vision, the fidgeting of our fingers, or whatever else we might have noticed going on in and around us in the concert hall had we turned our thoughts to that instead. “Pure experience” consists of all the possible objects of attention at any given moment; “experience” in the usual sense consists of only selected features out of that massive whole. It is the latter, ordinary meaning of “experience” that James employs in the Principles of Psychology when he says, “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (PoP 380). This kind of experience is secondary, while pure experience is primary. It is pure experience together with, James will say, accumulated human experience, more than personal experience as we ordinarily speak of it, that James takes as the test of truth. James would have avoided a lot of trouble trying to make himself better understood if he had been able to make this point clear. How, then, does James understand the relation of experience and truth? When James puts forth experiential consequence as the criterion of truth, he does not at all mean to suggest that truth is whatever we would like it to be or whatever will produce the desired feelings of the moment. He means to suggest that truth must conform to the known or knowable facts of experience, which, he believes, tell us all we can ever know about reality. Conformity to experienced or clearly experienceable fact is what makes an idea true. The experiential consequences to which James refers are the experienceable effects, whether we like them or not, that would obtain if we believed and acted on a given supposition. They are what show us whether the supposition was accurate. If I have an idea about something but am constantly rebuffed by the facts of experience when I “try it out” (whether the matter is “theoretical” or “practical”) I have good reason to think the idea is false. The level of experience for James is the level of reality—or at least as much of reality as human beings can have access to. Therefore making experience the test of truth is in James’s mind nothing more nor less than making reality the test of truth. James prefers to speak in terms of “experience” rather than “reality,” in part, one suspects, because the former term suggests concreteness in a way the latter does not, and it is in the concrete that we find the hard test of ideas that James is looking for. In Pragmatism, James says that Pragmatists hold to the usual notion of truth as “agreement with reality,” but they insist on pressing the question of what exactly agreement with reality means, of “what may precisely be meant


139

by the term ‘agreement,’ and what by the term ‘reality,’ when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with” (Pr 96). Philosophers often present truth as a “copy” or “transcript” of reality, but James shows that this concept of truth is inadequate. Conceiving of truth as a copy of reality works in some cases, as when we want a true idea of what a particular physical object looks like, a building downtown, say, or a person we expect to find at the airport. But some realities are not amenable to copying in this way: as examples James gives “past time,” “power,” and “spontaneity.” This consideration suggests that copying is only one type of agreement with reality, and that if we are to get an adequate conception of truth we will have to consider a variety of types. An adequate conception of truth must answer the question, What do all the various types of agreement with reality have in common? James’s answer is that all of them bring us into closer working contact with the facts of experience. Truth is “essentially an affair of leading” to and through reality (Pr 102–3), or more precisely, “into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience” (Pr 97), terminating, if we follow them far enough, in “sense-percepts” (Pr 104). If this is what is meant pragmatically (that is, concretely) by “agreeing” with reality, what is meant by “reality”? “‘Reality’ is in general what truths have to take account of ” (Pr 117). It is “something resisting, yet malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken ‘account’ of incessantly (tho not necessarily merely copied)” (Pr 124). It is malleable in the sense that we can manipulate it in some limited ways, and it responds to our manipulation. But while we make genuine contributions to reality or change it in various ways by our own thinking and acting, this is not to say we simply create it: “All our truths are beliefs about ‘Reality’; and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing found, not manufactured” (Pr 117). We know this independent something only because we have in fact found it or have compelling reason to believe we would find it if we tried or if circumstances allowed, and this is why experience must be the touchstone of reality. “The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run, over thought. Objective facts . . . are real only because they coerce sensation.”10 (It is crucial here to understand that James means “sensation” in the broadest possible sense, as including all kinds of perception and all concrete intellectual processes. He does not mean only what is knowable through the physical senses.) “Every living man would instantly define right thinking as thinking in correspondence with reality.”11 But what reality as a whole actually is remains somewhat obscure, to put it mildly. The only standard available for determining which of the various “postulates” about reality is valid is experience: “each [such postulate] must depend on the general consensus of experience as a whole to bear out its validity.”12

140


Note James’s formulation here: “experience as a whole.” This rendering reminds that James does not use the term “experience” in a narrow sense. While all immediate experience of the world is individual and personal, collective human experience offers a view of what may be known beyond our own personal encounters. James is careful in Pragmatism to specify that for most purposes actual verification in sense-percepts is not necessary for taking claims as true, that “verifiability” will suffice (Pr 99–100; his emphasis). Moreover, James’s brand of empiricism is distinctly nontraditional. John E. Smith aptly warns that describing James as an “empiricist” can mislead: “James was the philosopher of experience par excellence, but what he understood by experience was something far richer than the conception of experience that dominated classical British empiricism, and therefore attempts to assimilate his thought to that tradition are erroneous and misleading.”13 In his pivotal essay “A World of Pure Experience,” James explains that his “radical empiricism” is both empirical, in that he “starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order” (he mentions his likeness to “Hume and his descendants” here), and radical, in that it “neither admits into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor excludes from them any element that is directly experienced.” And James (unlike Berkeley, Hume, J. Mill, and J. S. Mill) includes “conjunctive relations” as direct experienceables (ERE 23). The resulting conception of experience is, as Smith noted, extraordinarily rich. The difficulty in defining “reality” stems in part from the fact that we, the experiencers, are part of it. In some contexts “reality” denotes that independently existing something that we encounter; but in the complete sense—reality “as a whole”—it must be understood as encompassing all of us and our encounters as well as the things encountered. Once we realize that James is ultimately concerned with reality in this latter, larger sense, and that “experience” as James uses the term is a more concrete substitute for “reality,” his pragmatic meaning of truth as “agreement with reality” begins to come clear. Truth, James is trying to say, is a process within reality. Truth is essentially a relation between two things, an idea, on the one hand, and a reality outside of the idea, on the other. This relation, like all relations, has its fundamentum, namely, the matrix of experiential circumstance, psychological as well as physical, in which the correlated terms are found embedded. . . . What constitutes the relation known as truth . . . is just the existence in the empirical world of this fundamentum of circumstance surrounding object and idea and ready to be either short-circuited [because it is usually not necessary to explore thoroughly] or traversed at full length. . . . The nature and place and affinities of the object of course play as vital a part in making the particular passage pos-


141

sible as do the nature and associative tendencies of the idea; so that the notion that truth could fall altogether inside of the thinker’s private experience and be something purely psychological, is absurd. It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. (MT 91–92)

As far as James’s philosophy goes, the beginning of wisdom is to realize that experience entails more than psychology.14

Common Sense We are now in a position to consider James’s account of common sense and its place in his larger philosophy. James combined the two most basic meanings of common sense: as perceptual judgment and as common convictions or understandings. He wrote more often of the former sense, as most of his writings (psychological and philosophical) are preoccupied with epistemological concerns. He sometimes spoke of the latter in terms of “funded experience” and the “rich and active commerce” of experiences in the community of men (see Pr 34–39). For James, common sense in both respects is a variety of truth. In Pragmatism, he describes three basic levels of truth, that of common sense, that of logic, and that of theory.15 Each kind of truth is a kind of leading toward or directly up to various experiences. The common sense level relates to “matters of fact,” so that common sense truths terminate directly in experiences of the world, or of “things” in the world, including the “thing” called the “self ” and even including moral and “religious” facts. Logical truths concern “relations among purely mental ideas” and lead through our constellations of abstract ideas to certain abstract conclusions (Pr 100). Logical truths, then, do not lead directly to real-world facts, but they do lead toward them: because they are derived ultimately from our mental classifications of “real objects,” they suggest what facts must follow from certain orderings of other facts (Pr 101).16 Theoretical truths concern truth relations more generally, and mediate between new ideas and “the whole body of other truths already in our possession” (Pr 100–102). As new ideas are the product of new experiences and all truths derive somewhere from or point to experience, theoretical truths also have a real-world basis and suggest what new experiences to expect from new coordinations of older and newer truths.17 Of these three levels of truth, common sense is closest to reality in the sense of the concrete universe. For James, the level of reality is “pure experience,” undifferentiated primary experience. It is here, in pure experience, he says, that we find all the materials from which to build our truths. If reality concretely considered is undifferentiated primary experience, common sense is essential-

142


ly differentiating primary experience. At the common sense level, you might say, reality is still directly in view. However an observer might misconstrue the nature of the reality before him here, the common sense level of thought has at least this advantage over the other levels, that here objective reality of some kind is immediately present, here there is something definitely real to be known.18 As differentiating primary experience, common sense is also necessarily the first form of truth in order of time. James says it constitutes the first great “stage of philosophizing” (Pr 81). For James, “philosophy” is simply “man thinking, thinking about generalities rather than about particulars.”19 Philosophy is thus, in James’s conception, a specific kind of concrete experience of the broadest application. It denotes man’s effort to grasp the basic elements of reality, the broad sweep of reality-as-a-whole and the larger patterns and movements detectible within that greater current. Common sense thinking on this view is thus appropriately classified as an incipient form of philosophizing. Like the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, James distinguishes between the ordinary and the technical, philosophical meanings of “common sense”: “In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from excentricity [sic], his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought.” The philosophic meaning is perhaps not so “entirely different” as James suggests: the meanings are connected, and the failure to see or remember these connections raises certain philosophical problems. James in fact does not usually use “common sense” in his technical sense here, and he employs the other meanings constantly for philosophic purposes. In any case, James conceives the “forms or categories of thought” he mentions as intellectual forms inherited from our ancient ancestors, which “have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time”; these forms collectively constitute “our fundamental ways of thinking about things” and “form one great state of equilibrium in the human mind’s development, the stage of common sense” (Pr 83). Common sense notions may be questioned, and indeed philosophers have subjected them to intense scrutiny, but they have weathered the onslaught and continue to exercise an irresistible power over us: “Criticise them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed.” “Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought” (Pr 88). James names as “the most important” common sense concepts: Thing; The same or different;


143

Kinds; Minds; Bodies; One Time; One Space; Subjects and attributes; Causal influences; The fancied; The real. (Pr 84–85)

These common sense concepts are derived directly from perceptual experience. On the level of common sense, concepts are never far removed from percepts, and this is what makes common sense generally so reliable. Philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition, James suggests, is essentially a technical elaboration of such common sense concepts: “The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically and articulately.”20 These technically articulated categories are, he observes, “magnificently useful [for] steering our discourse to profitable issues” (Pr 90). James does not think common sense infallible, nor does he find it adequate for all human purposes. While “for all utilitarian practical purposes [common sense] conceptions amply suffice” (Pr 89), more precise conceptions are needed for attaining a genuine understanding of man and his environment and for enabling him to navigate ever more efficiently and advantageously across and through that environment. Common sense must be refined and supplemented by critical thought and science. Critical thought reveals the limitations of common sense conceptions, and science adds to them proven methods of verification and new means of managing experience. Neither critical philosophy nor science can ever simply supplant common sense, however; they can only supplement it. Common sense conceptions serve an indispensable function. Common sense “interpolates . . . ‘things’ between our intermittent sensations,” so that we “connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes.”21 Critical philosophy demands to know what exactly these things are; science “extrapolates” (James’s emphasis) to what is “beyond the common-sense world,” to atoms, magnetic fields, and such (Pr 90). Each of these disciplines is essential and even superior in its own domain: “Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third.” But, James adds, “whether either be truer absolutely, Heaven only knows” (Pr 92). Common sense must be taken with a certain measure of “suspicion” because “its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses” (successful

144


in the sense of relating us closely enough to nature to be extremely serviceable for “ordinary practical purposes”), but then critical philosophy and science must likewise be held in some suspicion, as none of these modes of understanding can “support a claim of absolute veracity” (Pr 94). The need for diverse modes of understanding the world and the limits of each serve as primary motivators for James’s pragmatic philosophizing. “Ought not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support the claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma?” (Pr 94). It would seem that we need all these modes in their fullest development, and in coordination, to get a complete picture of the world. Pragmatism as a philosophic method is meant on the one hand to be a tool for refining meaning, for cutting away irrelevant considerations and bringing the essential facts and ideas into sharp relief, and on the other hand, to do justice to all such facts and ideas, despite their emergence in such widely diverging encounters. Pragmatism in this latter mode lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. (Pr 32)

The pragmatic method does its refining work and forges its paths between theories by constantly chipping concepts down to their concrete meaning and uncovering concrete connections among available facts. “The whole originality of pragmatism,” James reminds us, “the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it” (MT 115–16). With its help, James thinks, common sense, logic, and theory may be honed to maximal precision and their respective truths made cohesive and mutually serviceable. The main point here, however, is that the common sense mode of understanding, in James’s schema of philosophy, is foundational, in that it is the most intimately associated with the facts of experience. It is also regulative, in that philosophy must constantly take it into account: there is something true


145

in common sense, and thus it cannot be safely ignored or forgotten. James describes common sense concepts as having preserved themselves through known human experience. Having been tested by such long experience, they deserve our profound respect. James’s view of common sense ideas reflects his Darwinian assumptions about human development. As Thomas Carlson observes, “In James’s time . . . Darwin’s theory of evolution through spontaneous variation and natural selection offered . . . a general model of the means by which knowledge itself is constructed. James’s friend and mentor, Chauncy Wright, argued, ‘our knowledges and rational beliefs result, truly and literally, from the survival of the fittest among our original and spontaneous beliefs.’”22 Wright’s statement nicely captures James’s understanding of the status of common sense notions. These notions are not innate but inherited; they originated in response to the facts of human experience and developed over time; they survived to form a stable foundation for knowledge because experience has not discredited them; they are true enough to the facts of experience to be reliable for most purposes, even to be taken for granted in most cases. In short, they are generally fit to ground our thought and discourse because they generally fit the facts of our individual and collective experience. Common sense is not necessarily in its final shape, however, because fitter conceptions may come along with sufficient persuasive power to replace older concepts and form new givens for the human community. Still, such fundamental conceptual change should not be intolerably jarring or disruptive because it merely reflects a better understanding of what were already known to be fundamental facts of human experience. The foundation of common sense in its glacial transformation is thus quite sufficiently firm and stable to support all ordinary human activity. In finding common sense to be both foundational and regulative of thought, James is perfectly in line with Scottish Common Sense philosophy. But he differs from the leading philosophers of that tradition in two crucial and momentous respects: (1) in understanding the intellectual forms or modes of thinking that compose common sense to be ancient habits, rather than products of permanent structures of the mind; (2) in neglecting or treating inadequately the intuition of first principles. As to the first point, James rejects the faculty psychology of classic and Scottish Common Sense philosophy and its correlative notion of an entity called “soul” as unsubstantiated by the facts, given what we now know about human psychology.23 The second he never directly confronts in writing, although he does hint at accepting something like moral first principles in his embrace, in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” of “the Intuitionist” description of moral perceptions (see Chapter 6). Common sense concepts as he presents them in

146


Pragmatism are nothing more than commonly held ideas and beliefs about the world, common to mankind in its present stage of development. But such ideas and beliefs, though they clearly have some basis in reality, may, in their representation of what is seen, be false in some respects while the common sense intuitions the Scottish realists spoke of—as self-evident, necessary, and universal—cannot be false. The patent availability in any case of first principles—not indeed as literal somethings “out there” but as necessary verities about the possible facts—is of enormous significance. James’s relative neglect of these principles constitutes a major problem with his construction of philosophy. He should have confronted them more directly and more systematically, for the possibility of philosophic reasoning depends on them, as Aristotle showed conclusively. Forgetting this undermines confidence in truth, as in fact has happened. James’s failure to come fully to terms with the intuition of first principles would be the undoing of Pragmatism. One of the aims of this book is to save both intuitionism and Jamesian pragmatism by synthesizing them (see Conclusion).

Common Sense and Radical Empiricism How central is common sense to James’s overall philosophy? My argument is that James’s radical empiricism is in fact a sort of refined version of common sense in its widest connotation (fact-based judgment as well as usage of time-tested mental categories). If this is correct, common sense is quite central indeed to his larger philosophic project. The reasons for classifying radical empiricism as common sense refined are several. First, radical empiricism wishes to emulate common sense in maintaining unbroken contact with the facts of experience. Common sense “interpolates . . . ‘things’ between our intermittent sensations,” allowing us to “connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes” (Pr 90). Radical empiricism as James describes it “must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (ERE 22–23). Like common sense, radical empiricism keeps one eye, so to speak, always on experience, on realities as they directly confront us. As a way of philosophizing, radical empiricism insists on making hard reality the test of truth. If certain facts cannot be made sense of, theory must be made to yield to those facts; facts must never be ignored for the sake of theoretic unity or elegance. Common sense predisposes to such an approach. It “contents itself with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, in short, a practical compromise, without trying a theoretic solution. This attitude is of course respectable.”24 James is not, like some latter-day pragmatists, “against theory.”25 At least half the point of


147

radical empiricism is to provide a more adequate theoretical understanding of the world.26 But he does insist that theory be held accountable to fact. Common sense thinking is not, strictly speaking, theoretical, and in this it falls short of philosophy in the full sense. Common sense simply takes reality as it finds it, while radical empiricism tries to uncover the deeper sources and tendencies of things. But common sense constitutes the starting point of radically empirical theorizing. If common sense is differentiating primary experience, radical empiricism merely takes this more compact level of thinking to a higher degree of differentiation. Radical empiricism is just common sense made perspicuous. In his Essays in Radical Empiricism James points to several fundamental judgments shared by common sense and his radically empiricist philosophy— most significantly: both view the world pluralistically; both espouse a robust variety of realism, taking the objects in the world to have an existence independent of our thoughts about them, but taking our thoughts also to have genuine ontic status; and both assert the objective reality of relations. Take first their pluralistic outlook. James throughout his writings contrasts pluralism with monism, or “Absolutism”—the idea, given its classic philosophical expression by Hegel and championed in James’s day by F. H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, that the universe is absolutely one in substance and finds its unity in the fact that all its parts are manifestations of one absolute mind. The pluralist rejects the monistic thesis as wildly speculative; the thesis could be true, but nothing in common experience supports it.27 Ordinary experience gives us “the common-sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined” (Pr 80). Radical empiricism takes the world as common sense does, as “a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related,” with disjoined parts hanging together “by intermediaries,” so that “the whole world eventually may hang together similarly, inasmuch as some path of conjunctive transition by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be discernible.” The world on this view is thus a “concatenated union” rather than “the ‘through-and-through’ type of union . . . which monistic systems hold to obtain when things are taken in their absolute reality” (ERE 52). Common sense and radical empiricism likewise both conform to the basic thrust of traditional realism. Much confusion has surrounded the question of whether James was in fact a realist or was really something else. Ralph Barton Perry took James to be a straightforward realist, while others have read him as a subjectivist of some kind. Of these two interpretations, Perry’s is the more correct, but his analysis needs refining. James clearly was a realist in the traditional sense of understanding things in the world to exist independently of what we may think about them and assuming that many things may exist of which we have no knowledge at all. This basic supposition of classic realism is the common sense view, and it is James’s view. “Practically,” James says in the Essays in

148


Radical Empiricism, “our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this supposition’s being literally true” (ERE 39). Even more emphatically, James says of himself, Dewey, and F. C. S. Schiller in the Preface to The Meaning of Truth, “As I myself understand these authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in the truth-relation” (MT 9). He adds the proviso “provided it be an experienceable object” because Pragmatists do insist, again, that any object, to be taken as real, must be experienceable, whether it has been already experienced or not.28 Indeed, James in Essays in Radical Empiricism gives the following as the basic postulate of radical empiricism: “Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real” (ERE 81). Some critics, he asserts, have made an unwarrantable leap from the Pragmatists’ typical refusal to discuss “altogether trans-experiential” objects to the assumption that pragmatists deny the independent existence of anything beyond our minds. This assumption is so far wrong that James is clearly annoyed at having to respond to it: “It seems incredible,” he says, “that educated and apparently sincere critics should so fail to catch their adversary’s point of view” (MT 9–10).29 The reason Perry’s interpretation of James as a straightforward realist needs refining is that it fails to recognize how much more subtle and precise, and ultimately how much truer to reality as we know it, is James’s brand of realism than the older sort. Charlene Haddock Seigfried has aptly described James’s version as a reconstructed realism.30 It is reconstructed in that it includes subjective elements in its accounting of the real. All knowledge according to James’s analysis is necessarily both objective and subjective. “Knowing” implies a real knower as well as a real something known. It also implies that the knower makes contact in some way with the known, either directly or through intermediaries. The knower, the known, the concrete tracks of mental and physical material connecting them, and the act of knowing itself (the traversing of those tracks), all are fully real, and each must receive its due weight in any adequate account of the real. In the final analysis this Jamesian “thick” realism seems more thoroughly realistic than the usual kind, not less.31 So far, again, radical empiricism turns out to be only a more differentiated form of common sense. This holds true once more in the matter of relations. While “both rationalism and the usual empiricism claim that [relations] are exclusively the ‘work of the mind’—the finite mind or the absolute mind, as the case may be,” “common sense and . . . radical empiricism stand for their being objective” (ERE 74). These “objective” relations are just those concrete


149

paths of some kind connecting knower and known as were mentioned above. Common sense takes relations among things to be real and not tricks of the mind. It takes space and time, for instance, to be not Kantian categories but real-world relations. For a radically empirical philosophy, “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relations experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (ERE 23). The hard evidence of objective relations: We experience both our thoughts and the larger reality enveloping us as a continuous stream, and within this flow we feel our thoughts in relation to other thoughts and ourselves in relation to things around us. Relations are directly felt; we know them immediately, by acquaintance. “We ought to [but from inattention usually do not] say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (PoP 238). Radical empiricism takes these subtle feelings at face value, as manifestations of real conjunctive and disjunctive relations within experience. James describes the basic categories of felt relations in “A World of Pure Experience”: Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be “with” one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other’s being (ERE 23).

James derived these categories of relations from his own painstaking examinations of consciousness and of the experience of being-in-the-world, the results of which he elaborates most thoroughly in The Principles of Psychology. The common sense view that relations are real, then, is fully confirmed by careful empirical investigation. Radical empiricism does part ways with common sense on one important point. Common sense is inveterately dualistic, positing an entity called the “soul” or “mind” as the domain of mental phenomena, an entity altogether different in basic substance from material reality. Radical empiricism rejects a hard-and-fast dualism as unwarranted by the facts of experience and

150


superfluous on an explanatory level. James concedes that believing in soul or consciousness as an entity is consistent with the facts and suggests that one can believe in such with a good scientific or philosophical conscience (PoP 181–82, 332). The point for him, however, is that mental facts do not require a substantial soul behind them to be explained, that they can be explained perfectly well in terms of relations within experience. “The central point of the pure-experience theory,” James says, “is that ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ are names for two groups into which we sort experiences according to the way in which they act upon their neighbors” (ERE 70). Before a retrospective sorting into categories, there is no “inner” and “outer” of experience but simply a that. At the level of pure experience, the level of reality, thoughts and things are substantively “absolutely homogenous” (ERE 69); or at least, a homogeneity of substance is what experience itself, independently of our retrospective thinking about it, suggests. A truly radical empiricism, therefore, cannot take either spiritual or material substance as a fundamentum; it must be content with substantively ambiguous, mysterious pure experience for its concrete basis. From a philosophical viewpoint, taking as true the idea of consciousness as an entity would violate the pragmatic principle, because consciousness is not concretely known as an entity (there are no effects manifesting a conscious entity per se) but only as a “function in experience,” the particular function of knowing. Looking to pure experience as the concrete phenomenon to be understood, “knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known” (ERE 4–5). The difference between common sense and radical empiricism on the question of substance should not be overstated, however. Again, common sense dualism, while not a necessary conclusion, is fully compatible with the facts of experience, and common sense and radical empiricism are in full agreement about what these facts are. Common sense dualizing, if indeed invalid, may be attributed to the human tendency to conceptualize prematurely, before the facts are adequately weighed, and to adopt as true any hypothesis close enough to the facts to work for ordinary practical purposes. Indeed, James pragmatically accepts such hypotheses as the two-substance theory as being true insofar as (but not farther than) they do so work. Within the borders of previous experience (Pr 107)—before more meticulous examinations of the facts of consciousness were made—that particular interpretation of the “physical” and “spiritual” facts was true in the sense of being a closer fit to the facts than any other available. Should James’s hypothesis that consciousness does not exist


151

as an entity be borne out fully by future experience, that understanding itself would become part of common sense thinking. Moreover, James, in rejecting dualism, is hardly rejecting spiritual reality. At the end of “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” he says, “I greatly grieve that to many [his conclusion that consciousness does not exist as an entity] will sound materialistic” (ERE 19). As anyone will attest who has read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and his other essays and letters on the subject of spirituality, this profession of grief is no mere rhetorical flourish, a polite way of respecting the religious sensibilities of his American readers, but expresses a genuine concern of being misunderstood. No one at the turn of the twentieth century was doing more than James to make religious belief scientifically respectable, and James clearly thought that a great many events are appropriately characterized as spiritual, in the sense of not being reducible to mere physical processes. Whether Socrates’ assertion in Plato’s Apology that belief in “spiritual things” logically necessitates a belief in spirits is valid, and whether this verdict is enough to render James’s position untenable, the reader can think on and judge for himself.32 Suffice it to say for now that James’s rejection of dualism is fully consistent with his pragmatic, radically empirical approach, in that it leaves what “spiritual” may mean, beyond a certain peculiar quality of activity, as empirically—according to the current state of human experience, at least—an impossible question to answer.33 The foregoing is enough to show that radical empiricism is fully compatible with common sense and is itself in key respects a variety of common sense thinking. James can meaningfully and accurately be described as a common sense philosopher.

Common Sense, Psychology, and Human Nature James took the common sense perspective as his default position in his analysis of human psychology. When in The Principles of Psychology he discussed the possibility that no spiritual core of consciousness exists, he presented his thoughts on the matter as “a parenthetical digression” and said that “from now to the end of the volume [he would] revert to the path of common-sense again,” the path he had traveled from the book’s beginning (PoP 291). But this should come as no surprise: as James clearly indicated in Pragmatism, common sense is the level of truth in general most directly in contact with concrete experience of things, and common sense perceptions are our first perceptions of reality. Our first perceptions can be wrong (though our sensations, strictly speaking, cannot) and thus may need correcting (as he admitted they might in the case just mentioned), but they are

152


by definition and by necessity our point of departure in any initial examination of reality. What is indeed the common sense perspective of psychology? It is, as we might say, the natural perspective, natural in the sense of being prereflective—unforced, spontaneously adopted, taking appearances at face value. Its advantage over traditional philosophical or scientific perspectives on psychology is that it deals primarily in percepts, treating concepts as secondary and derivative. It doesn’t seek a conceptual framework but merely asks, Who goes there? It starts from what is immediately given rather than trying to read the given through one or another theoretical lens. Common sense does not object to conceptualization and conceptual framing per se (witness the discussion of common sense “concepts” set out above), but it resists any conceptual constructions that fail to acknowledge what is directly sensed. As James saw it, modern philosophers of psychology had not answered this demand satisfactorily. Rationalist psychology, as represented most notably by Hegel, blurred over critical distinctions and obliterated objectivity with its monism, and abstracted too much from concrete experience in its fixation on concepts and principles. Empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and J. S. Mill were more faithful to the concrete facts but still tended to approach psychological phenomena and human experience generally in an unnatural way. Peter H. Hare explains: As James saw it, the basic problem with traditional empiricism was that, in its own way, it departed from common sense almost as much as did rationalism. . . . Such common-sense realities as the self, material objects, causation, and freedom of the will turned out, in the empiricist analysis, to be fictions. Although he never felt any inclination to abandon empiricism, whose reliance on fact he applauded, he sought some way to revise empiricism to bring it into accord with common-sense beliefs. . . . The key idea in his new or “radical” empiricism was that empiricists had been using an artificial and impoverished notion of experience. If we recognize, James argued, that experience is much richer than empiricists have supposed hitherto and includes such common-sense realities as relatedness, tendency, and continuous transition, we will be able, as empiricists, to vindicate common-sense beliefs and will not in desperation [like the rationalists] seek the realities needed for practical activity in worlds transcending experience. The notion of experience as a continuous flux is, in short, the key to James’s empiricist defense of a common-sense realism.34

To put the point bluntly, James found the going alternatives to the common sense view inadequate.


153

James’s key psychological insight was that “we really gain a more living understanding of the mind by keeping our attention as long as possible upon our entire conscious states as they are concretely given to us, than by the postmortem study of their comminuted ‘elements.’ This last is the study of artificial abstractions, not of natural things.”35 Ironically, traditional empiricism, while staying closer to the facts, trafficked in abstractions almost as much as rationalism in its psychological accounts. “Most [psychology] books,” including books of a supposedly empirical variety, “start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation” (PoP 219). Taking, as James suggests, “our entire conscious states as they are concretely given to us,” we discover five essential characteristics of consciousness: “1) Every thought [mental state] tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while” (PoP 220).36 Each of these findings confirms common sense assumptions (as Hare suggested above). Common sense accepts the personal dimension of consciousness as a matter of course. It does not try to escape the personal to attain some Archimedean viewpoint but, rather, accepts the personal, perspectival element of knowledge as an inherent limitation of being human. Common sense also takes constant change, continuity of experience, objectivity, and interestedness for granted. Common sense is, at least in part, a mode of feeling, and our lives feel like they are constantly changing, despite the corresponding feeling that we who undergo the changes are somehow, in some sense, the same. The passing objects that we engage and events in which we participate (mentally, if not physically) constitute a palpable flow of experience, a flow in which we seem fully immersed: we know it from within. Psychologically, the sense of continuity derives, it seems, from the continuity of thought, of consciousness. Consciousness in general, in James’s famous metaphor, is a “stream.” If we take our conscious experience as we have it, we do not find discrete thoughts of this or that object, but always of objects embedded in a seamless web of connecting relations. “The Object of your thought,” James says, “is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less. . . . The object of every thought . . . is neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter and however symbolic the manner of thinking may be.” The object of thought should not be confused with the thought of

154


an object. The objective deliverance of a thought contains a multitude within “one undivided state of consciousness” (PoP 266). But within that wider state, we are almost always interested in and attentive to some particular features, to the exclusion of others: “The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention” (PoP 277). Attention is drawn by interest, the excitement created by those possibilities of experience within the field of consciousness appealing most directly to the dominant active tendencies of the self. Attention leads to perception, to the apprehension of “things” within the sensual stream, and as James indicated in Pragmatism, the perception of “things” is the primary function of common sense on the level of personal judgment. (“Things” here, speaking loosely, may be “spiritual” as well as “physical,” as The Varieties of Religious Experience suggests. In Lecture 3, for instance, he talks of the experience of an unseen presence.) It is significant that common sense does not see any incompatibility between perspectivity and objectivity. And why should it? Why indeed have philosophers so often opposed perspective to objective truth? If one is looking at reality, perspective terminates in the real and so is true to that extent. What really should be contrasted by those concerned about narrowness of perspective is not perspectivity and objectivity but, rather, reliance on few perspectives and reliance on the wider view achieved through the imaginative synthesis of many perspectives. The common sense outlook has the virtue of being both narrow and broad, of simultaneously allowing both acuity and breadth of vision. Common sense, as James suggested, is by definition that which enables us to connect the matter immediately before us with matters remote. It is objective in two respects: in knowing real objects as they present themselves to consciousness (and here we see that perspective even in the narrow sense is objective) and in recognizing a larger reality not presently experienced that is the context of such knowing acts, thus gaining “perspective” in the popular sense of “putting things in perspective.” These two sorts of objectivity are what make common sense a form of “realism.” Common sense realism is precisely the position that perspectivity and objectivity are fused and inseparable. James treats consciousness in general as a phenomenon of knowing, and common sense as a particular kind of knowing within the knowing stream. The stream of consciousness is, as James says, a sciousness, and consciousness a secondary event within that primal, knowing stream (PoP 290). The whole stream of thought is knowing, but not yet knowing with until some manner of reflection takes place. Common sense’s interpolation of “things” within the stream is just such a mode of knowing-with, a proto-reflective act in that it apprehends each organized group of sensations as an entity of a particular


155

class.37 The function of common sense perception is to classify particular, experienced objects. The larger stream of thought is, as James presents it in the Principles, a stream of sensation. “Sensation,” in James’s classificatory scheme, is a mental rather than a physical phenomenon. Sensation is conscious feeling, including not only pleasures and pains but every subtlest “sense of things” we have. It is that “sciousness” of which James spoke, a kind of pure knowing. It is, in a word, “knowledge by acquaintance,” our direct awareness of what passes in the flow of experience. When we ordinarily talk of “sensation,” we do not mean our entire sensual experience but, rather, some particular feeling of some particular thing. Sensation in the latter specification is “a function in our thought whereby we first become aware of the bare immediate natures by which our several objects are distributed” (PoP 653). Perception, by contrast, is a kind of “knowledge about,” which involves not only sensation but also interpretation.38 As James explains: Perception . . . differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the sensation [this associating of farther facts is what James has called “interpolation”]. . . . Sensational and reproductive brainprocesses combined . . . are what give us the content of our perceptions. . . . Perception may then be defined, in [psychologist] Mr. Sully’s words, as that process by which the mind “supplements a sense-perception by an accompaniment or escort of revived sensations,” the whole aggregate of actual and revived sensations being solidified or “integrated” into the form of a percept, that is, an apparently immediate apprehension or cognition of an object now present in a particular locality or region of space. (PoP 725).

If you were shown an object you had never seen, but you also had never seen anything like it and did not know where to place it categorically, then you would be experiencing an essentially pure sensation, you would see but not perceive. For the most part, however, after infancy, “a pure sensation is [for us] an abstraction” (PoP 653). After a few years of life, certainly by adulthood, we experience virtually everything perceptually. “Why, there’s a dog, a car, a house,” we say, taking in everything we see as things of a kind rather than as raw sensibles. The “thing” perceived James calls a “percept.” A percept is something other than a “concept.” The class into which a perceived object is put is signified by a concept, but the immediate, particular perceived object itself is a percept. There is the concept of “cat,” and then there is the perceived cat sitting here in front of me. The distinction between concept and percept is important to James because it highlights, by reminding us of the role of percepts in

156


our thinking, a too-neglected part of philosophy. Most philosophers are conceptualists extraordinaires, who run wild among concepts, leaving percepts far behind and sometimes treating them with sneering contempt. James’s critique of those he calls “rationalist” philosophers is that they fail to stay in working contact with percepts—and more broadly, with concrete experience—and therefore run the risk of losing touch with reality. Philosophers need to be grounded in common sense to “keep them honest,” to prevent their engaging in wishful thinking and ultimately presenting as “philosophy” nothing more than personal flights of fancy. “Conception,” James tells us, is “the function by which we . . . identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse,” and “concepts” are “the thoughts which are its vehicles.” This function of conception derives from our “sense of sameness,” the sense that some experienced objects are of the same kind as others known before. The distinction James made before between the two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge by acquaintance and the knowledgeabout, is possible because of “a fundamental psychical peculiarity which may be entitled ‘the principle of constancy in the mind’s meaning,’ and which may be expressed: . . . ‘the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same.’ This sense of sameness,” James avers, “is the very keel and backbone of our thinking” (PoP 434). As such, it is also the basis for common sense. Common sense recognizes that this object before me now is of the same kind as objects I have previously experienced. Common sense interpolation and conception come from the same root (this sense of sameness) and remain close to that root; together they provide the foundation for all advanced thinking. But unfortunately philosophers have tended to privilege concepts and degrade percepts and have thereby violated and undermined common sense. They have tended to treat meaning as a purely conceptual matter rather than as a matter of living experience. James refuses to make that mistake. The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of [our] thought. It is one of those evanescent and “transitive” facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. . . . It pertains to the “fringe” of the subjective state, and is a “feeling of tendency”. . . . This [consciousness of meaning] is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into something understood, and determining the sequel of my thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way. (PoP 446)

One guesses that this view of meaning is not “perfectly definite” enough for the inveterate rationalizer, who will take this “feeling of tendency” as too in-


157

substantial to count as something that really matters. But James stands with common sense and against the rationalists in refusing to discount the vague and dimly felt. In the famous chapter on the stream of consciousness in Psychology: Briefer Course, James says he wants to see “the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life” (PBC 164). He wants this because the “vague and inarticulate” in our experience is empirically fully as real as what is sharply made out and easily defined, and because this hazy domain is where the meaning of life is found. It may be the case, and James in fact believes it is the case, that the most important realities are the hardest to grasp and put in words. But the rationalist will say, “What about truth? If we have a concern for truth, we will resist the Jamesian urge to engage in wishful thinking, to hope against hope—and more to the point, against hard evidence—that somewhere in that mysterious fog of tendencies and possibilities is something exceptionally valuable, but too deep for us to grasp.” This objection rests on both a misconstruing of the evidence and, James would say, a thin and hollow notion of truth. James’s argument on behalf of the vaguely felt is predicated on empirically verifiable fact: this radiating field of tendency is as real as anything else we sense, or we cannot trust our sensations at all. The sense of meaning this tendency gives is a sense of being intimately connected to a larger whole that is the ground of our experiences, the ground of their possibility, the necessary condition of their actualization—a larger whole to which, moreover, we make a contribution by our activity, and that seems to have a direction of its own. This sense of participating in a larger whole that grounds our possibilities is empirically indisputable. It would seem equally certain that only in sensing the whole can we find the larger meaning of our lives, and thereby the real significance of the regularities and tensions we discover in living them. The human situation is not to be grasped by means of concepts. Concepts, as James says, are only instruments for navigating our way across the surface of the vast existential continuum, giving us fixed points by which to steer our course. The greater meaning can only be understood by a vision of the continuum itself, a vision not merely of its surface but of its full voluminous depth and breadth.39 Despite the benefits of conceptual mapping, “the map remains superficial through abstractness, and false through the discreteness of its terms. . . . Conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fulness of the reality to be known” (SPP 45). It is inadequate because “the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled” (SPP 46). Concepts may “bring new values into our perceptual life, [may] reanimate our wills, and make our

158


action turn upon new points of emphasis” (SPP 43), but their worth is derivative and instrumental. The felt continuity of the stream of thought, and between that stream and the wider world, is the base of meaning, and infinitely more truth is made out through immersion in the perceptual flux than by the most refined conceptual system. Implicit in this account is that we know outer realities, objects in the world, directly, as directly as we know our own thoughts. We know them so by sensation and perception. We do not know the world (nor indeed our own minds) directly by conception. Conception, like perception, is a kind of knowledgeabout, but unlike perception, it does not always have direct contact with the facts of experience.40 But concepts need to have such contact at some point in order to show their truth-value. Conceptual systems which neither began nor left off in sensations would be like bridges without piers. Systems about fact must plunge themselves into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock. Sensations are the stable rock, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of thought. To find such termini is our aim with all our theories—to conceive first when and where a certain sensation may be had, and then to have it. Finding it stops discussion. Failure to find it kills the false conceit of knowledge. Only when you deduce a possible sensation for me from your theory, and give it to me when and where the theory requires, do I begin to be sure that your thought has anything to do with truth. (PoP 658)

A primary intent of James’s Pragmatism is to bring conceptual schemes and theories down to common sensibles, down to relevant percepts and ultimately to the applicable parts of sensual experience underlying them. “Sensible realities,” says James, “are . . . either our realities or the tests of our realities. Conceived objects must show sensible effects or else be disbelieved” (PoP 930). “A conception, to prevail, must terminate in the world of orderly sensible experience” (PoP 929). The “common” in “common sensibles” has a double meaning, first that common sense interpolation is involved in tracing out the perceptual basis for any theory, and second that philosophy and science must proceed on the basis of publicly accessible observations (accessible at least to philosophers and scientists) of what may be commonly sensed. It is critically important to remember that James’s “sensation” includes the knowledge by acquaintance of anything whatever, including what may be classed as spiritual phenomena and religious experiences. The reader should bear in mind that sensation itself, as James understands it, is a kind of spiritual phenomenon. James in one place calls the sensual stream a “spiritual stream”


159

(PoP 322). For James, sensual knowledge is not a purely physical process, though it does require certain physical preconditions, nor is it limited to knowledge of physical objects. What is commonly sensed may be something intangible, like a moral fact or an attitude. Such common sensibles will in fact be the basis of James’s moral and social theories. Common sensibles, persistently felt, breed conviction, belief. Belief itself is a kind of “sense of reality,” which according to James “in its inner nature . . . is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.” Actually, we human beings are so constructed as to believe all perceptions uncontradicted by others. “The true opposites of belief, psychologically considered, are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief ” (PoP 913, 914). We sometimes receive mixed messages, and we start to wonder what’s really going on. But when we get the sense of the same again and again, conviction deepens that we are dealing with reality. Conceptual systems that account for all or almost all of our common sensibles are the ones that lay greatest claim to the truth. “The conceived system, to pass for true, must at least include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more. The system which includes the most of them, and definitely explains or pretends to explain the most of them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail” (PoP 939). Among the most interesting common sensibles, humanly speaking, are those pertaining to human inclinations, and these must be accounted for in any metaphysics worth having: “That theory [of reality] will be most generally believed which, besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs.” Our tendency to believe that the universe and human powers correspond seems natural, innate. “Certain postulates [of this kind] are given in our nature; and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real” (PoP 945). That we tend to treat these postulates as true is a fact, and although this tendency to believe the universe congenial to our powers is not proof of the possibility, it may count as evidence. Related to our sense of human inclinations and capacities, and supremely important for human flourishing, is our sense of right and wrong. In the preface to his Psychology: Briefer Course, James expressed his “regret” that he had not been able in the Principles or in this shorter “scissors and paste” textbook version of his psychology to provide a chapter on “the moral sense” (PBC 3). Apparently he had thought that, while desirable, such a chapter did not have to be included because he understood moral awareness to be merely a specific sort of sensation, a sense of “directly felt fitnesses between things” (WB 143), or the contrary feeling of unfitness. So the same principles that applied in general

160


to sensation could be safely assumed to apply in particular to moral sense: one could know moral phenomena by acquaintance (sensation), classifiable moral facts by organized sensation (perception), moral categories by abstraction and generalization (which, combined, result in conception), and so on. It may also be that he thought the workings of the moral sense had been adequately described by the intuitionist philosophers. Although he faulted them for a tendency to dogmatism, James agreed with “the intuitionist school” (against the “sensationalists”) that human ideals are “not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped” (WB 144), and he said that “the intuitional moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological facts” (WB 158). Whatever the reason for the lacuna, it is beyond doubt that James assumed “the moral sense” to be of highest importance for human life. In the Principles he placed “moral sensibility and conscience” at the core of human identity, locating them in man’s “innermost self ” (PoP 284).41 In addition to allowing us to sense the fitness or unfitness of relations among persons or among priorities within a person, the moral sense as James conceived it supplied a “sense of an ideal spectator” who judges our values and intentions.42 This is a feature of natural human sociability. We seem naturally to seek the good opinion of others, especially of those we perceive to be the best of persons. We find ourselves driven “in pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such a companion there be. . . . This judge is God. . . . It is probable,” James admits, “that individuals differ a good deal in the degree in which they are haunted by [this sense of an ideal spectator], but I am sure that even those who say they are altogether without it deceive themselves, and really have it in some degree” (PoP 301). James hints thus at sharing the WitherspoonMcCoshian understanding of conscience as sensitivity to divine judgments, a view he considers (favorably) more at length in his “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (see Chapter 6). Some philosophical readers will be asking, What of reason? Does James not think that reason is the highest power in man? The answer depends on what is meant by “reason.” Sensation and perception, as James describes them, in particular the intuitive grasp of intangibles, were understood to be functions of “reason” by ancients such as Aristotle. What is clear is that “reasoning,” as James uses the term, is a secondary, higher-order process that depends on the prior activity of sensation and perception for its successful exercise. James’s sensation and perception, then, parallel Aristotle’s nous, and his reasoning Aristotle’s dianoia, at least in form. The simplest kind of thinking, James notes, is “spontaneous revery,” consisting of “trains of images suggested one by another” (PoP 952). Closer to “what would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning,” he


161

says, are “those where a present sign [a concept] suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality” (PoP 953). James understands reasoning to be a process of analysis and abstraction. He finds the process to involve two elements: “First, sagacity, or the ability to discover what part, M, lies embedded in the whole S which is before him; Second, learning, or the ability to recall promptly M’s consequences, concomitants, or implications” (PoP 957). The process proceeds by analyzing the matter at hand, that is, mentally breaking the whole into parts; abstracting some element of interest from the matter, and then considering it in varying relations. Other instances of the same element in different contexts are thought of, and the awareness of numerous instances of the same kind gives rise to conception; a name for the kind is recalled or created, and this concept provides an easy, shorthand way of handling the category just recognized; as a sharply delineated signification, meaning one thing and nothing else, the concept may now be treated logically (if item X is a member of class Y, then it must have these qualities, relations, etc.); logical relations among concepts may be mapped out; and so on. The logical relations discovered in the course of reasoning are eternally valid, says James. They cannot be other than they are. Yet, these relations may not hold in the empirical world. Logic is no final test of truth. A proposition may be perfectly true, logically, but utterly false as a description of reality. Fortunately, the concrete world of experience has enough regularity and order in it to make reasoning about it worthwhile: “This is, in fact, a world in which general laws obtain, in which universal propositions are true, and in which reasoning is therefore possible” (PoP 963).43 James’s description of reasoning and its place in human understanding, and more broadly in human activity, suggests that reason as he defines it is instrumental in function. The meaningful function of reason as analytical and logical power is to navigate us across the sea of experience and get us in touch with its farther reaches, to take us from one experience to another. We know reason has achieved its purpose when we have sensation where we expected to have it, that is, when through sensation we find reality where we expected to find it. The test of rationality is concrete effect. Rationality itself, James believes, is a concrete state of being. When reasoning, we are seeking rationality as an end state, and this state is a certain mode of experience, a certain kind of sensation. It is a “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness . . . [of an] absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,” so that the flow of thought is unobstructed. James calls this the “sentiment of rationality” (WB 58). We arrive at this sentiment when we have found the right way of conceiving the matter at hand, the right conception for the occasion. It is as if the pathway between the knower and what he seeks to know has become smooth,

162


and a clear track of connecting points from one to the other has opened up, until finally the two come face-to-face, and the restlessness of the search drains away. In fact, James thinks something like this occurs literally in a successful course of reasoning, as we saw in his account of truth as a concrete track of experience between knower and known. Reasoning is a principal means of attaining truth. It is not the only way, however. Sometimes the truth just comes to us, the path to the real just suddenly discloses itself, in the absence of any reasoning process. Indeed, this may be the more usual way of finding truth. In this case, reasoning begins, if it begins at all, as a response, as an effect rather than a cause of the truth disclosed, and its work is to “make sense” of the newly seen truth by analyzing it, finding a way to adequately conceive it and whatever elements it may consist of, tracing out relations to other concepts, and so on. By further reasoning, we literally make more truth. Remember, for James, “truth” is a relation between knower and known, so that when we relate ourselves in new ways to old objects, we “create” truths. The idea of making or creating truth is not so startling when you recall that James understood “truth” always to apply to ideas rather than to objects. What we are really after in the “search for truth” is reality, and a truth is a way to it. Thus, strictly speaking, we make truth by our creation or traversing of a path, and what we discover is reality. What happens when truth “just comes to us”? The causes may be mysterious and varied, but according to James’s understanding of the mind’s workings, the means of disclosure are sensation and perception—what reasoning must in any case ultimately come back to in its quest. By far the larger share of our truths is common sense truths. All the time we are perceiving or interpolating, and every case of perception or interpolation involves truth, in that in it our thoughts find a direct correspondence or commerce with some reality. Comparatively speaking, a much smaller percentage of our truths are attained rationally, that is, through a process of reasoning. But that common sense truth is not attained through reasoning does not make it somehow irrational. The same “sentiment of rationality” that comes with the right conception also comes with each interpolation, with each this-is-a-kind. The reasoning way is the abstract way, the common sense way is the concrete way, and reasoning needs common sense as a foundation—as an anchor to reality as well as a starting point. Moreover, reasoning must frequently touch down at strategic points to common sense (interpolated) percepts to keep it on the path of truth (where truth is a matter of more than merely logical relations). Once a concept has been anchored to reality by a common sense percept, the common sense percept itself may be evaluated for its accuracy in interpreting


163

the underlying sensation by comparing the common sense percept to other, possibly conflicting percepts. James’s analysis of truth, taken altogether, clearly implies that common sense is the stable basis of rationality.44

The Self All these mental functions we have noticed—who or what activates and directs them? This question takes us to the heart of what man is, and the answer hinges on the nature and status of the self. James gives a richly textured account of the self in The Principles of Psychology. There he describes it as consisting of at least three, possibly four parts: a “material Self,” a “social Self,” a “spiritual Self,” and perhaps, something difficult or impossible to determine on the level of psychological analysis, what has been called the “soul” or the “pure Ego.” The material Self includes the body as its “innermost part,” but also clothes, immediate family, home, and outer possessions—all the tangibles one takes to be his own (PoP 280). A man’s social Self is composed of the images of him that others carry in their minds. “To wound any of these images,” James says, “is to wound him” (PoP 282). James is speaking here not only of man’s sociability, his desire for human company (which he recognizes to be natural), but of his “innate propensity” to seek the favorable attention of others, to be well regarded for who he is and what he does (PoP 281). The spiritual Self, empirically considered, is “a man’s inner and subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely,” including reasoning ability, “moral sensibility and conscience,” strength of will, and the like. “These psychic dispositions are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that which we most verily seem to be.” If we take “a concrete view,” James says, “the spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present ‘segment’ or ‘section’ of that stream, according as we take a broader or narrower view” (PoP 284). The “spiritual stream” (PoP 322) of consciousness, broadly speaking, is the spiritual Self, and the core of this self, our “innermost self,” is the present thinking thought: [This last is] the active element in all consciousness . . . a spiritual something in [a man] which seems to go out to meet . . . qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the perception of sensations, and by giving or withholding assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse. It is the home of interest,—not the pleasant or the painful, not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us to which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. (PoP 285)

164


This innermost self, James says, is definitely felt: “It is something with which we . . . have direct sensible acquaintance” (PoP 286). What exactly is it that is felt? James is cautious here and says he can only describe his own experience. When he is most self-aware, he experiences this innermost self as something that spontaneously reacts to the “play” of his stream of thought, “welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no” (PoP 287). When he tries to be as concrete as possible and “grapple with particulars,” he finds that “it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head.” James is not sure what to make of this. All he can discover through introspection of the innermost self from which these central acts break forth are these “cephalic motions” (PoP 288). But what of this “introspective glance” itself that manages to notice these motions? Is it not at that moment something deeper, more inner than, or at least something other than the motions? Is this “glance” a physical or a spiritual activity? What manner of thing is it that causes the glance? Can we really, after all, learn anything about the innermost self through introspection, or has James only demonstrated the limits of introspective analysis? Perhaps trying to observe the innermost self is like the eye turning in its socket to examine its own features—a natural impossibility, doomed from the beginning. Is there then some other, non-introspective approach by which we may understand this “self of selves”? These questions and more come crowding in. James in the Principles seriously considers the possibility, and the implications of the possibility, that the innermost self is after all only a particularly subtle “feeling of bodily activities” (PoP 288). But ultimately he rejects the theory as too much at odds with common sense and common philosophic assumptions in general to be adopted without further substantiation: [such] speculations . . . traverse common-sense [and] contradict the fundamental assumption of every philosophic school [that] our thoughts [are] the one sort of existent which skepticism cannot touch. . . . I will therefore treat the last few pages [discussing these speculations] as a parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of the volume revert to the path of common-sense again. I mean by this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumed all along . . . ) a direct awareness of the process of our thinking as such, simply insisting on the fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenomenon than most of us suppose. (PoP 291)


165

The common sense understanding, and that of most of the Western philosophic tradition, is that we know directly the activities of the innermost spiritual self— our reasoning, our willing, and so forth—and know them as spiritual not physical phenomena, though the meaning of “spiritual” is mostly a negative conception, denoting just something different from any physical process we know. The only conclusion to which James can come on the sole basis of introspection is that (in some persons at least) the part of the innermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to consist for the most part of a collection of cephalic movements or “adjustments” [in reaction to objects in the stream of consciousness] which, for want of attention and reflection, usually fail to be perceived and classed as what they are; that over and above these there is an obscurer feeling of something more; but whether it be of fainter physiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, but rather of subjectivity as such, of thought become “its own object,” must at present remain an open question. (PoP 291–92)

James himself thought that the innermost self is “something more” than physical. One of his earliest observations in the Principles is that psychology must presuppose a dualism at least of mental states and brain states, as the former can by no means—on our present level of knowledge, or any we are likely to have in future—be reduced to the latter; at most, certain mental states and certain brain states may be shown to correlate. Psychology must further presuppose a dualism of subject and object, of “mind knowing and thing known,” so that “Neither gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the other, neither makes the other” (PoP 214). The whole stream of consciousness is spiritual, remember, and what James calls the “innermost self,” taken at face value, is just the present section of the spiritual stream. To understand what James means by the “present section of the stream,” it helps to realize that James (in agreement with other psychologists) found the span of consciousness to last at least a few seconds, shading out into vagueness and then darkness at each end, dropping away into past thought on one side and trending into futurity on the other. The sense that the present thought is continuous with past and future is what gives consciousness its streaming quality. James seems to understand the innermost self as identical with that whole section of thought between the dark outer edges, what philosophers typically call “consciousness.” The innermost self, on this reading, is constantly changing. If there is anything behind this present, dynamic section of thought, James thinks, we can only be aware of it “in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way” (PoP 291). We cannot, apparently, perceive it directly. We can at most sense it on the periphery of thought.

166


The common sense belief is that there definitely is something behind the present thought, and indeed behind all the various phenomenal selves, that there is a Thinker of the thought and an Owner of the selves: “common-sense insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere appearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the fact. She is sure that it involves a real belonging to a real Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Relation to this entity is what makes the self ’s constituents stick together as they do for thought” (PoP 320). James believes he can account for the unity of the selves without postulating such a substantial Owner. It may be that the selves are unified by “something [other than a soul or ‘pure Ego’] not among the things collected, but superior to them all, namely, the real, present onlooking, remembering, ‘judging thought’ or identifying ‘section’ of the stream” (PoP 320–21). This is in fact James’s position: the innermost self, the spiritual center of man, is his present thought, which is felt to be continuous with the wider stream of consciousness, including all those parts within it recognized in varying ways as “my Self,” and which appropriates to itself the thoughts and selves gone before. “Who owns the last self,” says James, “owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.” James thinks it “impossible to discover any verifiable features in personal identity which this sketch does not contain” (PoP 322). But he is not sure what he has said can quite meet the challenge of common sense. This assumption, though it yields much, still does not yield all that commonsense demands. . . . The essence of the matter to common-sense is that the past thoughts . . . were always owned. The [aforementioned present] Thought does not capture them, but as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its own. How is this possible unless the Thought have a substantial identity with a former owner,—not a mere continuity or resemblance, as in [James’s] account, but a real unity? The “Soul” of Metaphysics and the “Transcendental Ego” of the Kantian Philosophy, are . . . but attempts to satisfy this urgent demand of common-sense. (PoP 321)

The commonsensical embrace of the substantial soul did not derive from a single common sense perception. The soul never was a percept—or at least it was certainly never perceived as an entity. James implies that the common sense adoption of the soul-concept emerged over time as (1) a hypothesis that worked for all practical purposes (one that, furthermore, could not be disproved), and (2) a tradition in philosophy, theology, and civilization. That is, the notion of the soul was commonsensical in the secondary sense of being a common conviction tested over time and never successfully contradict-


167

ed. The idea was empirically based in that it was a hypothesis based on hard evidence: we feel these acts emanating from our inmost selves, and we reason that something causes these acts, and that they come from somewhere. “Soul” became a name for this cause and/or site. But, as James points out, the mere naming of this unknown cause or site does not count either as a description or as an explanation. No doubt part of what made the soul hypothesis into a conviction is that the soul’s existence was thought to guarantee goods of the most precious kind—in particular, immortality, responsibility, and individuality. It was thought that only a permanent inner substance could guarantee them. But James thinks he shows that the theory of the soul does not, in fact, guarantee any of these. In short, the soul “explains nothing and guarantees nothing” (PoP 331).45 Still, neither here in the Principles nor in his later essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” (where he publicly declares his judgment that, as an entity, it does not) is James dogmatic in his rejection of the soul hypothesis. In the Principles he is careful to say, “The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes” (PoP 332). Moreover, James has taken very seriously the common sense “demand” that the ownership of thoughts and of the various selves be accounted for, and it seems likely that had he not found a way to understand the present thought as exercising such ownership, he would have taken the common sense view over the available alternatives. Associationist theories and transcendentalist theories alike failed to recognize the concrete continuities between thoughts in conscious experience: Hume and his followers made thought consist of “bundles” or series of discrete sensations, “associated” but not continuous; the school of Kant essentially accepted that sensations come to us in a bundle, or “manifold,” bringing in a transcendental Ego to make them into a unified thought (PoP 349). As he did on other occasions, James took the common sense understanding as his starting point for thinking about the innermost self. Whatever the shortcomings of the common sense perspective here, it at least was faithful in accepting the reality of continuities, to the concrete facts as presented. One thing more needs to be said about the inmost self. James mentioned reason, conscience, and will as being associated with this most intimate self. But in the Principles he gave special attention to, and found a special significance in, will. He seemed to see will as the deepest, most central or inner of human powers. After all, will seems to be necessary to engage reason and to act on conscience, indeed to make all the other central human powers fully active.

168


But will was important to James not only as being fundamental, the prerequisite of man’s engagement of his own capacities and with the world around him. James found the question of free will to be especially urgent, both personally and philosophically. The question preoccupied and haunted him in an unusual way, in a way rather uncharacteristic of modern writers. His scientific learning had made him feel the full force of determinism, and this contributed in his early career to a profound personal crisis. His own account of this crisis has become well-known among readers of James, but it is well worth reexamining, for it sheds much light not only on the centrality of the question of will for him but also on his own philosophic motivations and on the general cast of his philosophy. Consider the following two passages. The first was published in the Varieties of Religious Experience under a false personage; James attributed the account to “a Frenchman,” but later admitted it to be autobiographical: Whilst in [a] state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. (VRE 134–35)


169

James went on to say that he had “always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing” (VRE 135). We will consider the religious aspects and implications later; for now observe the palpable feeling of helplessness against catastrophe suggested in the experience, and the implied crushing of personal willpower. The incident must have powerfully reinforced James’s growing appreciation, thanks to his medical and scientific work, of the limits of the will, and more generally of the limits of human nature. The other passage comes from James’s personal diary, dated April 30, 1870: I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second “Essais” and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present . . . that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. . . . Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can’t be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] doing and suffering and creating.46

If the first selection showed the hard limits of the will, this second one points to its potential and possibility within those limits. The dynamic tension between man’s creative possibilities and his need of something beyond himself—his need to harmonize his powers with a larger reality not of his making—is a theme that runs throughout James’s writings. In maintaining this tension, James demonstrates again the balance of common sense, the equipoise of “on the one hand, and on the other hand.” Common sense takes free will for granted, as it also takes for granted that we can’t do just whatever we might wish to do. We certainly seem to choose freely in many cases. It certainly feels as if sometimes we make things happen by fiat, as if we do one thing when we could just as well do another. On the other hand, we cannot simply choose to be rich, or to be happy, or to be wise. We may choose to do things that will contribute to making us so, but there are definite limits to the power of sheer will. To common sense, this is all quite obvious, and the common man will tend to laugh at persons who trouble themselves about such matters. “You think too much,” he will say. And perhaps in some measure he is right. But if his common sense is well rounded, he can probably

170


be brought around to appreciate that there is a time to think more on these things, just as there is a time to leave them alone. The problem of will that confronted James and challenged his common sense was twofold. First, the latitude of will that the Western world had long taken for granted seemed to be more and more in question, in light of modern science. Deterministic forces seemed to account for more and more of what happens in the world, and the free space within which the will might maneuver seemed on the verge of disappearing altogether or, rather, seemed about to be exposed as having always been an illusion. Second, even if free will was veridical, and the will had its domain, it might be rendered powerless by greater forces. The first part of the problem provoked James’s affirmations of will; the second turned him to religion. What modern psychology was beginning to show by James’s day was the very significant extent to which the body acts on stimuli of its own accord. “The first point to understand in the psychology of Volition,” James says, is that “voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary functions of our organism. . . . Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements are all primary performances” (PoP 1099). The will does not act ex nihilo; it can only choose to perform movements that have already been experienced in some way. “We learn all our possibilities by the way of experience. When a particular movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed. . . . A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life” (PoP 1099–100). Our bodies, moreover, would be set in motion even without this reduplicative action of the will: “Consciousness is in its very nature impulsive. We do not have a sensation or a thought, and then have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is already on its way to instigate a movement” (PoP 1134). Where, then, does the fiat of will come in? Or is it perhaps the case that it never comes in, that we are, in fact, highly complicated automatons? The clearest evidence that we are not, James observes, is the peculiar “feeling of effort” (PoP 1141) we experience when performing some act against resistance. Effort comes in “whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind . . . whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome.” Effort is a kind of prevailing in “the line of greater resistance” (PoP 1154, 1155). James’s account of this effort on behalf of such “ideal impulses” takes us to the very core of his philosophy, the center of his philosophic vision. He says in


171

one place that, “The ideal impulse appears [as] a still small voice which must be artificially reinforced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, making things seem as if, while the force of propensity were essentially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of various amount” (PoP 1154–55). The “still small voice” may in some cases be religious in nature, or it may be merely the voice of our better judgment.47 In any case, it certainly looks as if we have the ability from somewhere deep down, some spiritual reserve all our own, to make a response, even where this response goes against powerful contrary tendencies within us. The spiritual makeup of man is not quite exhausted by the stream of consciousness and its vital center. Beyond the “margin” of consciousness lies the subconscious, and this too is spiritual territory, at least in part. “The most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science,” says James, “is the discovery . . . that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs” (VRE 190). The empirical evidence shows, James thinks, that the mind’s subconscious region is (among other things) a kind of gateway to deeper spiritual experience. He even speaks of the conscious region of the psyche as the “lower” region in comparison with the subconscious (VRE 173). From the higher district, in some individuals, come transformative “invasions” of mysterious forces (VRE 432). The evidence that this is so, James believes, is overwhelming. The origin of these invasions is open to question (whether spiritual or neurological, divine, or sometimes perhaps diabolic), but their effects cannot reasonably be denied. The discovery of the subconscious, and of the fact that this region is the locus of “religious” experiences, helps explain the common sense understanding of religion. The subtitle of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience was “A Study in Human Nature,” and James thought religious experiences revealed the full range of human possibilities in a way nothing else could. Hundreds of cases, both classic and little known, show these experiences to produce striking effects: expanded “vision” or “synoptic insight into the significance of life as a whole,” or more frequently, vastly augmented supplies of energy, especially increased moral power.48 The religious life like no other “lets loose the strenuous mood” that drives men to serious moral action; “in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power” (WB 160). Both intellectually and morally, then, man’s capacities are enhanced by “saving experiences” that “flow in” from the subconscious region

172


(PU 139). The common sense conviction that prayer and religious devotion have significant real-world effects seems empirically well founded.

Physiological Foundations

Special stress has been laid on James’s understanding of the “spiritual” dimension of human psychology. It is important, however, in order to appreciate how much James’s psychology owes to common sense, to observe some of what he has to say about the physical preconditions of thought. One of the most striking features of James’s Principles of Psychology is how much attention he gives therein to physiological phenomena. Common sense—so immersed as it is in sensation, so attuned to every feeling, so “down to earth”—has a keen sensitivity to bodily experience. It cannot very well forget the body’s needs, demands, and limitations. Our own bodies are, after all, our most frequent percept; from the standpoint of common sense our bodies are, literally, the anchors of our existence. James expresses the common sense view when he says, “By an inscrutable necessity, each human mind’s appearance on this earth is conditioned upon the integrity of the body with which it belongs, upon the treatment that body gets from others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as their tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruction” (PoP 307). Obviously, the body is the home of the sense organs, the receptors of the outer stimulations that give rise to sensations. Indeed, as James tries to show, the body is a more sensitive instrument than we give it credit for. It is a detector of the most subtle and delicate motions—even, James seems to think, of purely spiritual movements. Modern psychology has shown, moreover, just how dependent the mind’s activity is on the proper functioning of the brain. Mental states are not reducible to brain states, but they certainly need them; it is as if our thoughts need that soft gray matter to take form. All our habits and associations of thought are neurologically based: “An acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape” (PBC 137). Thanks to the plasticity of human brain matter, after every thought of two things together there is at least a slight tendency to think them together in future. Our capacity for memory owes much, perhaps everything, to the forging of neural pathways in the brain. Another class of acquired habit, motor habits, are essential for making decisions “stick,” and this is especially important with respect to moral decisions, and more generally, to character formation. “No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess,” James says, “and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every opportunity to act [and thus made the moral principle or


173

feeling a motor habit], one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved” (PoP 129). It so happens that those sentiments James just mentioned, or more generally our emotions, are also physiologically based. In fact, James believes our emotions are entirely physical events. “Our natural way of thinking about [especially our] coarser emotions [‘grief, fear, rage, love’] is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, to the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion” (PoP 1065).49 The body, again, is an exquisitely sensitive register of excitements. “Objects . . . excite bodily changes by a preorganized mechanism [and] the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate” (PoP 1066). The body is a “sounding-board” not just for the aforementioned “coarser” emotions but even for our “subtler” ones, for our “moral, intellectual, and aesthetic feelings” (PoP 1082). Our bodies, then, are the sine qua non of our emotional lives. Between habit and sentiment our bodies play a crucial role in our moral development, personally and socially. Our moral character is the sum of our habits (intellectual, emotional, and active), and even our intellectual habits must be physiologically established: at the very least, pathways must be forged in the brain, and very often (always?) intellectual habits are formed with the aid of physical signs and movements (imagistic, ritualistic, linguistic). The fact that our intellectual lives require the body’s service to take root and take form points to another way common sense is foundational for human wellbeing. We need common sense interpolation to bind our world together, make it coherent, make it a place where we can act intelligently, a place fit “for all practical purposes.” But in addition to simple common sense perception of this sort we need common sense perception in the larger sense, in the sense of the community’s perception, as a community, of relevant moral facts. To perceive and to know that we perceive the relevant moral facts as a community, we must be able to communicate our thoughts with each other, and to do this, we must make our thoughts incarnate, we must make physical signs (notably, with our mouths and by our hands) by which to publish our moral perceptions—our perceptions of, practically, what is needed and what is required. Rational speech is the lifeblood of the community, of its common sense, and speech requires the joining of body and mind. This matter of language raises yet another advantage of common sense over much of modern philosophy and science, its predilection for simplicity of

174


expression. James had little patience for the elaborate school jargon employed by so many leading philosophers and scientists of his day and of the preceding decades. The Germans, of course, were the worst offenders. Lovers of concision and clarity cannot help but be secretly delighted when James says, “The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge” (PoP 346). No one can read James’s own elegant prose and fail to be impressed by the simplicity and clarity of his words. His linguistic style is much in keeping with his affection and respect for the common sense way. But, as James surely understood, “complication of thought and statement” is not merely annoying; it can be debilitating and even destructive of human purposes—in particular, of moral and political judgment and action. Even where real complexities require complex terminological constructions for technical precision (which is not as often as the Kants and the Hegels of the world think), these linguistic complications must be translated to common language in order to be made socially comprehensible and useful, and amenable to practical application by ordinary men. That is, the complexities, where a general sense of them is necessary for salutary social action, must be put into common sense terms. No social consensus, and therefore no community, can arise without frequent appeals to common sense perceptions in the common language of the people. This “appeal to common sense” is not what Kant mistakenly took Thomas Reid to mean by it, “an appeal to the opinion of the multitude,” but what Reid did mean by it—an appeal to the people’s common perceptions, to their effective grasp of certain self-evident truths, not least moral truths.50 In this sense, even the philosopher must make regular appeal to common sense, for his truth claims stand or fall according to how well they uncover the nature and meaning of things commonly perceived. Such appeals, as James continually endeavors to show, are not only justifiable but absolutely essential, for common understanding as much as for consolidated action (see discussion of Vico in Chapter 2).

6 The Common Sense Basis of James’s Moral and Social Theory

James did not express his moral understanding in terms of natural right, but it can accurately be conceived in that vein. His indications of an “eternal moral order” and objective moral relations, his prioritization of human value in order of spiritual, social, and physical, and his treatment of justice and character all suggest a right determined by nature, albeit a nature more dynamic than most of the classic natural right/natural law philosophers ever imagined. Without question, morality and justice for him are not determined subjectively, and the objective criteria of right are not infinitely variable, even if the particular moral relations are constantly shifting, because some moral relations in his accounting are permanent in principle, especially if it is allowed (as he allows) that there is a divine overseer who represents everything good and makes demands of us. His moral philosophy is exactly what the natural law tradition needs and has long lacked: a dynamic rather than static conception of nature and of the standards it implies. This conception is not dynamic in that there are no permanencies but in the sense that nature is alive and the standards are personal, experienced personally as felt expectations of other persons, the most important being God’s, whose wishes have, of course, a special authority. Put another way, natural right and natural law have been too abstract, and James is the ultimate cure for abstractness.

The Basic Theory James grounded his moral theory, as he did all truth, in percepts, specifically in moral percepts. Our most stable moral convictions, as our most stable

175

176


beliefs generally, are of the common sense variety, grounded in percepts we see again and again. Concepts that terminate in common sense moral percepts and theories that make the most sense out of moral common sensibles, taken collectively, together constitute our stock of common sense moral truths. The percepts themselves are true at least in some measure, and the concepts and theories based on those percepts are true insofar as they do them justice. Our overall stock of moral truths will contain some that, while potentially realized by all, are in fact not commonly sensed. But if and when these uncommon truths become widely recognized, they become common sense to communities, part of the sensus communis. Although James does not say so explicitly, it is clear on close examination that his reflections on morality and ethics are founded on the common sense experience of individuals, of society, and ultimately of mankind. James never worked out a full-blown ethical theory, but he did leave a detailed outline in his penetrating and suggestive essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” The essay is so dense and so foundational that a very close analysis is provided here, almost a gloss.1 And as the form of James’s inquiry in this place is profoundly Socratic, the questions underlying it are drawn out explicitly. James says pointedly in the first sentence of “Moral Life” that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance” (WB 141). Any viable ethical theory must be built up on observable moral “facts” (WB 158), that is, on moral percepts. The method, then, is inductive. The proper “aim” of ethical philosophy, says James, is “an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical point of view” (WB 141). The “subject-matter” for the ethical philosopher, the material he has to work with, is “the ideals he finds existing in the world” (WB 142). The most prevalent ideals actually “existing in the world,” of course, are common ideals, common judgments or opinions about what is best. A careful examination of these, James thinks, will give a handle on man’s moral situation and reveal the network of “moral relations that obtain among things.” The basic procedure, initially at least, is the same as Plato and Aristotle’s, who began with common views about what is right and good, thinking that in them they would find indications of a deeper basis of rightness and goodness in nature. This assumption stems from a sense that people’s opinions on the subject are opinions about something real, that, however they might differ, they refer to things experienced by all—to common sensibles. If we can penetrate to these underlying realities about which people opine, we should be able to test the varying opinions against them and determine their relative adequacy.2

James’s Moral and Social Theory

177

“There are three questions in ethics that must be kept apart,” James says. He names them “the psychological question, the metaphysical question, and the casuistic question. The psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words ‘good,’ ‘ill,’ and ‘obligation’ are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.” James thinks that too often ethical thinkers confuse these questions or fail to give full consideration to all of them and, in consequence, end up with deeply flawed ethical theories. Indeed, most modern theories (like Mill’s, for instance) never get beyond “the psychological question” (WB 142). The psychological question concerns the raw materials of moral experience, which are “our moral ideas and judgments.” As such, it is foundational. How do we come to have these moral ideas and judgments? There are two basic theories. One is that they derive from an innate human faculty called “conscience”; the other is that they come from “the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain” (WB 142, 143), that is, whatever is associated with pleasure or the diminishing of pain will seem good to us, and whatever is associated with pain will seem evil. James finds that many of our ideals have arisen the second way, but not all, that some simply cannot be explained in this way. Among those that cannot are “a vast number of our moral perceptions,” for example, “The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc.—are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of a more ideal attitude for its own sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. ‘Experience’ of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar?” (WB 143–44). Our moral perceptions “deal with directly felt fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility” (WB 143). So, while the associationists (such as Bentham and the Mills) deserve credit for showing that many of our ideals originate in response to pleasures and pains, “the intuitionist school” (prominent among them, the Scottish Common Sense philosophers) have been more accurate on this point of moral perception (WB 144). Let us linger a moment over this matter of conscience and moral perception. Given that James understands “sensation” broadly as “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in the absence of any suggestion in his writings to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume that the “moral sense” for James involves simply a specific kind of sensation, a sense of fitness or unfitness. Moral perception, then (assuming James is using the term “perception” in the same way he used

178


it in the Principles), would be a grasp of particular, given moral sensations as composing a coherent moral fact—as, for example, a perception that a certain business mogul’s words and/or actions betray an attitude that may be classified as “greed.” In this example, the instanced attitude is the perceived moral fact, and the nature of the perception is that the mogul’s intentions constitute an existential orientation out of joint with human warmth and comity, and therefore an unfit disposition. Now, the perception might be wrong, the perceiver may misinterpret the tycoon’s words or actions or both, but such a mistaken perception is correctable by taking a closer look at the particulars of the case, provided these are available for scrutiny. The point is that if the motives are correctly understood, the judgment that this individual is guilty of greed is valid and true. The metaphysical ethical question concerns the meaning of “good,” “ill,” and “obligation.” More precisely, it concerns the meaning of the realities to which such words apply. The first thing to notice here, James says, is that the “status” or site “for good and evil [and obligation] to exist in” is sentience or “conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic ‘nature of things’ can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed merely of physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply” (WB 145). The basis of good, evil, and obligation, then, must be the concrete moral relations that obtain in and among sentient beings. The prerequisite of moral truth, James says, is a concrete standard outside the thinker. “Truth [in general] supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform.” If only one sentient being exists, there can be no moral truth, only the moral fact of feeling things to be good or ill. In such a situation, there could be “no outward obligation.” The only moral problem in this case would be finding an internal consistency of personal ideals. With the existence of two or more sentient beings, the moral situation remains the same as long as each ignores or is “indifferent to what the other may feel or do” (WB 146). Where does obligation come in? It must arise in a context in which someone, at least, is not indifferent about what the others feel or do; it must arise with the concrete demand of a concrete person. But are all demands equal? May not some be more legitimate than others? This concern raises the issue of the status of ideals, the primary material the moral philosopher wishes to understand. Every demand made presupposes some ideal, some end desired and demanded on the basis of this desire. The question of the relative legitimacy of ideals is central for the philosopher as he


179

surveys his material. If no one else makes the demand for taking some ideals to be better than others, and therefore obligatory, he, at least, will make it. In that situation where multiple sentient beings exist but are indifferent to the feelings and actions of others, where they live in moral isolation, there appears at first glance to be no obligation to favor any of the existing ideals against others.3 But the ethical philosopher finds this state of affairs intolerable. In the imagined scene, “we find realized for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics conceived of—in which individual minds are the measures of all things, and in which no one ‘objective’ truth, but only a multitude of ‘subjective’ opinions can be found. But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he holds to the hope of philosophy, will not put up. Among the various ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more truth and authority; and to these the others ought to yield, so that system and subordination may reign” (WB 147). He wants that “genuine universe” of moral relations, and beholding this multiverse of ideals offends his sense of order and possibility, for the dissonance is jarring and the lack of coordination strikes him as a terrible waste: how much more good could there be, he wonders, if all these solitary beings joined their energies and pursued certain of the ideals together? This is for him not merely a question of aesthetic preference. He must know the true order of ideals according to which this better life might be achieved. James noted at the beginning of the essay that the ethical philosopher himself cannot be a skeptic. Like Witherspoon, McCosh, and other common sense philosophers, James rejects skepticism as unphilosophical and fatal to ethics. The moral philosopher “will not be a sceptic . . . so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim,” his aim in this case being again that “stable system,” that “genuine universe” of moral relations. This is the ethical philosopher’s own ideal, and he is not content to leave the constellation of sentients to their lonely pursuits (WB 141–42). But why should anyone care about the philosopher’s ideal? Does his ideal really matter any more than the others? Is anyone obliged to take it seriously, or to even take notice of it? It’s not clear that anyone should, on the face of it. If the ought must be traced, as James suggested, to “some existing consciousness,” it does not seem that the consciousness to which it must be traced is the philosopher’s. “But now what particular consciousness in the universe can enjoy this prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?” (WB 147). The answer can only be, God’s. If a higher obligation is to come in

180


anywhere, it must come in with the demand, the claim, of a thinker whose demands are more authoritative, more weighty than those of others; and the only thinker who obviously and necessarily matches that description would be God. By the sheer size of his claim, he would have the advantage. But this observation raises a host of difficult questions. The first and most obvious in this day (and already, for a growing number, in James’s) is, Why should we believe that God exists? A secondary, but still fundamental question is, Supposing God exists, is our obligation to him based on anything more than his advantage of power? This second is a version of the old question over which Christian theologians have wrangled for centuries, Is it right because God wills it so, or does he will it because it’s right? The first question is considered more fully below in the section on religion, but it is relevant here to recall that James finds among the sensations associated with our innermost selves a “sense of an ideal spectator.” James might not have gone as far as Coleridge in saying that the notion of God is “essential to the human mind” and is “called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience,” that “the one great and binding ground of the belief of God and a hereafter is the law of conscience.”4 But James’s comments in the Principles clearly suggest that he found this sense of an ideal spectator to be an important piece of evidence for God’s existence and presence among us. James’s handling of the second question, of the ground of our obligation to God, is startling in its freshness and simplicity. If we fixate on the imposing weight of God’s claim on us, we are tempted to think that the basis of the claim is power, that his wishes are more powerful than ours and that he has the power to enforce them, so that our acceding to his demands is a matter of facing the futility of opposing him. But any such conclusion comes from looking in the wrong place. The extent of God’s claim is relevant, but it is the nature of the claim that makes the extent of it morally binding. The crucial point is that God’s claim, like all claims, is that of a living sentient being, and more particularly of an intelligently desiring being. James’s initial assumption was that the ultimate ground of good, ill, and obligation must be a peculiar kind of concrete existence, a consciousness. Abstract moral principles must be derivative and have all their authority from this ground. But how (to raise the Humean objection) can the ought be derived from the is? The ought, James answers, is a function of concrete demand: someone makes a demand of us that we are obliged to heed. The critical insight into the nature of obligation is the realization that every demand entails some degree of obligation. “The moment we take a steady look at the question” of obligation, says James, “we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim” (WB


181

148). Every demand, and therefore every ideal, has special existential weight as coming from a sentient being, and thus every ideal, not only God’s, constitutes a legitimate claim by virtue of its existence. God existentially stakes the greatest claim, but the weightiness of God’s claim cannot by itself destroy the legitimacy of our own. Our supreme obligation to God derives from not merely the greater extent and power of his claim but also, and crucially, from the fact that this more extensive demand comes from a living sentient being. To understand fully the obligation of higher ideals, we need to understand the nature of an ideal. An ideal, existentially, is an intentional (that is to say, intelligent) desire, a desire that reality go a certain way. Such desire is the absolute basis of any obligation. The demand calls for respect because it comes from intelligent desire. What makes this kind of desire intrinsically worthy of respect? Ultimately, that it is the deepest expression of life and the ground of being. “The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist,” James says, “is that such a phenomenon actually is desired.” The only plausible reason that anything exists at all is that God wanted it to exist; the only reason that anything should exist is that he or we or some conscious being first desires it, holds it out as an ideal. Every such desire, every ideal, is a claim, and every claim creates an obligation against others, as something that ought to be taken into account. The basis of our obligation to anyone, then, is his intelligent (ideal-pursuing) desire, and the base of our greater obligation to God is the greater amount of his desire. When we realize that he is desiring as we are, we see that we have no better right to things desired than he does; when we realize how much vaster (not to mention nobler) his desires are, we see how unreasonable it is for us to treat ours as of equal importance. Acknowledging our obligation to God is really a matter of fairness, and of respect for life. “It is life answering to life,” and “a claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which no thought of an ‘ideal’ backing [James here refers to the support of ‘an abstract ideal order’] can render more complete” (WB 149). Abstract moral principle, again, is derivative, abstracted from the facts of sentient experience, and in particular the sense of appeal from a “higher judging companion” (see Chapter 5). “Wrongness,” then, existentially (and thus most fundamentally) is “disappointment” of a concrete divine person, and we must be judged by the extent to which we are concretely “responsive” or “not responsive” to his wishes (WB 149). Although desire is, on James’s account, the basis of obligation, one can yet desire wrongly, and indeed wrong desiring is the root of all evil. How can both be true? How can desire be the basis of obligation and also be the source of evil and wrong? The answer, again, is strangely simple. It is never desire in itself that is wrong. Desire becomes wrong when it takes the lesser over the

182


greater good: the satisfaction of the lower at the expense of the higher self, the good of self generally over the good of many, or merely human goods over divine goods. To be more precise, if the intelligent agent allows the normal desire for lesser goods to eclipse the desire for greater goods, the form of desire is warped, and the agent is defiled. At the deepest level, moral perceptions are perceptions of the fitness or unfitness of particular desires to particular objects in the larger scheme of things. Actions are right or wrong in a moral sense according to the particular aims of the desires that produce them. This is essentially the Platonic-Augustinian account, and James’s handling of “the metaphysical question” suggests that it is, in general form, his own. James’s moral metaphysics, then, is a metaphysics of desire. The moral order, correspondingly (if there is one) is existential, formed by desires and their concomitants. The philosopher looks at the vast thicket of desires the world presents and adds to it his own desire, “his own peculiar ideal . . . that over all these individual opinions there is a system of truth which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.” Moral truth, as all truth by James’s lights, is itself existential, or at least potentially so. It “cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws, or an abstract ‘moral reason,’ but can only exist in act, or in the shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found” (WB 151). Concrete moral relations among existing persons constitute the moral universe, and moral truths are thoughts or ideas that help the thinker come to terms with those real relations. The philosopher tries to think about human moral experience in such a way that the relations become transparent to him, and to express those thoughts and describe or symbolize those relations in a way that allows others to see the relations for themselves and test the adequacy of his formulations concerning them. What he initially finds, on examining moral experience, is a tangled, mutating chaos of competing desires, the very antithesis of order. Finally he is led to a realization that God’s desires must be the standard, if there be any standard, by which to judge and rank the other desires and so discover the true moral order he seeks. This metaphysical solution is also the answer to the “casuistic” question, the third of the three basic ethical questions he mentioned at the outset—the question of the measure of good and evil. A plausible objection to James’s scheme is that, by the “life answering to life” standard, a stable and adequate moral system could be worked out without bringing in a god if we formulated the standard of behavior as whatever will most conduce to the best practicable life for human beings, a standard James presents (see below) in terms of preserving as many human goods as possible within the constraints of time, space, and circumstance. James’s unfolding analysis suggests he would find a system without God inadequate because it wouldn’t allow for the higher goods and greater moral energy the life of


183

faith makes possible, and unstable because of the weakness of the obligations it could assert—to facilitate merely temporal satisfactions and to serve an impersonal crowd of humanity and posterity. But now the philosopher is confronted with a new problem. How can God’s true desires be found out? And how does the philosopher avoid making God in his own image in construing them? Or as James puts it, how can he avoid construing God and the right order of desires “save by an act in which his own sympathies and prepossessions are implied?” (WB 152). The philosopher needs an “impartial test” for judging desires (WB 151). He knows that God’s desires must be that test, but how can he be impartial in determining what those desires are?5 Many philosophers have failed to realize that any adequate standard must be divine, but all “the more serious ethical schools” agree on the basic “method” for discovering an impartial test of moral motive and behavior, and this is to look for “a common essence” shared by all goods. James surveys the various essences proposed and concludes that “the best, on the whole . . . seems to be the capacity to bring happiness” (WB 152). This was Aristotle’s conclusion and that of the Epicureans and their progeny, including the modern utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, and so on), although the Epicurean or hedonistic notion of happiness as pleasure was rather different from Aristotle’s.6 “But,” James continues, “in order not to break down fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses that never aim at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most universal principle—that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand” (WB 152–53). All demands being satisfied (psychological, physical, relational, and so on), we would be totally fulfilled. The basic moral problem is that we could never satisfy all demands. Given the limitations of time and space and capacity, some demands will have to be sacrificed. But which ones? The moral philosopher, if he is self-aware and appropriately humble, realizes that he cannot rightly look to his own preferences for guidance. He sees that “the very best of men must not only be insensible, but be ludicrously and peculiarly insensible, to many goods,” so that, were he to rely on his own personal inclinations, the result would be “a mutilation of the fulness of the truth” (WB 154). What, then, to do? One of the problems the moral philosopher must contend with at this stage of his inquiry is that he finds the various goods already ranked in society, and some ideals already sacrificed, but he cannot assume that the goods actually on top are really the greater goods or that the ideals honored are better than the ones forfeited. Conventional rankings may blind us to certain goods. “If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher

184


either die and do not return to haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, everyone applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard” (WB 154). The dominant practical reality that every man has to come to terms with is the order of values of the society in which he lives; and philosophy, to say nothing of moral philosophy, cannot get off the ground until the thinker takes seriously the question whether that cultural order of values is the right one. There is one more feature of the human moral situation, symbiotically bound up with personal experience and social mores, and of capital importance for moral understanding: our “metaphysical and theological beliefs” (WB 159). Man is not a passive element in the universe but an active participant; he cannot merely exist in the world but must interpret it and make sense of it in order to live comfortably therein. And his understanding of the universe of which he is part decisively conditions his perceptions of moral qualities and of the obligations he bears to others. Perceptions, remember, are organized sensations, including both sensations immediately given and remembered sensations called up by expectations about what a given object might be. Metaphysical and theological beliefs involve expectations about what the universe will show and do, and these beliefs thus inform perception. To know the world as it is requires at the least some circumspection about our expectations and caution about making empirical judgments. To understand our obligations we must give due consideration both to our moral perceptions and to the beliefs that inform them, scrutinizing our beliefs, testing them against sensible experience, and correcting our beliefs and perceptions as necessary. How then, in the face of the values and beliefs that we before have taken for granted, can we know which ideals to keep and which to sacrifice? Well, the first thing is to sacrifice as few as possible, to try to do justice to as many as possible. James says: The guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) [must] be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can. That act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat there must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the more inclusive side—of the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished party’s interests lay. (WB 155)


185

Two important qualifications should be recognized here to avoid misunderstanding. It is abundantly clear from what James says elsewhere in the essay that he does not mean to suggest all demands are equal. He has said philosophy calls for a ranking of desires and ideals (and so by implication demands), and he has suggested also that according to our moral perceptions, some attitudinal qualities (and so, implicitly, desires) are inherently superior to others, as nobility versus vulgarity, as being fitter in the context of objective moral relations. The point is not that all demands are equal but that, within a right ordering of demand-satisfaction, as many of them be met as possible. In any case, the endeavor to do justice to as many as possible is the common sense approach to the problem. The other side of the common sense attitude of taking life as it is is a resistance to leaving out of account anything that manifestly contributes to life, no matter how relatively small or how hard to reconcile with other goods. James said in an early essay that, “‘Mind,’ as we actually find it, contains all sorts of laws—those of logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, decorum, beauty, morals, and so forth, as well as of perception of fact. Common sense estimates mental excellence by a combination of all these standards.”7 Common sense estimates moral excellence and human excellence generally in the same way, not fixating on one kind of good to the exclusion of others but appreciating and defending them all. It is not enough for common sense to preserve only the highest ideals; all claims should be heard, and all goods should be saved that can be saved.8 Something else begins to come clear from James’s account so far. Making happiness the essence of good might suggest that ethics in the end comes down to determining and living in pursuit of our true self-interest. But, like Witherspoon and McCosh, James implies that ethics cannot be reduced to considerations of interest. His formulation of the good as “satisfying demands” points to the ineradicable element of duty in the moral life. We are obliged, in James’s scheme, to satisfy as many demands as possible, and obligation implies duty. James follows Witherspoon and McCosh, too, in understanding interest and duty to be inseparably connected. Our desires and ideals entail an interest, but we have an obligation to respect the interests of others and, more deeply, their intrinsic value as sentient beings, which is the reason respecting their interests is morally imperative. This implies a right to the pursuit of happiness and a duty to honor that pursuit. Rights and duties, James would agree, are correlative terms. The question remains, How to prioritize the various goods? Which of them must be preserved at all costs, which should be fought for but not made allimportant, and which can be let go without unacceptable loss? According to James, the answer hinges on metaphysical and theological considerations, and these in turn on psychology, or more precisely on experience, in which the

186


psyche apprehends realities beyond itself. He says in “The Moral Life” that, “The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs.” As just noted, beliefs inform perceptions. The most fundamental beliefs, and the most morally significant ones, are beliefs about the larger scheme of things. How one “reads” the moral facts will be most decisively influenced by just this kind of belief. Of all metaphysical questions, the most momentous for ethics is the question of God, his existence and his nature. Take the world first without reference to God. James says that “real ethical relations” would exist “in a purely human world,” and even in a “moral solitude,” where a person had no relations with others (WB 159). In the latter case, the individual would still find that he cannot satisfy all his desires at once and would have to choose among them. The case of moral solitude is especially useful to consider, because the moral relations here are relatively simple. What should the individual in moral isolation do when he finds himself conflicted about which desires to favor? In light of our guiding principle that we should always try to satisfy as many demands as possible, “awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions,” the answer seems clear: in cases of conflict, he should cater to those demands which, if not satisfied, will come back to “plague [him] with interminable crops of consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets.” James calls such demands “imperatives” (WB 159). Such imperatives are clearly recognizable in experience, if not always before the moment of moral decision, then certainly after choosing to ignore them. At some point, we perceive the quality of imperativeness in such demands and realize the damage to us (or, in a social context, to others) that will come from ignoring them. This perception of imperativeness is the experiential criterion by which to rank our goods. By this perception we see that some goods are more essential, and thus more important than others. Now we who live in society manifestly do not live in moral solitude, and we must factor into our moral calculations a vast range of ideals besides our own. But the same rule applies: the socially most imperative goods must be on top. Who should determine which goods are socially most imperative? James suggests they ought in general to be determined by the long run of collective experience or, in other words, by the common sense of the community, rather than by any one man or group of men. Remembering his limitations, his “insensibility” to many goods, the philosopher will not be quick to dismiss the order of goods in place in his own society. He will recognize that more ideals have been preserved and more good deposited in the funded experience of civilized tradition than he knows or can ever fully appreciate. James’s explanation of this attitude is worth quoting at length:


187

The course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands—that and that only is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints; and though someone’s ideals are unquestionably the worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for himself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction to the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases of conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs of the community on top. (WB 155–56)

The affinity of James’s notion of social progress to Burke’s is evident.9 This is not the whole story, however. James goes on to say that if our ethical theorist “be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without producing others louder still” (WB 156). So, while the presumption in disputed cases should favor the conventional order, this presumption must not be allowed to harden into rigid inflexibility. “Every now and then,” says James, “someone is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old ‘laws of nature’ by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept” (WB 157–58). That is, in pursuing his vision he discovers that the old “laws of nature” were not really the laws of nature or were misconceived, and that the old moral rules were inadequate to the situation, and accordingly breaks out of the old paradigms in order to bring about a greater good. As much as some intellectual ideologues may wish it, and have wished it, James cannot plausibly be read here to promote political radicalism. The “right” to be original and revolutionary is conditioned on a due respect for the conventional order, and the breaker of the old rules cannot reasonably

188


expect society to turn itself upside down for him. There are other social goods than the ones he wants to promote, and even if his are higher and worthier, he has no right to tear down what may be impossible to build back up. His right is “to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw” (WB 156; emphasis added). James’s attitude is very much like that old revolutionary Socrates’ in the Crito. Civilization, James suggests, is the maximal realization of ideals through a balancing of heroic new beginnings on the basis of new insight and conservation, preserving and consolidating the good of successful experiments. It is the product of “relative equilibrium” between “conservative” and “revolutionary” forces. It is clear enough that James in his view of social development adopts the perspective of common sense. In general he identifies with the hard-won common sense of the community, or “the conservative sentiments of society” (WB 157), as against the revolutionary passions. But while common sense resists radical change, it is capable of embracing revolutionary ideas and approaches when they prove their worth experimentally. It is safe to say that James is an adversary of total revolution, but it is equally apparent that he welcomed partial revolutions that, by improving life dramatically in some respects without sacrificing larger civilizational acquisitions, create a more ideal situation on the whole. He could even be open to a total transformation of the culture, provided the change was sufficiently continuous with the old order and sufficiently gradual and above all manifestly better all around than what came before. Elsewhere he calls this evolutionary improvement of society “meliorism.” James’s posture, again, is the common sense attitude. Unless deeply offended by them, common sense does not respond to new ideas and programs with “no!” but, rather, with “wait and see.” Its posture is like that of Gamaliel, the wise Pharisee who advised, “Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”10 Common sense, then, is not merely conservative. It is, rather, a kind of openness to whatever proves itself in experience. The reference made to God here is not entirely incidental. James suggested that the most momentous ethically relevant beliefs are precisely those about God. In point of fact, it looks as if every civilization has had its origins in religion, as if the various civilizational mores emerged out of religious belief and practice. Arguably, the moral power of Confucius and Socrates and Jesus, for example, stemmed from their attitudes toward what must be taken as divine. Their respective views of right order hinged on a sense of a higher order laid out in or by heaven. Their imperatives were more piercing than the usual imperatives because they were seen as having a source beyond self and beyond


189

the societies in which they lived, even beyond mankind and nature itself, and this sense of higher obligation generated in them extraordinary moral energy. “The deepest difference, practically in the moral life of man,” James says, “is the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained” (WB 159–60). Nothing awakens the strenuous mood, James observes, like the sense of divine appeal, a challenge from on high. “In a merely human world without a God,” he explains, “the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up.” The “religion of humanity” that some have proposed (as John Dewey would propose later, in his Common Faith) as a substitute for traditional religion cannot possibly make up the deficit. It tries to replace the appeal of God by the appeal of posterity, but we cannot work up much excitement for those vague and distant people. The religion of humanity “lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the don’t-care mood” (WB 160). James continues: When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering, tragically challenging note of appeal. . . . All through history, in the periodical conflicts of Puritanism with the don’t-care temper, we see the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high, and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need. . . . The strenuous type of character will on the battlefield of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall. (WB 160–61)11

We begin to see a moral energy here far exceeding even that of Socrates. The sense of the divine as personal, as a personal presence, sets the conscience and will on fire. The conclusion of James’s inquiry is that what the moral philosopher seeks is available only through faith, faith not of the dogmatic kind, a kind of blind adherence to a “set of beliefs” (as we like to say nowadays), but of the living kind (such as described in Chapter 3). This may be a recognition of the limits of logic, but it is by no means an abandonment of philosophy, for philosophy

190


is something more than logic. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James suggests that “mystical experience” has a “noetic quality” (VRE 302), and the philosophic ascent to the divine pattern of goods he describes in “Moral Life” is patently noetic. Moreover, his noetic exploration in the essay just as patently has a religious dimension, for the critical awakening as James tells it is the “penetrating appeal” of divine desire. In his own words: It would seem . . . and this is my final conclusion—that the stable and systematic moral universe for which the ethical philosopher asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he now exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach. In the interests of our own ideal of systematically unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious cause. (WB 161)

Thus, James’s ethical and religious investigations are, and must be, inseparably connected, at least with respect to the quest for an “eternal moral order,” a scale of ideals permanently guaranteed.12 This order and this complete scale, though James again does not frame the matter thus, would be the concrete basis of natural right. In the end, however, attention to the higher appeals we feel does not result in any clear-cut, final ethical system. The reason for this is that the mix of ideals present in the world at any given moment is never what it was, or will be moments hence. The general moral relations may hold permanently, but the particular moral relations are continually shifting, changing with each new desire and each new interaction of persons. Religious experience may sharpen our sense of the deeper order of nature and may clarify considerably our view and understanding of the permanently higher goods, but we cannot derive from religious experience any ethical rules that will show us exactly what to do in any genuine moral dilemma. Morally speaking, faith “after all serves only to let loose in us the strenuous mood” (WB 161), making us willing to pursue moral insight and discernment more doggedly.13 In the moment of moral conflict, James says, “it is simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor’s lectures and no array of


191

books can save us. The solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their interior characters, and nowhere else” (WB 162), in the responsiveness or unresponsiveness to the demands of the time. We see, then, that James understands right order in human affairs, as distinguished from the permanent moral order constituted by God’s desires, to be an achievement, the concrete fulfillment of a process in experience aiming at maximization of satisfactions. It is an achievement, moreover, that requires constant maintenance: continual adjustments must be made if the concrete order is to remain adequate to the rich and dynamic range of existing ideals. As James summarized in a letter, his philosophy is one “which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making.”14 God himself, James thinks, the foregoing account implies, is involved in this process. Although God’s ends are presumably unchangeable, the establishment of that order of ends in practice is infinitely variable, and this is what makes faith an adventure. The life of faith or philosophy (James seems ultimately to think they are the same at the experiential level), and the higher moral life that proceeds from it, is not one of dry adherence to a list of principles, which would be unutterably boring, but one of unfolding truth and creative construction in fidelity to the divine pattern, livingly encountered. James does not deny the value of moral principles, but thinks it critical to recognize the limits of their usefulness: Abstract rules indeed can help, but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.

James concludes: “There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see” (WB 158).

The Model It helps, trying to live well, to have a model, someone who “shows us how it’s done.” The best model is the best example we know of. This might be a singular individual or it might be a composite of many. Perhaps a composite is ideal, as presumably even the greatest exemplars have their weaknesses. In Varieties James presents such a composite in his description of the “saintly” character.

192


It should come as no surprise, given his sketch of ethics above, that he turns especially to religious persons for moral illumination and guidance. James finds certain basic features of “saintliness, the same in all religions.” They are (1) “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power” (VRE 219–20); (2) “a sense of friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control”; (3) “an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down”; and (4) “a shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards ‘yes, yes,’ and away from ‘no, no,’ where the claims of the non-ego are concerned” (VRE 220). He lists as “characteristic practical consequences” of these “fundamental inner conditions” (1) “asceticism,” a deliberate forgoing of lower-level desires for the sake of higher goods; (2) “strength of soul,” making old, powerful “motives and inhibitions” insignificant; (3) “purity,” keeping “unspotted from the world” for the sake of deepening “spiritual consistency”; and (4) “charity,” an active love of one’s fellow man (VRE 221). It is easy to see how these characteristics would augment tremendously the strenuous mood. The sense of higher purpose and divine empowerment and the corresponding ascetic discipline, single-mindedness, and energetic surge of love for others make the saintly personality a center of moral power that, other things being equal, cannot be matched. This is a variety of the strenuous life of which most persons are simply incapable. And yet, James observes, the magnetic examples of these extraordinary individuals inspire imitation by more regular folk, so that saints become a “creative social force” like no other (VRE 285).15 The “test” of the saint’s value, James says in Varieties, is “common sense.” The common sense test is the test of the “long run” of experience: how does the saintly life look in light of the common perceptions and standards that have withstood the ravages of time? (VRE 262, 266). James considers corruptions of saintly virtues in some detail but finds that, on balance, “the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world’s welfare” (VRE 299). He summarizes the source of these qualities and their salutary influence this way: [The] group of [saintly attributes] forms a combination which . . . seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary; he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward


193

as well as outward, for his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity,—these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure. (VRE 294)

All in all, the moral tone of the saint’s life is richer and profounder than any other, and his example motivates and inspires as much as his service helps.

Ethics in Practice The larger concern of ethics, James implies, is the well-being of persons. Practically, however, a man is no good to others until he has first put himself in order. The first concern of ethics, therefore, is the formation of personal character, which amounts to construction of a certain kind of self. Initially, this construction of the self is not personally managed but directed by parents or guardians, by schools and churches, and by society at large with all its social pressures and incentives. The self indeed is in some measure constituted by its relations to others. Ethics must accordingly consider the social dimension even when concentrating on personal formation. At some point the individual comes to a maturity of powers sufficient to make him primarily responsible for his own moral development. In either case—dependency or independency— the goal is the same: construction of a certain kind of self. This self is not constructed ex nihilo. The materials James indicates are given by nature. But the moral individual is confronted with a variety of potential selves and must choose which among them to make actual. James described the empirical self in the Principles of Psychology as divisible into a material self, a social self, and a spiritual self. These “selves” are not discrete, of course; they are conceptual cuts of a continuous field-self. Nonetheless, the divisions correspond roughly to real tensions within the field, and some potentialities there must inevitably give way to others. As a practical matter, given human limitations, “to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the

194


list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation” (PoP 295– 96). On the deepest level, the practical need to rank available goods becomes a question of how to rank potential selves. The broad outline of how we should rank them is clear enough on the level of common sense. “A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different selves . . . in an hierarchical scale, with the bodily Self at bottom, the spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves and the various social selves between.” We are motivated or directed to rank this way partly by necessity, partly by the judgments of conscience, and partly by social expectations. We would like to “aggrandize” fully all the potential selves, but constraints of space and time do not allow it, so whether we do it from rational reflection or from mere emotion, we are forced to prioritize. We are aided in our choice of which selves to invest in by our moral perceptions of relative nobility and what is fitting. Regarding social expectations, James says that, “By having constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ere long to see . . . my own lusts in the mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about them in a very different way from that in which I simply feel. Of course, the moral generalities which from childhood have been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent of this reflective judgment of myself ” (PoP 299).16 Of all the potential selves, James thinks, “the potential social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life” (PoP 300). The paradoxes he refers to here concern the conflicts that arise from competing opinions of us. Some people’s judgments of our character and life are better than others, and we should not seek to be honored by just any sort of person but only by the best. Even if the best are not around to observe us, the thought of better judges bolsters our resolve to do what is right. James explains: When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club, and “set” . . . I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. . . . [Even if no human companion’s approval is expected,] the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God. . . . The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves


195

of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world. (PoP 300–301)

The “sense” of this “ideal spectator,” as James goes on to call him, is for James the ultimate standard for right living and the right kind of self.17 The central moral problem for human beings, practically, is their instinct for “natural self-seeking.” Our desire to “aggrandize all the selves” is natural, and in itself good, but the natural impossibility of indulging them all presents a dual moral hazard (PoP 299). The first hazard is to ourselves, that we will undermine ourselves by indulging the lesser selves at the expense of the greater. The second is to others, that we will undermine them by pursuing our personal aims at their expense. These observations lead James into a discussion of “self love.” What kind of love of self is appropriate? To answer this, we must first consider, “What self is loved in ‘self love’?” The tendency is to love the body most. “The most palpable selfishness of a man,” James notes, “is his bodily selfishness, and his most palpable self is the body to which that selfishness relates” (PoP 304). The passions of the body are loudest and tend to drown out the social and spiritual desires. Our social self-love and spiritual self-love also are excited by objective factors, objects in the field of consciousness, social self-love by “the images other men have framed of me” and spiritual self-love by “my more phenomenal and perishable powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibilities, and the like” (PoP 305, 307). All these “excitements” are normal and involuntary tendencies and, as such, are morally neutral. And because all of them are spontaneous, James finds that “the dictum of the old-fashioned sensationalist psychology, that altruistic passions and interests are contradictory to the nature of things, and that if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as secondary products, resolvable at bottom into cases of selfishness,” is empirically false. “There is no reason why any object whatever might not arouse and interest as primitively and instinctively as any other, whether connected or not with the interests of the me” (PoP 309). We have, in other words, normal altruistic tendencies as well as self-interested ones. The moral difficulty, again, enters the picture when there is a conflict—immediately, a conflict of excitements and desires, and more remotely, a conflict of potential selves. When push comes to shove, the spiritual self must be given primacy, its natural desire cultivated and pursued, even to the sacrifice of body and reputation. One of the most important factors to consider in deciding which desire to favor and which self to become is how indulging or pursuing one’s various desires will affect others, and this consideration raises the question of justice.

196


What is my obligation to others? What is right for me to do in light of their desires? What claim do they have on my attention and action? James says: The just man is the one who can weigh himself impartially. Impartial weighing presupposes a rare faculty of abstraction from the vividness with which . . . things known as intimately as our own possessions and performances appeal to our imagination; and an equally rare power of vividly representing the affairs of others. But, granting these rare powers, there is no reason why a man should not pass judgment on himself quite as objectively and well as anyone else. No matter how he feels about himself, unduly elated or unduly depressed, he may still truly know his own worth by measuring it by the outward standard he applies to other men, and counteract the injustice of the feeling he cannot wholly escape. (PoP 311–12).

The root of justice, then, is impartial judgment, and the root of injustice, partiality. The proper “outward standard,” James has suggested, is the stable order of God’s desires, a standard that could be conceived (though again he doesn’t consider it) in terms of natural law. Justice would be applying that higher standard to yourself just as you apply it to others, and acting accordingly. Note that, according to James’s analysis, principles or “standards” of justice emerge from experience—of the affairs of others and crucially, of divine expectations—and that justice itself is an existential matter, an inner disposition of impartiality in weighing interests and claims that leads to appropriate action. As Bernard P. Brennan has observed, James shows “the possibility of having objective standards which grow up in our experience.”18 James does this, in part, by showing the relation between moral concepts and moral percepts. Brennan explains: Without concepts we could not have a single rule of conduct or a single moral ideal. As James notes, “life’s values deepen when we translate percepts into ideas! The translation appears as far more than the original’s equivalent.” For example, when we “translate” our perception of a heroic act into its conceptual equivalent, we transform and enrich our perception. The concept of heroism complements the thickness of the perception with a luminousness and depth peculiar to conception. On the other hand, once we are equipped with concepts, we find that we have guides to steer us through the labyrinth of life with its confusing mazes of sensations. As useful teleological instruments, concepts help us to survive and prosper in this world. Moreover, by means of concepts, we are able to make a re-evaluation of life, a task certainly of great importance for our moral development.19


197

This is the sense in which moral principles or ethical rules may be of service. They may not let us know what to do in a genuine moral dilemma, but they augment tremendously our moral understanding and are indispensable aids to moral living in giving us a better sense of the general direction our lives should take. As James sees it, our personal moral development depends above all on our attention to the right kinds of thoughts. He understands our intellectual and active capacities to be intimately linked. We are naturally impulsive creatures, and our thoughts are so bound up with our active tendencies that every thought we have produces an impulse to act. Only the presence of conflicting thoughts prevents us from acting on any given one. Listening intently to “the still small voice” of wisdom, of “reasonable ideas,” will banish our unwise and ignoble thoughts, so that the latter can gain no purchase on us. The good man hears that still small voice “unflinchingly . . . and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind. Sustained in this way by a resolute effort of attention, the difficult object erelong begins to call up its own congeners and associates and ends by changing the disposition of the man’s consciousness altogether. And with his consciousness, his action changes, for the new object, once stably in possession of the field of his thoughts, infallibly produces its own motor effects” (PoP 1168). If we can just keep the right kinds of thoughts steadily before our minds, and not let the wrong kinds seize the field, we will act rightly in due course. We begin to see the proper relation between what we call “reason” and “will.” The quality of our moral lives depends on our strength of will. But will is essentially “effort of attention” (PoP 1168), and what we attend to matters. A good will and good thoughts go together. To choose the best things they must first occur to us, and then we must contemplate and consider them. But the moves to contemplate and consider are acts of will, decisions first to hold a thought continuously before our minds and then to consider its implications. So the transformation of character begins after all, as the Christians say, with getting a good will. But getting a good will depends in the first place, as the Christians also say, on seeing the best things and being sufficiently inspired and empowered to embrace them. The necessary correspondence of reason and will for making any progress intellectually or morally goes all the way down. The intellectual work to be done here is partly perceptual (observing what is good) and partly conceptual (naming and classifying the various goods and the appropriate ways to achieve them). The goods for man are desirable or worthy ends, or what James in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” called “ideals.” Living wisely and reasonably involves choosing the most worthy ideals for the long run and for the moment. James explains, “The

198


wise man is he who succeeds in finding the name which suits the needs of the particular occasion best. The ‘reasonable’ character is one who has a store of stable and worthy ends, and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any one of these” (PoP 1139). None of the higher human ends are attainable in a single act, and it is not obvious from the outset just what series of actions will achieve them. We must discover appropriate means for attaining our ends, and this requires deliberation. The dynamic between reason and will is the same here, however. Deliberation as James describes it involves holding alternative possibilities before the mind until, for present purposes, one possibility is selected. Selection may be based on immediate or remote considerations (PoP 1137–38). It is characteristic of the wise man that he takes the long view into account in his decisions, that he makes his present purpose fall in line with his longer term purposes and so selects means that will most conduce to his highest ends. All of this presupposes finding right thoughts, and knowing right thoughts when we see them. How is the mind led to such thoughts? This concern raises the question of education. In a 1907 speech at Radcliffe College, James described what he thought to be the appropriate aim of a college education, and what he said there holds for his view of humane education generally. He says in that address that, “The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help you to know a good man when you see him.”20 Plato’s Socrates emphasized, when he and his companions were imaginatively establishing their ideal city in the Republic, the importance in early education of telling stories of heroes who were truly heroic, who really were the best of men and deserved to be emulated; and Socrates went on in the course of the dialogue to suggest the value to society at large of noble storytelling, creating literature that, capturing the popular imagination, inspires people to noble lives. James has similar ideas. “What our colleges should teach,” he says, “is . . . biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. . . . When we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms ‘better’ and ‘worse’ may signify in general.” James is recommending study of the “humanities,” and by this he means the study of human “masterpieces” of all kinds. “You can give humanistic value to almost anything,” he explains, “by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being.” What is to be cultivated by


199

this examination of great human creations is, first, a “critical sense” for “ideal values,” and second, “a lasting relish for the better kind of man.” The point of helping people to know a good man when they see him, after all, is to make them want to be like such men, as much as possible.21 Readers unfamiliar with James might conclude from this description of education that he holds the “common people” to be of little account. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, James recommended educating ourselves about “the little guy” as well as the “geniuses.” But we study the former and the latter for different purposes: we study the great ones to inspire us and set a standard for us; we study the least to understand the tremendous intrinsic value of every life. James’s most developed direct statement on appreciating ordinary people was a lecture in Talks for Teachers entitled “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” We are peculiarly blind, he observes there, “in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves,” and so we have to work at cultivating an imaginative sympathy with them. Whenever we get a “gleam of insight” into the inner lives of others, there is potential for a great moral breakthrough. We realize in such moments that the deep significance we feel our own lives to have, others feel in a similar way about their often quite different lives. If we let this insight germinate, James says, it “makes an epoch in [our] history.” There is a depth “in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences”; “the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded [and] a new centre and a new perspective must be found.” “The stupidity and injustice of our opinions” concerning “the significance of alien lives,” “the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals,” then all become clear to us. The moral significance of our own lives, we begin to see, depends in large measure on attending carefully to the insight and seeking further glimpses into those inner lives, and a deeper understanding of them. But this will require effort and perseverance. We will need to put aside some of our ordinary practical concerns to make time for it, investigating these foreign matters both through literature and through imaginative matching of what we can discover of others’ experiences with what we have seen and felt in our own.22 The study of human excellence, then, helps us develop our own inner capacities and thus construct the best possible self; the study of the inner significance of ordinary lives helps make us just. But for our powers ever to mature fully and for us ever really to be just, we must give ourselves over to visions of excellence and of inner meaning until they drive us to action, and we must persist in exploring such visions and acting on them until personal virtue and justice toward others become ingrained habit.

200


Habit, James points out in one of the best-known chapters of his Principles, is a physical concern. It is really nothing more than neural pathways formed in the brain by repeated thoughts repeatedly acted on (see PoP 109–12). Mind and body both are complicit in the process. We make certain thoughts repeatedly the object of our attention, and our motor reflexes take over. The more we act on the thoughts, the more deeply ingrained is the tendency to act that way again, until we do it unconsciously, and it becomes, as we say, “second nature” to us. The “will,” however, is critical to the process of habituation, and not only at the beginning. Moral habituation will involve willfully training the mind on appropriate moral ends, deliberating (that is, deliberately, willfully, holding the options before us) about the best actions to attain those ends until we settle on the right ones, consenting to active impulses conducive to the specific actions and resisting contrary impulses, and then willfully repeating those acts until pursuing the right objects becomes more or less automatic. Even after this, will must be exerted to hold the line against passions or pressures to swerve from the path of right habit. James’s account of right thinking and right acting presupposes free will. He was, in the Principles, tentative on the question. He acknowledged that it is impossible to prove the will to be any more than instinct, as d’Holbach said it was.23 But James famously willed to believe in free will. Freedom of will is one of those “live, forced, and momentous” (WB 14) matters that justifies unsubstantiated belief.24 In an essay titled “The Dilemma of Determinism,” James examines the reasons searchingly and gives a ringing defense of objective morality, the most forceful defense of it in any of his writings. Belief that all our actions are determined for us by processes beyond our control naturally results in a “don’t care” attitude toward events. The feeling of regret—that a brutal murder occurred, for example—becomes meaningless, as does any notion of “right” or “wrong” acts. The “dilemma” to which James refers in the title is this: if all our acts are determined in this way, then there are two possible outcomes. First, “Both [acts like ‘murder and treachery,’ on the one hand, and regret, on the other] are supposed to have been foredoomed; so something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world” (WB 127). That is, acts are not wrong, it’s the world itself that’s wrong, in being a place where such acts are “normal.” Second, “The world must not be regarded as a machine whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them. Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge” (WB 129). James calls the former view “pessimism” (an outlook epitomized by Schopenhauer) and the latter “subjectivism” or (the term James personally prefers)


201

“gnosticism.” As pessimism has few takers, James concentrates his analysis on the subjective or gnostic stance. His common sense resistance to skepticism and pragmatic adherence to “what works” are again evident. If we practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. . . . In theology, subjectivism develops as its “left wing” antinomianism. In literature, its left wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds. Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimism turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution in its train. . . . After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones must be explored. (WB 132)

The gnostic form of modern thought and life could hardly be better described.25 Fortunately, there is another option besides pessimism and subjectivism. It is “the objective philosophy of things” to which James holds, with its “recognition of limits” and its “willingness, after bringing about some external good, to feel at peace,” leaving “the burden of the rest [to] higher powers” (WB 134). This objective way James calls “pluralism,” the way he elsewhere (see Chapter 5) explicitly calls the way of common sense. It views the universe as “a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations of the rest.” It makes sense of the apparently bad things in the universe and the sense of regret we feel about them, and it provides a motive for acting. James concludes, “For my own part, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains difficulties that are greater still” (WB 135). And so James embraces “affection” for his fellow inhabitants of the universe, “an unsophisticated moral sense,” and a genuine freedom to heed conscience and cultivate and act on such affection, taking the risk of being duped in doing so as a risk well worth taking (WB 137). The question of will, then, is central to James’s moral and religious theory and, by implication, to his social theory. In the Principles, he says: “Will you or won’t you have it so?” is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer

202


by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution we make to the world! (PoP 1182)

We begin to see how James could say that “the solving word” in moral dilemmas comes down to our “dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses” (WB 162) to respond to the higher appeals that break in on us to hold to the good. In the end, if we are to live nobly we must reach out to a higher good we know but don’t understand and risk extending ourselves on behalf of a better practical order that we may in the end fail to bring about.

Common Sense Religion Most of what needs saying about James’s religious outlook has already been said in the foregoing, but his view of the relation between religion and common sense may be a little further clarified. We just saw his comment in “The Dilemma of Determinism” that the “objective” and “pluralistic” common sense approach to life entails “bringing about some external good” in the world, as we are able, and leaving “the burden of the rest [to] higher powers” (WB 134). How, though, should we understand those higher powers? James’s view, and the part played by common sense in helping us decide the question, is suggested in his essay “Reflex Action and Theism,” where by process of elimination he arrives at his general notion of God. He rejects radical monism for destroying the felt distinction between man and God (WB 106), agnosticism for denying we know anything about the nature of Being “and how it asks us to behave,” and gnosticism for claiming to know (not merely believe) just “how Being made itself or us.” This leaves ordinary common sense theism, which James embraces. “Between agnosticism and gnosticism,” he says, “theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as to insist that we can know Being’s character when made, and how it asks us to behave.” The essence of true religion, James thinks, is responsiveness to this larger reality. “In the silence of our theories,” he reflects, in “those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting about this formula or that,” “we . . . seem to listen, to hear something like the pulse of Being beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe, is more than all theories about it put together” (WB 111). If this is faith, faith is a kind of knowledge. Interpreting this “pulse of Being” is a hard matter, and a full


203

understanding of the encounter we have with it may be impossible, but that something is there is sure, and our trust in that something, as we noticed in our discussion of Thomas Reid, is the common sense disposition (see Chapter 2). In Lecture 14 of the Varieties of Religious Experience, James says that the test of religion’s value and truth was common sense or, more particularly, a religion’s ability to maintain its worth over time in the face of all the vicissitudes of history. He admits that “skepticism cannot . . . be ruled out . . . as a possibility,” because “it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age” (VRE 266). Holding to the middle way, however, he reasons: “But to admit one’s liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another,” and if religious experience seems to ennoble us and open up to us a larger horizon of truth, we would be foolish to dismiss religion for fear of going wrong (VRE 267). This balance, openness, acknowledgment of limitations, and willingness to trust to the long run of human experience, again, characterize the common sense disposition and, James seems to think, the form of true faith.

Common Sense and Society James did not write much of a directly political nature, but in his treatment of morality and ethics we have already seen features of a well-considered social vision. In particular, we noticed James’s conception of civilization as an equilibrium between conservative and revolutionary forces and as unfolding through a melioristic process of development through application of new insights while retaining the old civilizational achievements. The process corresponds directly to an unfolding of truth as new experiences reveal a need for a refining and supplementing of older true but inadequate conceptions. James describes this latter process on the individual level in Pragmatism, but it takes the same general form on the social. The passage is worth quoting at length. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between

204


the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. . . . The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this “problem of maxima and minima.” But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.26 The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle—in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness to them. (Pr 34–35)

In all this, pragmatism emulates common sense. The common sense way of reasoning is to try to find a way to do justice to all known facts and truths. As it resists unnecessarily sacrificing any of the goods (personal or social) available to us, it resists also the neglect of truths already established and every dogmatic or ideological attempt to leave them behind for the sake of some newly fashionable opinion or hypothesis. The common sense procedure “on the one hand, and on the other hand,” weighing and comparing until the facts or truths are reconciled or, if no reconciliation can presently be found, living with mystery. The socially relevant truths are those about what is most important and what contributes to the good life, first for the individual, then for community, and finally for region and country. James said before that our “social selves” are at the core of our identities. We are, as Aristotle said, “political animals,” or at least communal ones. The highest in us, the health of which must be our highest priority, is our “spiritual selves.”27 The community or, on a wider scale, the solidarity we have with each other is spiritually grounded. We judge each other by our respective spiritual development and inward character, and by the corresponding ordering of our social and physical selves. The order we cre-


205

ate together is a self-reflective spiritual order, reflecting societal approvals and disapprovals. The good order we achieve together, if we achieve it, is an order forged by common affirmation of the vision and imitation of the life of those dynamic men driven by those higher appeals to live well and rightly. Every social order, James thinks, is formed around dynamic individuals, whether their influence be noble or corrupt. He said in a 1907 speech at Radcliffe College that “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world.”28 The high value James placed on the heroic virtues is evident here. This conviction that the path to civilization is forged by “geniuses” (that is, persons with a genius for creativity) was a common refrain in James’s writings. In an essay called “Great Men and Their Environment,” he asserts that “The mutations of societies . . . are in the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction.”29 Again, in Some Problems of Philosophy, he said, “The progress of society is due to the fact that individuals vary from the human average in all sorts of directions, and that the originality which they show is often so attractive or useful, that they are recognized by their tribe as leaders, and become setters of new ideals and objects of envy or imitation” (SPP 9). To James the observation was self-evident, a simple matter of common sense, but he was well aware that the view was meeting growing resistance in the increasingly collectivist Western intelligentsia, and so he felt it needful to say the obvious, and repeat it now and then to make sure it sank in. He thought the matter important, perhaps, for the same reason he thought free will to be so important: it is essential to the meaning and significance of our lives that we can make a real difference in the world, that we can engage, participate, and contribute our mite to the whole. His conviction about the significance of individuals was deeply grounded in experience, in his sense of how great men had impacted his own life, through books and through acquaintance, and in his profound sense of history. It was not, again, that he discounted the significance of ordinary people. Quite the contrary. They contributed in their own (though less impactful) ways. More to the point, it was for their sakes he wished the basic insight about the social role of “geniuses” to be recognized. He was convinced that ordinary people’s lives were decisively shaped for good or ill, degraded or ennobled, devastated or enriched, by the actions of “great men.” This

206


is the way things work, like it or not, and he wanted people to understand that it was part of their responsibility to try and ensure that men of great capacity served, rather than undermined, the common good. In fact, James despised the tendency of modern social science to reduce people to numbers, abstracting away all individual personality. In an essay on “The Importance of Individuals,” he blasts the prevailing sociological outlook for its inhumanity. “I for my part,” he says, “cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms.”30 This dry “scientific” way of looking at human affairs was, he thought, deeply illiberal. It abstracted away everything interesting and meaningful in human life. It discounted the geniuses and made the common man smaller. Ultimately, it represented a thinning out of humanity; and professionally, perhaps more than anything else, James wanted to restore to the human sciences an appreciation for the richness of human experience. James indicates that the great exert their transformative influence specifically through example and education. The latter is usually informal, though formal systematization maximizes education’s impact. The influence through example was illustrated by the saintly model, but it could just as well be exerted by a diabolic one, a Jim Jones, or more systematically, a Hitlerian or Stalinist cult of personality. (Example in this last case bleeds into education, propaganda being just a peculiar kind of education, though perhaps “education” in this case should be put in quotations.) The dynamics here have already been indicated: the dynamic leader articulates a vision for society, forges a path, and attracts followers. Informal education (and, to some degree, formal education too) involves storytelling (historical and fictional) that illustrates and promotes communal values, and additionally public and private celebrations of those values and of cherished traditions and practices.31 James himself, as a college professor, was especially interested in the role of formal education. The title of his Radcliffe College address was “The Social Value of the College-Bred.” In this speech James had in mind to impress on his young listeners not only the value of a humane education to themselves but also how such an education could fit them to serve their country. Shortly following his claim that human progress is a matter of great initiative and imitation, he challenges his auditors: We Americans ought to consider soberly what he calls the “democratic problem” and try to meet it. Critics say that democracy results in “vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized,” and we should take their critique seriously. “Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how well it will stand the ordeal.”32 “Our democratic problem” is just this: “Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat


207

as rightful leaders?” It is incumbent upon us, “the educated class . . . the only permanent presence [in our democracy] that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries,” who “with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions,” to take moral leadership so that our majorities take their cue from leaders with the capacity, training, wisdom, and virtue to direct others to the common good.33 James is calling for those John Adams and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristoi.”34 How can we provide such leadership? James suggests two possible ways. The first is to broaden the culture by providing “a wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at.” This relates to the concern just mentioned about the narrowness of the human sciences. The second is to deepen the culture by setting the right moral and spiritual “tone.” There are some, he says, who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness . . . feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. . . . But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe’s life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains—under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. . . . “Tone,” to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other. . . . If democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, the healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.35

In addition to spiritual qualities such as vision and tone, however, James knew that even the most high-minded of us will be rendered ineffective if we neglect the simpler things. As Aristotle observed, education is part teaching and part habituation. James’s understanding of human development implies a similar notion. He was always mindful of how much our lives are conditioned by our bodies. Above all, he well knew, the shape of man’s life personally and socially is forged by his habits. “Habit,” James said, “is . . . the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance. . . . It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again” (PoP 125– 26). This is “well” for two reasons, at least: (1) “Habit simplifies the movements

208


required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue”; and (2) “Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed” (PoP 117, 119). These facts have great importance for education. “The great thing . . . in all education,” James says, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our early life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (PoP 126). We may extrapolate from James’s larger psychological and philosophical work that habit wedded to common sense perception (interpolation) gives us a fund of common sense instincts and impressions to draw on and keeps us from going far astray from reality—keeps us, in other words, living in truth. Indeed, James’s common sense in its broadest meaning is simply funded experience. The individual funds his experience through faithful, habitual adherence to the accumulating lessons of experience, and a community or society funds experience similarly, sharing observations, safeguarding time-tested ideas and practices, and judging new proposals by how well they suit both the current fund and the needs of the time. To do this is to develop what Eric Voegelin called a “common sense tradition” (see Chapter 2).

Public Philosopher Like Witherspoon, James was an enormously effective public intellectual. Many of his books were first public lectures, or compilations of them, that electrified his audiences. He was not a statesman and had no direct political role, but he addressed himself publicly to pressing moral, religious, and social concerns, and the impact of his lectures and popular essays (such as those in The Will to Believe) extended far beyond his professional specialties of philosophy and psychology. In all this James was a kind of common sense philosopherprophet, calling to the public’s attention and concentrating their minds on vital truths and awakening them to the higher ideals, kindling in them like the saints he spoke of “unsuspected faculties” (VRE 294). And indeed you cannot read James long without experiencing some such kindling. As George Cotkin said, James’s call for “stenuosity, passion, and heroism . . . served as a jeremiad and solution to the social lethargy, to the numbing tedium vitae that James believed afflicted many Americans in the late-nineteenth-century.”36 Probably no modern philosopher’s thoughts have made a greater impression on the American mind, and almost certainly none has better expressed its potential.

7 Conclusion

How compatible were Scottish Common Sense and James’s philosophy? How compatible were the Scottish realist and the Jamesian moral understandings? What is their relevance for us? What can we conclude from this study as a whole about the personal and social meanings of common sense in general, and the role of common sense in the unfolding of American order in particular? And how might American common sense and that of other peoples be preserved and vivified?

A New Direction for Philosophy The two kinds of realism considered here—Scottish Common Sense and James’s pragmatic radical empiricism—have their differences, clearly. Scottish realism lays heavy stress on the constitution of the mind and the discovery of first principles and natural laws. James’s theory, conversely, stresses perceptual experience and the dynamic quality of knowing. Scottish realism assumes the existence of an entity called soul, while James doubts it. But these differences mask a fundamental compatibility. First, both theories are empiricist in spirit and method. The Scottish realists’ stress on first principles might give a superficial impression that they are rationalists like Descartes or Kant, differing from them only in detail, but the Scots in contrast to those thinkers continually remind us that the grasp of first principles is a kind of experience, which they call “sense” or “intuition.” Like James they are concerned to keep philosophy concrete. Also like James they adopt an inductive method of philosophical investigation. Second, both the Scots and James are centrally concerned with combating the evils of skepticism, on one side, and idealistic certitude on the other. Both employ the same means of attack, trying to out-empiricize, if you will, their opponents. In so doing, they both hew to the common sense middle 209

210


way. Third, both stand for the objectivity of knowledge and reject pure subjectivism as being inconsistent with the facts of experience, whether of intuition or simply our sense of externality. Both, in short, are thoroughly realist in orientation. The claim has been made here that the intuitionism represented by the Scottish realists and the dynamic realism of James need each other and cannot be complete apart, cannot indeed survive apart in terms of maintaining the respect of the philosophic world. The reason is that a fixation on first principles leads to philosophical desiccation and forgetfulness about the experiences that make the principles intelligible, while an obsession with movement disconnects us from the fixed points in the stream of experience that give it stable meaning. (A stream, after all, though its content continually changes, cuts through the same country and rolls over the same unmoving contours.) Reconciliation is not impossible. The Scottish Common Sensers did recognize the experiences required for a knowledge of first truths, and James acknowledged our perceptions of intrinsic value, the fact of unchanging truths on the conceptual level (relations that must hold between certain ideas), and at least the possibility if not the likelihood of permanent realities (as, for example, of an “eternal moral order”). Moreover, Scottish realists such as Witherspoon who understood true faith as a vital connection to God had a sense of the deeper truths that intuition in the narrow sense could not touch, though they did not sufficiently explore the philosophical implications. James, though he did not make much of it, recognized the “regularities” in perceptual experience and the necessity of these for reasoning about the world. The inadequacies of each camp are not a matter of substantive falsehood— they are both right—but of attention and analytical development. Each fails to keep certain critical points in mind and in focus and, in consequence, fails to differentiate their significance adequately. To the extent the two sides do so, they fall short of common sense. Each fails also to see the connections between the things variously emphasized—in particular, the connection between first principles and the larger dynamic and continuous world of experience. James does not give sufficient thought to the element of judgment involved in all rational determinations or the necessity of certain conclusions about the concrete world. The Scottish realists did not adequately consider the questing dimension of philosophy (or, conversely, the philosophical dimension of faith), or the element of active and creative appropriation in our grasp of reality, or the concrete realities underlying true propositions—not the existential conditions of knowing, which they recognized, but the empirical ground of the propositions themselves.

Conclusion

211

With a few adjustments, however, the respective insights of both camps may be brought together into a consistent, coherent common sense philosophy, or into a comprehensive realism. The critical move would be to show the connection between pure experience and intuitive cognitions, beliefs, and judgments (to use James’s and McCosh’s terms). This would involve showing that Kant’s “a priori conceptions judgments” are in fact a posteriori, that the necessity involved in those mental operations is itself experienced in particular objects before it is realized to apply universally. Necessity, in other words, is something in certain “things” experienced—specifically, a quality of certain actual relations—that can, upon being encountered, then be reflexively extrapolated to be true necessarily for all similar cases. The conclusion of universality only seems a priori because it comes so fast. This conclusion would not be a leap beyond experience but would be derived directly from experience, from the sense of the sameness of different cases. First principles would be only an abstraction and generalization of the specific samenesses involved; the necessary universality would follow directly from the fact of sameness, which is known not by inference or implication but directly. McCosh indicated the nature of the process when he said that abstraction and generalization are required for “the discovery even of an ‘intuitive principle’” (EMP 30). This is a difficult matter, hard to put into words, very hard to summarize briefly, but what I have described here is the gist of the solution to the problem of how to understand first principles empirically. James took a step toward this solution in his treatment (in “Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life”) of moral perceptions as involving “directly felt fitnesses between things” WB 143), “fitness” being intrinsically a necessary relation. The observed rightness of a particular act of loving sacrifice, for example, is known directly and immediately to be a necessary relation in the actual case between will and intended object, a rightness of fit that can retrospectively be seen to obtain in all like cases because, anywhere the general relation is the same, the element of necessity is there as a quality of the relation. If we accept that necessity is indeed an experienced fact, a directly felt concrete quality of actual relations, our conviction as to the truth of first principles begins to make sense. The concreteness of the sense of necessity lends a depth and solidity to our conceptions and conclusions. The conclusions that may be formulated as first principles are enabled and instigated by the sense of sameness and tendency James spoke of in the Principles of Psychology (see Chapter 5). These experiences are what make us understand the principles and their real significance, even before or in the absence of formulated propositions. Thus, really understanding the proposition that we should always do good and never harm our fellow man would involve a kind of experience of

212


goodness—of a higher good and of the human good (each good involving necessary relations of inclinations and ends or aims)—and a sense of the corresponding experiential ramifications, themselves felt as reverberations through the existential continuum we call “the world.” This kind of understanding would require a certain spiritual receptivity and sensitivity to the flow of Being and an attentiveness in particular to the sense of necessity attending our intuitions about it. James captured the dynamic when he said, “Place yourself at a bound . . . inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand” (PU 116–17). We could then, abstractions and distinctions in hand, build out our theories of life in a way most faithful to the real thing and employ our acquisitions to order our lives more fruitfully. We could be both logical and wise. The larger concern is to do justice to both static and fluid elements of knowledge and of the experienced world. Nous moves, but as it moves it discovers constants in the flow of Being and in its own operations, and only in appreciating both the constants and the movement of nous and Being does the fullness of meaning come home to us. The solution is not, as some would have it, static Nature or fluid History but constants of order and movement in Nature.1 The constants and the movement together constitute Nature. An adequate common sense philosophy would address fully both elements of reality.

Moral Realism Pragmatic radical empiricism and Scottish Common Sense also prove compatible on the question of moral truth. Witherspoon, McCosh, and James are in essential agreement on what James called the psychological, metaphysical, and casuistic questions. Each understands moral perception as intuitive recognition of intrinsic moral value: Witherspoon and McCosh describe it in terms of a sense or intuition of “moral excellence,” James in terms of a “preference of a more ideal attitude for its own sake.” Each took obligation or duty, and not just interest, to be essential to morality and saw the absolute basis of obligation to be certain moral relations between God and man, and between man and man, and within the individual among the inward parts and between the spiritual and the bodily elements of the self. Each thinker also took the standard of right to be ultimately the higher law or higher order, which is God’s status as the greatest being, his nature, and his determinate will or desire. McCosh captured the nature of moral perception most adequately, with his elaboration of the elements of cognition, belief, and judgment involved. Witherspoon gave the most adequate treatment of higher law and elaboration of our various duties. James gave the best account of the basic moral re-

Conclusion

213

lations and how they ground our obligations, and of the dynamics of moral interaction. Taken together the three thinkers provide a full and robust common sense morality. Their political or social theories also coincide. All three saw conscience (the sense of higher law or divine demand) and love (inspired by divine excellence and driven by divine energy) as pivotal for the formation of right social order. Witherspoon traced the role of conscience through the whole spectrum of personal and political moral development, from individual self-government to people’s mutual rights and duties to international law. He and McCosh both suggested that our basic obligation to God and man is to love them. James went further to suggest the social dynamics of love and conscience in his descriptions of moral sense, the saint’s life and influence, humane education, and habit formation. The saint’s interaction with the world flows from his sense of “an unseen divine order” and a divinely inspired charity that moves him to help his fellows in body and soul, and the attraction and imitation of his life transforms and ennobles society. The right kind of education facilitates a more systematic cultivation of the right values and high spiritual and moral vision and tone. Inspiring people—awakening a higher love—with this higher vision and tone and their imitation of the corresponding human excellences fosters a more civilized community. All of this is reinforced by each individual’s sense of a “higher judging companion” whose approval he craves and whose disappointment cuts him. For Witherspoon, McCosh, and James alike, the moral relations involved are concrete and the call to love and obligation are objectively discerned.

Conclusions about Common Sense This book has presented a kind of portrait of common sense. Although the deliverances of common sense may be called “simple,” in being self-evident, common sense itself is enormously complex and defies simple definition. The best that can be done is to make a sketch of it and indicate prominent features. We are now in a position for a fuller account than was provided in our initial overview. At bottom, common sense is a certain mode of consciousness by which to attain maximal clarity about the essences of things experienced. Aristotle called the mode noetic, a function of nous, or what Reid called “common sense.” It involves an openness to reality born of intimate acquaintance and trust, and a humble sense of our dependence and finitude. The sense of dependence and finitude comes from the awareness of things outside us, especially those we cannot control and, even more, those that control or move us. The intimate acquaintance is an immediate experience of reality, what James called “pure”

214


experience, and acquaintance breeds assurance. This assurance, if not counteracted by some alienating experience, leads to trust, and trust moves us to open ourselves to what reality has to give. The mind that may have been closed within itself is broken free to range across the outside world. This opening is what makes clarity possible. The deepening sense of the world is facilitated by the spontaneous acts of consciousness called “perception” and “conception.” Within the stream of experience, we perceive “things” by an instantaneous interpolation of sensations (of both physical and spiritual phenomena), and noticing other things of the same kind, we conceptualize them and put them into mental categories. Common sense, as James taught us, involves both perception and rudimentary conception. These are common sense operations in that they are instantaneous and irresistible judgments involving and enabling a recognition of self-evident facts or truths. Somehow the mind in this mode is able also to see immediately necessary implications of things observed and of the felt relations between them. This is what McCosh and other Scottish realists called “intuition.” It is the basis of first principles. The recognition of necessary implications is the basis for discursive or dianoetic reasoning. Formulation of these implications into propositions provides an invaluable instrument for navigating ourselves through the thicket of the real and making sense of the larger scene. On the level of consciousness, then, common sense is the immediate awareness of things through perception, conception, and intuition of the necessary implications of perceptual and conceptual objects and relations. On the next level, common sense is the good sense or good judgment that comes from sustained clear-sightedness. Clear-sightedness is impaired by withdrawal into the self, whether from fear, rage, self-indulgence, or some other cause, and consequent alienation from the world. The degree of good sense a person can achieve depends on his mental capacity, moral development, range of experience, attention to detail, and practice in judging difficult matters. Witherspoon describes this cultivated common sense and some of the obstacles to its development in his Druid letters. Common sense as good sense may be cultivated on a wider scale and become a source of social health and stability. This will involve persistent imitation of or deference toward men of great judgment by the many and the ensuing formation of common sense mores. If this process is sustained for a long time, the rudiments of civilization are established. If it continues a very long time, increasing in strength, a fully civilized order (or as fully civilized as practicable) will emerge. All the elements indicated or implied in this sketch may be drawn out into an extended definition of common sense, from the incipient form of con-

Conclusion

215

sciousness to the full flowering of common sense in society. Common sense in its fullest signification is: 1. Awakened but pre-reflective consciousness; immediate, alert experience. 2. Our belief-forming faculties in general (including cognition and judgment), and the capacity for grasping self-evident truths in particular (Aristotle, Reid, McCosh). 3. The act of perception, instant association of far-flung sensations (physical or spiritual) from pure experience and memory to recognize “things”—James’s “interpolation.” 4. Primordial formation of concepts—denkmittel.2 5. Intuition of self-evident, necessary, universal truths (Aristotle, Reid, McCosh). 6. Realization that others sense things in the same way we do and that things may be commonly sensed, and communication about common experiences in general, and in particular about practical needs and utilities, values, and notions of justice (Plato, Aristotle, Vico, Reid). 7. Concepts and patterns of thinking inherited from our ancestors (James). 8. Handling new experiences and ideas by grafting them on to the old stock of truths; the funding of experience and understanding (James and the Pragmatists). 9. Shared understandings of the good and the right, and common convictions (Plato, Aristotle, Vico). 10. Judgments made in accordance with the foregoing. 11. Sound, balanced judgment based on sustained consideration of accumulated experiences and truths.

From this cluster of meanings and the prolonged meditation on the subject through the course of this book, a number of conclusions may be drawn. First, physical sense is foundational to common sense and largely responsible for the “well-grounded” quality of the common sense outlook. The man of common sense maintains an intimate acquaintance with the solid realities of the physical world, appreciates the rootedness of the spiritual self in the body, and consequently has a keen sense of material possibilities and limitations. Second, he appreciates the significance of the obvious, or what should be obvious, and is inclined to think the most important things in life are simple, if not always easy. He is not impressed by self-important intellectuals who treat plain matters as beneath their consideration and consequently end up losing sight of them in their theories. Third, and correspondingly, he trusts the deliverances of his senses and mental faculties unless he has reason to doubt them. When doubt arises, the hard test of common sense opinions is concrete experience.

216


Fourth, these deliverances of consciousness collectively supply a great mass of givens, suppositions that can be taken for granted in the ordinary course of things. Fifth, these givens provide a solid foundation for thinking about the world; and because the givens are so closely attached to immediate experience of the world, reasoning that keeps near them cannot go far wrong. Sixth, the sense of deepening trust breeds a tendency to insist on taking all intuitions and givens seriously, a refusal to give up any of them, and a corresponding balanced perspective. Seventh, communication about the givens augments objectivity. Conviction deepens that we know what is real and what is true as we learn that others’ experiences tally with ours. Eighth, when such communication pervades a community, community givens emerge that provide a basis for associated action. Ninth, among these givens are understandings and convictions of value, morality, and justice. Tenth, principles and practices arising from these communal givens provide the basis for a common sense tradition. Such a tradition is established and sustained by common sense leadership, education (in the full Aristotelian sense of teaching and habituation), and legal and institutional norms.

American Common Sense, Civilization, and How to Keep Them Western civilization culminated in America, and the United States is now the West’s vital center. Specifically, the Western common sense tradition issued into a uniquely American tradition, and while common sense has been dying on the European continent, the American common sense tradition is still a living one, though more tenuous today than it once was. European common sense had been in decline for centuries when the intellectual revolt against reason and the ensuing rise of radical ideologies struck a dagger to its heart; the prognosis for recovery is uncertain. American common sense, fortunately, retains some color in the cheeks and may yet be saved. A full-rounded understanding of America would require a clear sense of the connections and interactions among the elements of American culture—its habits of thinking, feeling, and acting—and of how these relate to the American social and political order as it has existed and continues to evolve. The work of this book has focused on that part of the equation here called “the American Mind,” that is, on the habits of thinking, as modeled by Witherspoon, McCosh, and James. The American sensus communis entails habits of feeling as well as of thinking (in particular concerning matters of utility, value, morality, and justice), and we have not touched on American emotional attachments more than tangentially. Nor have the interactions between the specifically American sensus communis, common sense intuition, and American political order and

Conclusion

217

practice been more than superficially explored. Even in treating the American mind alone, the analysis has been no more than illustrative and suggestive, a bare beginning. Basic elements of American common sense were indicated in the chapter on Witherspoon, a decline in our appreciation for and understanding of them hinted in the chapter on McCosh, and the quality of American practicality suggested in the chapter on James. Obviously this will not count as a systematic analysis. As with the treatment of common sense itself, we have here only a very rough—but I hope revealing—sketch of American rationality. In these final pages I aim at two things. The first is to suggest in similar illustrative terms the main political outworkings of American common sense in American mores, institutions, and leadership—what we might call “American civilization.” The second is to speculate briefly on how to keep that rational foundation and its political product alive and supple, both here and wherever else it may be found. We don’t have a good English word to capture the collectivity of culture, practice, and social organization that makes a political society. “Regime,” as the Greek politeia is sometimes translated, comes closest, but that word is heavily associated with the idea of order or organization, the structural constitution of government and society, and does not in its usual employment suggest the vital substance of a society, its spiritual quality, if you will. “Culture” may suggest this vital substance but does not usually connote order. “Mores,” or “habits of the heart,” as defined by Tocqueville implies both elements but has no correlative for the political entity embodying and shaping them. “Civilization” suggests culture, habit, and political order but conventionally connotes a vastness of scale (as in Western civilization or Chinese civilization) that does not apply to the American regime, although if influence counts you could talk of American civilization as people have talked of Roman civilization. But in the Roman case there was a direct political control over the outlying territories that we don’t have in the American. The last term is chosen here for indicating the political fruit of common sense as being the best of the alternatives, taken however in the technical, narrow sense of one people’s civilized society. Given the universal accessibility of common sense, the following comments on American civilization would apply on a larger scale, with allowances for differences of regime and culture, but given the limited scope of material we’ve covered, we cannot make wider application in this space except to show the basic principles involved. The most important political manifestations of American common sense can be seen first through its primary founding documents, and then through the ways the principles and practices those documents reveal and to which they give form have evolved through our history. More precisely, the role

218


of common sense in the making of our civilization is conceivable in terms of a practical unfolding of the principles stated in the Declaration—which were of course in operation here long before it was written—in the form of the republic established in the Constitution, the application of law pursuant thereto, and the acts of pivotal American leaders who did as they did, whether or not they had the principles directly in mind, according to their own interpretations of them. Jefferson said that the Declaration was meant self-consciously as an expression of American common sense—of “the American mind” and “the harmonizing sentiments of the day” on the “common sense of the subject,” which was the right of Americans to break away from Britain. The principles listed in the Declaration are moreover presented as “selfevident truths,” the kind seen by common sense intuition. The political traditions tallied in the middle section’s list of grievances and the experience of liberty that the traditions grew out of no doubt made those truths visible to the Americans, now declared to be “one people,” separate and apart. A brief gathering and further differentiation now of the key substantive elements of American common sense revealed in the Declaration and a synoptic view of how those elements impacted the Constitution and continued to impact the nation through its history will indicate broadly how common sense may have had its civilizing effect here. Again, this is only suggestive. The particular truths asserted in the Declaration show the contour of American mores. Liberty and equality are the dominant values, but these are regulated by justice, conceived in terms of equal rights, themselves asserted on the authority of “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” who gave Americans the rights and to whom they appeal as “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” Conscience is overriding and, it is hinted, is the moral basis on which they make their revolution. Americans have not only a “right,” which alone might imply mere self-interest, but a “duty” to resist tyranny. Rights and duties are inseparable in their minds. The purpose of government and its duty is to “secure” these rights—that is, the unhindered enjoyment of these rights. Since King George would not secure them, the Americans intend to form a government that will. Jefferson understood conscience in the Scottish Common Sense way and took it as the standard that should regulate political determinations. His most complete statement to this effect came in a letter to Peter Carr in 1787, where, echoing Lord Kames, he says: Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing,

Conclusion

219

seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality. . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense.3

Here, Jefferson means “common sense” in the broader meaning, rather than the narrower technical meaning of the sensorium of self-evident truths. His “moral sense” functions precisely like the latter kind in its immediate intuition of right and wrong. Conscience is for him in any case the basis of right, and right in its moral connotation is the base of rights in the plural. As he said in his “Opinion on French Treaties” in 1793: “Questions of natural right are triable [sic] by their conformity with the moral sense and reason.”4 If Locke, like Hobbes, thought rights really boiled down to pure self-interest, Jefferson (like virtually every American reader of Locke at the time) didn’t understand him that way.5 Even if he had, he says explicitly in a letter to Henry Lee in 1825 that the “authority” of the Declaration’s claims rested, in addition to American consent, on the “elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.,” thus, Aristotle and Cicero as much as Locke and his kindred spirit Sidney.6 The conclusion seems irresistible that for Jefferson the “rights” of the Declaration depended on natural right and natural law understood in essentially Scottish realist or neo-Aristotelian terms. Most if not all the signers of the Declaration, and most Americans generally, apparently understood conscience with Witherspoon (himself a signer), McCosh, and James as being, in particular, a sense of divine expectations. The line about the “Supreme Judge” was not in Jefferson’s first draft, but the overseeing committee thought it should be added, thinking, no doubt, that the people saw things precisely that way. There is no question that the American people were (and in different form remain) a deeply religious people. Jefferson himself had appealed to divine judgment on the question of slavery and called the “conviction” that our liberties come from God “their only firm basis.” The connection between God, conscience, and rights seems to have been deeply ingrained in the American psyche.7 An appreciation of the Americans’ moral-religious understanding gives new meaning to their devotion to government by “consent.” Grounding government in this was premised on an understanding that the people deserved to rule, and that, more specifically, they possessed a requisite modicum of virtue (seen specifically in terms of responsiveness to obligation) and so would be

220


just to one another. The government derived its “just powers from the consent of the governed” because the people were just, or at least, just enough. John Adams implied this in the comment that, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”8 Madison expressed the common American view of humanity in the background, in Federalist 55 where he said, “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”9 This was the American view of human nature, which they took to be self-evident. The corruption in human nature was self-evident to them from their Christian background, and the human potential for good was self-evident from their own achievements. Given the tendency to corruption, virtue required determined cultivation, which meant continually doing one’s duty, first to God and then to neighbor. Hence the assumption that religion was the ground of good morals. In fact, as Madison and Witherspoon both noted, ingenious government is needed only because the people’s consent alone is not enough to ensure good government, and so we need those “auxiliary precautions.”10 The right of consent is based on virtue in the people and on their creaturely equality. The ground of consent is common sense, the basic capacity of the people to recognize right and wrong when they see it and to know the difference between good and bad rulers. “To make intricate researches in theory,” Witherspoon observed, “requires great natural abilities, which are the portion of very few: but to judge of a visible character requires only an impartial sense of right and wrong. On this the plain man is as susceptible as the most acute by nature, or the most enlightened by education” (WJW 2:392–93).11 Indeed, while “the multitude or common people are but poor judges of a man’s ability or learning . . . they are very good judges of his life,” assuming they know it (WJW 2:407). Accordingly, the common sense of the people (in both meanings) should be given great weight in the basic moral direction of the country. Witherspoon implicitly recognizes the key political significance of popular common sense to be the people’s recognition, if only the facts are known to them, of who is best fit to rule. He agrees then with James that the basic democratic questions are, “Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders?”12 And Witherspoon suggests, as James, that we will know them by their “fruits” (WJW 2:387).13 Fortunately for founding era Americans, and for us, they had a number of great men to choose from. Even the Declaration’s view of revolution manifests the common sense attitude. The document strikes a middle position between radicalism and pas-

Conclusion

221

sive acquiescence. It does not declare a right to destroy all the old ways, as the French would in their revolution, even while it asserts forcefully the right to resist tyranny. Revolution should only be made, it says, when “necessity” demands it, after “a long train of abuses,” on application of “prudence,” and after “repeated petitions” for redress. The justice of revolution depends not only on a just cause but also on a just pursuit of the cause. The ends alone never justify the means. Aims and means, in other words, must alike be regulated by the intuitions of conscience, and war must be just, only made to thwart impending tyranny or to repel direct hostility (see Witherspoon on just war, Chapter 3). The concrete meaning of American liberty and equality, and the American version of natural right, is seen in American institutions and practices. A number of these are mentioned or implied in the middle section of the Declaration: self-government, popular control of legislatures, civilian control of the military, trial by jury, charters detailing fundamental laws and protections of the people’s rights, and petition of government for redress of grievances. These are expanded through the U.S. Constitution to the separation of powers, a federal system, checks and balances, and a national bill of rights. Key liberties are explicitly protected against the national government in the Bill of Rights, ranging from freedom of conscience to the defense of property, and later applied against the states through “selective incorporation” through the Fourteenth Amendment, where the “equal protection of the laws” is guaranteed to all citizens. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments together mark an extension of legal protections and guarantees of rights, more effectively guaranteed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as does the Nineteenth Amendment also. These later developments, as the earlier ones, were the result of great leaders’ direct appeals to conscience, higher law, and specifically the principles of the Declaration, from Lincoln’s speech against the Dred Scott decision and his debates with Stephen Douglas to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech to the Declaration of Sentiments issued at Seneca Falls. All the way through, the deeper meaning of American forms of liberty is made intelligible through common sense intuition. The right of property is grounded in the common sense appreciation of our material existence and, in James’s formulation, of the extended self. Private property grounds and stabilizes, and the demand for it stems from a keen awareness of bodily needs, limitations, and possibilities. We need it for a sense of security, for feeling settled, for extending our reach and increasing our impact in the world. The right of self-government presupposes a human capacity for common sense knowledge, for the virtue that comes from obeying our intuitions of obligation, and for the sound moral decision-making this knowledge and this virtue make possible.

222


The concern about abuse of power is grounded likewise in the common sense of human limitations and of our propensity to corruption. Adherence to the rule of law and limited government is rooted in a common sense recognition of a law higher than man’s law, as are the specified civil protections of particular rights. The moral principles we call into service when we argue for justice are common sense principles. Finally, the possibility of social progress depends on a common sense appreciation for the limits and possibilities of meliorative social action. Last, to the question of how common sense and civilization here and beyond might be kept and cultivated. The first task would be a full recovery of the intuitive dimension of reason, in both its contemplative and phronetic modes. This, obviously, would be a work of philosophers. The decline of common sense in the West has coincided with a reduction of reason to reasoning or ratiocination, mere calculation, itself put increasingly in the service of mere interest or passion, as Hume said it should be. Probably the reductionist notion of reason is the effect rather than the cause of common sense’s decline, and so the deeper causes must be plumbed and traced out. The treatment of common sense in this book suggests that the cause is that a sense of a higher good and higher law has been lost from existential alienation, and so the causes of the alienation must also be explored, which would involve an identification and analysis of alienating human experiences. A historical treatment of common sense—for Western peoples but also for others (Confucian common sense comes to mind)—is also needed to show more clearly and systematically how common sense is manifested concretely in social and political institutions, and how exactly its vitality and impact have waxed or declined in varying contexts. In fact, the experiences of higher reality and of alienation can only be seen clearly historically, in the lives and reflections of representative thinkers and leaders. The modern philosopher who has done the most penetrating and illuminating work in these areas is Eric Voegelin, whose works deserve wider scholarly attention.14 The next task is for statesmen and other leaders of society first to reacquaint themselves with common sense understanding through reading and personal experience (the reading doing no good unless they can imaginatively enter the experiences the books uncover), and then to communicate this understanding to the people in the manner of Vico’s acutezze. A resurgence of classical education in colleges and universities, with particular attention to the great common sense thinkers (Aristotle, Cicero, Vico, and so on), would be tremendously helpful for the first task. The study and emulation of great public spokesmen for common sense public directions and measures (such as, in the American context, Witherspoon, Jefferson, and other founders, Frederick Douglass, Lin-

Conclusion

223

coln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William James, and Jane Addams) and also of classic rhetoric, the kind that aims at truth and right. Concerning the latter, Witherspoon’s own extraordinary Lectures on Eloquence would be an excellent place to start.15 The basic goal of common sense rhetoric would be to link common sense understanding to the sense of the community, fusing common sense truth with the peculiar genius of the people by capturing in the common language what’s good, what’s right, and what’s needed for the moment and for posterity. The content communicated would involve capturing a sense both of the communal possibilities and of the human and contextual limitations of what can be done. In terms of the representatives considered in this book, James felt and captured the sense of noble human possibilities better than the Scottish realists did, indeed as well as anyone ever has, but though he recognized the limits on will, he did not possess the Scottish realists’ keen sense of political limitations and their corresponding suspicion of political “schemes for improvement” and the expansion of governmental powers that would be required to carry out those schemes. James’s “Moral Equivalent of War” is indicative of the modern tendency to make every social problem a cause for national mobilization (see the “war on poverty,” the “war on drugs,” and all the other assorted domestic “wars”), each cause necessitating the federal government’s further intrusion into local and private affairs. Common sense leadership necessarily involves mobilizing the people, but whether the instrument of their action should be government action, laws, intermediate institutions, or the people’s own direct application of that celebrated American “know-how” is a matter for more careful consideration than the issue generally receives. The specter of Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” which he fingered as the single greatest threat to democratic freedom, should haunt us more than it does. Still, social and political improvements both great and small there must from time to time be, and common sense will know what kind of improvements to make, assuming we can find the right man at the right time. Cultivating such men is the highest practical priority for strengthening common sense and civilization. All of this will take time. The necessary philosophical and political work will be the work of decades, even centuries, just as civilization is. You have to take the long view, which is part of common sense. But the work is urgent. The achievement of common sense on a communal scale is a tenuous thing, especially when the original principles are widely forgotten, the sustaining habits, practices, and institutions weakening, and the underlying experiences increasingly less known. We had better get started.

Notes Chapter 1 1. For those who tend to see philosophy as either vicious or useless, see Plato The Republic 6.487d. Throughout this study, the term “existential” will be used to denote the state of being that makes various experiences and attitudes possible, with special focus on the state that enables the emergence of mature common sense. 2. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MT), 115–16. 3. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as ERE). 4. The amount of secondary literature on James is prodigious. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, is perhaps the best and certainly one of the most impressive works on James in the last fifteen years. The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, provides a fine collection of fairly recent essays. Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought, is the most comprehensive critical interpretation of James’s thought and serves as a less sympathetic answer to Ralph Barton Perry’s classic, The Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings. George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher, is a good overview of James’s social thought and public engagement In The Divided Self of William James, Richard M. Gale provides an interesting and engaging (if flawed) recent interpretation of the relation between James’s moral and religious philosophy. The most compelling interpretation of James’s view of the spiritual self is provided by Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation. Perhaps the best work on James’s metaphysical views is David C. Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience. Hunter Brown’s William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion provides a sound analysis of James’s religious philosophy. Finally, Henry S. Levinson offers a highly stimulating account of the religious motive behind James’s philosophic project in Science, Metaphysics, and the Chance of Salvation: An Interpretation of the Thought of William James. A host of other secondary works on James deserve mention, but the works cited here are the ones I have found the most telling and fruitful. 5. Jeffry H. Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic; Thomas Miller, ed., The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith, chapter 3; Jack Scott, An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon. See also Ned C. Landsman, “Witherspoon and the Problem of

225

226

Notes to Pages 5–7

Provincial Identity in Scottish Evangelical Culture,” Richard B. Sher, “Witherspoon’s Dominion of Providence and the Scottish Jeremiad Tradition,” Robert Kent Donovan, “The Popular Party of the Church of Scotland and the American Revolution,” and Thomas P. Miller, “Witherspoon, Blair and the Rhetoric of Civic Humanism,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten. 6. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition. 7. See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 1.5, in Works of Thomas Reid, D. D., Now Fully Collected, with Selections from His Unpublished Letters, ed. Sir William Hamilton. Unless otherwise noted, all citations for Reid’s writings are from this compilation. 8. Aquinas, following Aristotle, used the term this way, as did also John Locke, whose analysis of the concept may be especially interesting in light of his obvious influence on the Declaration of Independence. However, Locke did not grasp, as Aristotle and Thomas Reid and the founders did, the importance of self-evident principles for practical life. For Locke’s full treatment of self-evident truths, see An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4, chapter 7. On Jefferson’s understanding of self-evident truth, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and EighteenthCentury Logic.” 9. Reid explains the nature of common sense and elaborates basic common sense principles in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man 6.2, 4–6. (Essay and chapter numbers as well as page numbers are provided in Reid and some other classic citations, for the convenience of readers who might have different versions of the relevant texts. All page references to Reid’s Inquiry and essays on the Intellectual Powers and Active Powers are in Works of Thomas Reid, 583–86, 588. 10. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825 (emphasis added), in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 656. Jefferson may have had Tom Paine’s famous pamphlet in mind in referencing “common sense” here, but it seems likely that he associated the term with Thomas Reid and others of the Scottish school as well. Indeed, the title of Paine’s tract would have appealed not only to the common folk but equally to the learned men of the day who, like Jefferson, were well schooled in Scottish philosophy and for whom therefore “common sense” had philosophic as well as common currency. In fact, if Wilbur Samuel Howell’s fascinating study on the philosophic background of the Declaration’s appeal to self-evident truths is to be trusted, Jefferson got his notion of these from William Small, his Scottish-born mentor back at William & Mary, who immersed the young Jefferson in the Scottish classics. Wilbur Samuel Howell, “Eighteenth-Century Logic.” Moreover, seven years before his letter to Lee, Jefferson had described Dugald Stewart (the heir to Reid as leader of the Scottish Common Sense movement) as one of “the two greatest” epistemologists, along with Destutt de Tracy, “at present known to the world.” Thomas Jefferson, letter to Robert Walsh, January 9, 1818, in Gilbert Chinard, Jefferson et les idéalogues, 173–74. 11. Jefferson specifically mentions “rights” in the letter to Lee as the key point on which Americans agreed: “But with respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects.” Jefferson to Lee, May 8, 1825, in Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 657. 12. By “ideology” here is meant not adherence to a discernible set of ideas (which is commonplace), but holding to rigid dogmatic systems. The term will be used this way throughout the current study.


227

13. Editor’s introduction to Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer, xii. On Reid’s considerable influence on the course of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, especially in Britain and America, see Benjamin W. Redekop, “Reid’s Influence in Britain, Germany, France, and America,” in Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid. See T. D. Campbell, “Francis Hutcheson: ‘Father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, 167–85. 14. Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 290–301; The Moral Writings of John Dewey, ed. James Gouinlock, 12. 15. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, 54. 16. Elements of Pragmatism may be read to have opened the way for a more radical brand of politics, but James and Peirce at least always recommended a gradualist, melioristic approach to social change. Even Dewey, many of whose works show a distinctly radical tendency, was relatively moderate by the philosophic standards of twentieth-century Europe. 17. Even here the Scottish realists and the Pragmatists are not so far apart as it might appear. The Pragmatists are more willing to contemplate the potential overturning by new discoveries of some basic common sense categories (James described the basic categories as Thing; The same or different; Kinds; Minds; Bodies; One Time; One Space; Subjects and attributes; Causal influences; The fancied; The real), but they do respect the categories as being valid “for all practical purposes.” William James, Pragmatism (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Pr), 84–85, 89. 18. It should be noted that McCosh embraced Darwinian science, thinking not only that evolution and design in nature were compatible but indeed that evolution was a strong piece of evidence for design. See James McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution. 19. James describes the process in his chapters on “The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification” and “Conversion,” in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as VRE). Dewey notes that “the unification of the self throughout the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers, and achieves, cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe.” John Dewey, A Common Faith, 19. 20. Dewey, Moral Writings, 11. 21. Dewey, A Common Faith, 30. 22. None of this is to deny the worth of Dewey’s book. A Common Faith gives a penetrating analysis of the leading religious opinions of the day and presents one of the most compelling versions ever devised of the religion of humanity. But to anyone more than superficially acquainted with classic saintly writings, the overall impression on reading this slim volume is that the author has a distinctly tin ear for the more profound matters of the spirit. 23. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as WB), 63. 24. Of course, there are other ways it may become a live question, but this is one that does not require any extraordinary revelatory insight, that any thoughtful person can recognize.

228


25. Dewey, A Common Faith, 10. 26. See ibid., 42–56, and Dewey, Moral Writings, 62–82. 27. James’s criticism of other philosophical empiricists was always that they did not look far enough into experience—did not take all the contents of experience into account or did not account for them fully. It seems to me that Dewey’s treatment of religion can be criticized precisely on this ground. 28. On the noetic quality of mystical experiences, see VRE 302. 29. William James, The Principles of Psychology (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PoP), 301; see also WB 148–50. 30. James accepted the point of F. C. S. Schiller’s “humanism” that everything we can point to as knowledge is human knowledge because if it wasn’t our knowledge we wouldn’t know it (an elementary point of logic, actually). As James puts it, all knowledge is necessarily subjective as well as objective (see Chapter 5). Yet man, for James as for Schiller, is nonetheless essentially a dependent being, part of a larger whole over which he has no control and whose imperatives he must respect if he knows what’s good for him. 31. Hume, Leviathan 1.13–15; Locke, Second Treatise, ch. 2; Aquinas Summa Theologica 1.2.Q94, art. 2. For Reid, see Intellectual Powers 6.7, 462, 466. 32. Edmund L. Gettier raised the problem in his 1963 article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” 33. This resurgence was led most notably by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. 34. Postmoderns rightly recognize problems with modern, especially Enlightenment, philosophy, but to throw out reality surely is (if anything is) to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is hard to blame Scottish realists for needling radical skeptics, such as most postmoderns are, for having lost touch with reality, given the skeptics’ explicit denial that reality can be touched, when they have not rejected the concept of reality altogether. Perhaps the resistance of common sense to giving up reality is something more than mere prejudice. If religion is, as Richard Rorty put it, a “conversationstopper,” then the rejection of reality—or, more precisely, the possibility that we can know basic human realities or have any sense whatever of the meaning of life—would seem to call into question the point of conversing at all. See the chapter on “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope. 35. See Scott, Annotated Edition, 29–30. 36. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PU), 116–17. Chapter 2 1. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 28–29. Voegelin’s last words here are especially remarkable in light of the fact that “the methodological environment” in which he grew up was forged, as he notes in this same passage, by “men like Max Sheler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim.” By this Voegelin means to suggest that, brilliant as such men were, their sense of the full range of human experience could not match that of the ancients. 2. Frits van Holthoon and David R. Olson, Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science, 2–3. I am greatly indebted to this collection of essays for help in understanding the full amplitude of meanings and implications of common sense. The essays serve as an excellent introduction to the theoretic significance of the idea.


229

3. Preface of Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach, Good Sense, 1. 4. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.2, 422. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Ibid., 18. 7. Aristotle De Anima 425a–b. 8. Ibid. 418a22. 9. See Lawson-Tancred’s discussion of why he believes this to be a mistake, in the introduction to his translation of De Anima, 81–82. 10. Aristotle considers this faculty and its activity fairly extensively in Parva Naturalia, finding it to be the differentia specifica of animal life (what sets it apart from mere biological life). See especially “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” the first part of Parva Naturalia. 11. Van Kessel from Holthoon and Olson, Common Sense, 116. 12. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics book 1. 13. See Reid’s overview of the insights and deficiencies of ancient ethics in his Active Powers, 583–86, 588. 14. Reid’s treatment of common sense, including its correspondence to Aristotelian intellection and prudence, is considered below. 15. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1167a26–30. Compare Aristotle The Politics 1253a15–18. 16. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1167b1–10. 17. Holthoon and Olson, Common Sense, 100. 18. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 1.3, 87, in ibid., 101. 19. Ibid. Holthoon credits C. Werner with this formulation, citing Jaeger Werner, Der Heilige Thomas van Aquino, die Lehre (Regensburg; reprint, New York, 1889), vol. 2. 20. S. E. W. Bugter, “Sensus Communis in the Works of M. Tullius Cicero,” in Holthoon and Olson, Common Sense, 91–92. Bugter takes these definitions of humanitas from Charleton T. Lewis and Charles Short’s Latin Dictionary (1980). 21. Ibid., 83–84; C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Bugter puts these four points in his own words here. 22. Herman Parret, “Common Sense: From Certainty to Happiness,” in Holthoon and Olson, Common Sense, 28. 23. See Aristotle Posterior Analytics 1.1 and 2.8–10, 19. 24. Parret from Holthoon and Olson, Common Sense, 28–29. 25. Ibid., 104. The phrase is Holthoon’s. 26. John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism, 105. See also Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 1.2, 142–45. 27. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis, 115. 28. Ibid., 41. 29. Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 48. 30. Ibid. 31. Quotations in the next several paragraphs are from ibid., 51–54. 32. Ibid., 67. 33. Ibid., 61. 34. Ibid., 68. 35. The term “political science” is used here loosely and informally. Compare James’s attitude toward the social sciences (see Chapter 6 under “Common Sense and Society”).

230


36. See Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 31–37. 37. Note well that a sense of humor involves a sense of the humor of one’s acquaintances. 38. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 32, 43, 35–39, 59–65. 39. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis, 63, 67. Regarding the Baroque acutezze, Schaeffer says: “To Baroque poets like Marino, Donne, and Herbert, and to Baroque theorists like Gracian, Tesauro, Sforza-Pallavicino, and Peregrino, wit meant combining two apparently dissimilar things into a metaphor that highlighted a heretofore unnoticed similarity.” Ibid., 63. Compare James on common sense as interpolation in Chapter 5. 40. Ibid., 68. 41. Ibid., 106. 42. James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy: Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton, 35. 43. Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment, 73. 44. Ibid. Hutcheson quoted by Haakonssen from Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Dublin, 1738, 4th ed.), 129–31. 45. Hutcheson makes this point in the same passage from the Inquiry. 46. Haakonssen, Natural Law, 73–74. See Haakonssen’s account in these pages of the process by which reason does this. 47. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 179. 48. See Shaftesbury’s discussion of the relation between natural “public affections” and “self affections” in the same “Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” ibid., 192–216. 49. Haakonssen, Natural Law, 100. 50. See David Fate Norton, “Hume, Human Nature, and the Foundations of Morality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, 148–81. 51. Hume, Enquiry (London, 1751), 169. 52. See John Biro, “Hume’s New Science of the Mind,” in Norton, Companion to Hume, 42, 58. 53. Reid, dedication to Inquiry, 95; also Norton, Companion to Hume, 166–68. 54. On Reid’s account of the trustworthiness of our moral perceptions, see Terence Cuneo, “Reid’s Moral Philosophy,” in Cuneo and van Woudenberg, Companion to Reid; on his view of the theological significance of epistemology, see Dale Tuggy, “Reid’s Philosophy of Religion,” in ibid. 55. Cuneo and van Woudenberg, Companion to Reid, 1. 56. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, ix. 57. Cuneo and van Woudenberg, Companion to Reid, 1. 58. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, 4–5. 59. Cuneo and van Woudenberg, Companion to Reid, 256, 70. 60. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man 1.5, 522. 61. Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid, 257–60. See Reid, Active Powers 1.4–6. 62. Sir William Hamilton’s dissertation, “On the Philosophy of Common Sense,” in his “Supplementary Dissertations” to Works of Thomas Reid, 753. 63. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1.3, 3. 64. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.6, 456. 65. Ibid., 455 (emphases in the original).


231

66. The objection that the belief in causation may yet be false has no weight, we might add. Unless it could be shown (1) how experience could produce the concept and (2) that the concept thus produced is false, it seems we have no reasonable option but to fall back on pure intuition as the source of the belief and to take this intuition as reliable. It is hard to conceive how such a proof could be made, to say the least. We can experience causation directly, Reid says, “in the consciousness we have of exerting some power in ordering our thoughts and actions, but this [particular] experience is surely too narrow a foundation for a general conclusion, that all things that have had or shall have a beginning, must have a cause.” Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.6, 456. Significantly, James implies (though he does not dwell on the point) that we can in fact derive what Kant calls a priori cognitions and judgments from experience and know them to be true (that is, that their content is not illusory), according to his understanding of truth. In his treatment of moral perceptions in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (see Chapter 6), he speaks of “directly felt fitnesses between things,” “fitness” being intrinsically a necessary relation. The feeling of fitness would be a kind of sensation. By James’s lights, the judgment as to fitness could be wrong only if sensation is illusory, in which case there would be no remedy. (On sensation as a final test of truth, see Chapter 5.) According to James’s scheme, then, we could know what Kant calls the concept of causation by a feeling of necessary connection between one event and another and a sense of the sameness of the general relation involved (necessary connection) in all other connected events. (On the derivation of necessary truths directly from experience, see Conclusion.) 67. See Hume’s full account of causation in Treatise of Human Nature 1.3. 68. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.4, 456. Here is an instance of Reid’s distrust of systems and his resistance to privileging theories over facts, a posture typical of common sense. “It is in vain to reason from a hypothesis against a fact, the truth of which every man may see by attending to his own thoughts.” Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.5, 446. 69. Reid, Active Powers 1.4, 520. My insertion in brackets is from Reid, Intellectual Powers 1.1, 220. 70. See Hume’s “Of the idea of necessary connexion,” Treatise of Human Nature 1.3, 14. 71. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.4, 439. 72. As, for example, in ibid., 6.6, 457. 73. Reid applauds Hume for this service in ibid., 455, among other places. 74. Reid correspondingly makes practical ethics the test of ethical theory. Active Powers 5.4, 646. 75. Exactly what truth is indicated by utility can be realized only on reflection of what is genuinely, and not merely apparently, helpful in each case. It must be added that for the Pragmatists the criterion of “what works” entailed more than mere practical utility. “What works” meant whatever works to bring us in touch with reality and so included what works intellectually as well as practically. (The Pragmatist position will be elaborated fully in Chapter 5.) 76. Cuneo and van Woudenberg, Companion to Reid, 10. 77. Reid, Intellectual Powers 2.20, 330. 78. Sir William Hamilton notes this in “On the Philosophy of Common Sense,” Works of Thomas Reid, 754. 79. See Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy. Mendelssohn, Lossius, Feder, Hamann,

232


and Jacobi all valued the contributions of Scottish Common Sense. Indeed, as Kuehn shows, Kant learned much from their analyses of the Scots though never publicly giving any credit to, much less any scholarly analysis of, Reid’s work. One cannot so much as find Reid’s name in the indexes of Werner Pluhar’s translations of Kant’s Critiques. 80. Reid in the conclusion of his Inquiry finds Descartes to be the father of modern skepticism. 81. Ibid., 6.20, 183. William James describes the skeptic similarly (see Introduction). 82. Kant, Critique, 289. 83. Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid, 187. 84. Ibid., 191 (emphasis added). 85. See Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason 2.3, 4. 86. Reid’s analysis and interpretation of these thinkers’ theories of perception runs here and there throughout the Inquiry. His fullest account may be found in the conclusion of that work. 87. These conclusions may be gleaned from Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Plato addresses these matters most extensively in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and The Republic. The proper interpretation of his theory of ideas is much disputed. As with all of his proposals in Plato’s writings, Socrates offered this theory tentatively and not dogmatically, and one should not make the mistake of assuming he intended it as anything more than an intriguing hypothesis. 88. See Locke, Concerning Human Understanding, book 1, chapter 1; the first lines of George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, part 1; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 1.1, 1. 89. Locke explains how he came to this conclusion in the Essay, book 2, chapter 8. 90. See the introduction to the Inquiry, sections 3–7. Reid discusses the use and misuse of the term “ideas” in the history of philosophy in Reid, Intellectual Powers 1.1. 91. It is not clear what exactly Kant means by “thing in itself.” He may mean to say that we apprehend things in the world directly phenomenologically but cannot know them more than superficially and cannot get at their natures as substances. In other words, we know the externalities of external objects objectively but not, or at least not immediately, anything further; the things exhibiting these phenomenological qualities would not be known at all, though intuition tells us they necessarily exist. Reid would have agreed with the first half of this—all we know immediately are the objects as presented to us; whether Reid would have agreed with the second half is unclear. 92. The most striking piece of evidence is presented in chapter 5, section 2 of the Inquiry. This “proof ” is so powerful that it alone seems sufficient to overturn the whole “doctrine of ideas.” 93. The gist of the answer to the argument from illusion is that an illusion is not a mistake of sense but rather of interpretation. (The phenomenon of illusion [optical illusion and the like] is taken up in Chapter 3.) 94. Hume does not doubt that we have common convictions, only that they count as knowledge. He reduces them to instinct and natural feeling. Reid insists that they derive from intuitive judgments and thus have certain truth in them. 95. Reid’s mockeries of the posture are sometimes hilarious. One of my students said he laughed out loud on reading them; for example, the skeptical philosophy “is like a hobby-horse, which a man in bad health may ride in his closet, without hurting his reputation; but, if he should take him abroad with him to church, or to the exchange, or to the play-house, his heir would immediately call a jury, and seize his


233

estate.” Reid, Inquiry, 110. Reid was familiar with Shaftesbury’s essay on sensus communis and touches on it briefly in the Intellectual Powers. Reid, Works, 423–24. 96. Reid defends the use of ridicule and outlines its appropriate employment in Intellectual Powers 6.4, 438–39. 97. Reid, Active Powers 5.1, 637. 98. See Reid, Intellectual Powers 1.2, entitled “Principles Taken for Granted.” 99. In the passage on the theory of remembering or recollection. See Great Dialogues of Plato, 42. 100. Reid’s debt to Aristotle was direct. He acknowledges Aristotle’s articulation of what he will call common sense principles—indemonstrable, self-evident first principles whose necessity for logical reasoning, however, is demonstrable. Reid wrote an “Account of Aristotle’s Logic,” which may be found in William Hamilton’s edition of The Works of Thomas Reid. Plato might merit the distinction of being the first and greatest common sense philosopher but for two things: Aristotle elaborated the common sense attitude and its implications more systematically; and more important, Aristotle better appreciated the extent to which rationality is grounded in sense perception and the practical life. 101. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.2, 425. 102. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, book 6. 103. The necessity of basing all our reasoning on first principles is demonstrable, as is their superior certainty. See Reid’s explanation of the first point (citing Aristotle) and Aristotle’s explanation of the latter point. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.7, 466; Aristotle sources cited by Hamilton in Works of Thomas Reid, 771. Hamilton gives a comprehensive overview of Aristotle’s treatment of first principles and other common sense–related matters, including citations and relevant quotations from across Aristotle’s oeuvre, in “On the Philosophy of Common Sense,” Works of Thomas Reid, 771–73. 104. Reid lists and explains twelve contingent first principles and six classes of necessary first principles. Intellectual Powers 6.5–6. He is careful to stress that he does not intend the lists to be an exhaustive enumeration, though he does think the principles considered are among the most fundamental. 105. Technically, the discovery of necessary first principles is preceded by induction as well. Mathematical intuitions (that two plus two must always equal four, for example) depend on a prior abstraction from particulars, for instance. 106. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.5. 107. In Active Powers 1.6, Reid defines “laws of nature” as “the rules according to which [natural] effects are produced,” which often may be discovered even when the causes are unknown. Laws of human nature, then, would relate to the effects of human powers. 108. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.5, 451. 109. Reid, Inquiry 1.1, 97. 110. Reid, Active Powers 5.2, 641. 111. A zealous attachment to pet theories, Reid thinks, was the primary factor behind Hume’s misguided conclusions. “It would, indeed, appear wonderful that such a man as Mr. Hume should have imposed upon himself in [such plain matters], if we did not see frequent instances of ingenious men, whose zeal in supporting a favourite hypothesis darkens their understanding, and hinders them from seeing what is before their eyes.” Reid, Active Powers 5.6, 670.

234


112. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.6, 453. 113. Reid, Active Powers 5.1, 639; 2.4, 540. 114. Ibid., 3.3.8, 598. 115. Ibid., 595. 116. See ibid., 5.1, 640; 5.5, 654. 117. On the dependence of moral feeling on recognition of right and wrong, see ibid., 3.3.5, 587. 118. See Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 3.1, 2. 119. Reid, Active Powers 5.7, 670. 120. Ibid., 5.7, 671–72. 121. Ibid., 5.7, 675. 122. Ibid., 5.6–7, 671. 123. Jacobi quoted in Works of Thomas Reid, 771. 124. Reid, Active Powers 5.6, 670–71. 125. More profoundly, confidence in intuition may have been undermined by a kind of alienation from religious experience and corresponding distrust of anything that smacked of mysticism. There is, it must be admitted, something strange and mystical about the mind’s capacity to grasp first principles. There is perhaps no better or more universally accessible empirical evidence of a spiritual realm. A thorough investigation of this issue would be a great and invaluable service to philosophy. 126. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.5, 449, 450, 451. Reid elaborates on the nature of deliberation in Active Powers 2.3, 538–39. 127. Reid, Active Powers 5.7, 673–74. 128. Reid, Intellectual Powers 6.5, 440. 129. Reid, Active Powers 2.2, 536. 130. Ibid., 5.6, 666. 131. Ibid., 676. 132. In our moral universe, the relations are those between the various moral qualities; between man and his Maker; between man and man, generally, and men in their various ranks, offices, and other circumstances; between the moral agent and his actions; and among the parts of the mind or soul, most basically, between reason and the passions. See ibid., 581, 599, 639, 649, 677. 133. Ibid., 3.3.2, 581. See also ibid., 5.1, 638; 5.6, 665–66, 678. These passages together show a remarkably Thomistic account of human nature, human ends, and natural law, the difference between the Aristotelian and Thomistic versions in principle being the latter’s emphasis on the role of conscience. 134. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, book 2. 135. See Reid, Active Powers 5.1, 638. 136. Ibid. 3.3.2, 581. 137. Aristotle Politics 1253a15–18. 138. See Reid, Active Powers 5.6. 139. Ibid., 664, also 666. 140. Ibid., 663–68. 141. Ibid. 3.3.2, 581. 142. Reid, Intellectual Powers 1.3, 236. (Compare William James on this point, see Chapter 5.) 143. Reid, Active Powers 5.5, 652–53. 144. Ibid., 655, 657.


235

145. Ibid., 661–62. 146. Ibid., 5.6, 667, 669. The passage Reid evaluates here is from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3. Hume himself uses the term “contradictions” there. 147. Reid, Active Powers 5.3, 643. The natural rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” stressed in the Declaration of Independence, for instance, imply a duty to respect the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of others. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 5.6, 662. 150. Ibid., 5.3, 645. Cicero’s full statement may be found in his Republic, book 3. 151. Reid, Active Powers 5.3, 644. Reid points out that Grotius provided the first systematic elaboration of natural law. Reid’s praise for his work on the subject is glowing. Ibid., 645. 152. Aristotle Politics 1252a1–3, 1252b26–29, 1323a15, 1323b, 1324a1–4. 153. Reid, Active Powers 5.5, 656–57. 154. Ibid., 2.3, 538. 155. Ibid., 5.2, 642. 156. Ibid., 5.4, 647. 157. See again McCosh, Religious Aspect of Evolution. 158. Francis Hutcheson’s works titled An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and A System of Moral Philosophy were particularly important for Witherspoon’s lectures. Witherspoon clearly used them as a template for organizing the course, despite keeping up a running dispute with Hutcheson on certain key points throughout. 159. Witherspoon’s influence on American higher education, directly through his lectures and indirectly through Princeton graduates who studied under him or under one of his Princeton protégés, seems to have been massive. John Edwin Pomfret has observed that in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, “John Witherspoon . . . furnished a cohesive and logical synthesis that was to set the Princeton pattern for long generations.” Willard Thorp, ed., The Lives of Eighteen from Princeton, 158. Princeton, in turn, was to exert an extraordinary influence on American higher education generally. According to John J. Walsh, “Princeton’s educational influence [during the colonial period] quite literally dominated much of the thinking in educational circles all over the country.” Quoted in Scott, Annotated Edition, 51–52. Much of this influence was Witherspoon’s doing, and it bore his imprint. This influence, moreover, continued decades after the formation of the republic. Scott notes that “Scottish realism largely dominated the American intellectual scene during the first half of the nineteenth century, and Witherspoon’s Lectures were no small factor in the dissemination of this philosophy.” Scott, Annotated Edition, 50–51. See also Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746–1896, 113–15; and Donald Robert Come, “The Influence of Princeton on Higher Education in the South before 1825,” both of which point to the importance of Witherspoon’s Lectures. 160. See David Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861; D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic. McCosh’s Scottish Philosophy remains a classic. 161. Haakonssen, Natural Law, 63–64. 162. McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, 415. 163. See Hamilton’s “Supplementary Dissertations; or Excursive Notes, Critical and Historical,” note A, appended to Works of Thomas Reid, 743.

236


164. William Hamilton, “On the Philosophy of Common Sense,” in Works of Thomas Reid, 747. 165. Reid, Inquiry 6.20, 183. 166. Quoted by James. See Clifford’s entire essay “The Ethics of Belief,” in Contemporary Review 29 (1877): 283–309. 167. Plato The Phaedo 114d, translated by Hugh Tredennick in Collected Dialogues of Plato, 94. 168. Voegelin does talk in one or two places of a “common sense tradition” but usually formulates his work in this line in terms of nous. He does make a remarkable statement on common sense as the “residue” of nous and its civilizational significance, in his Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, 410–12. 169. By “existential basis” is meant the human state of being that makes the relevant experiences and the recognition of natural law principles possible. 170. The process of natural law’s instantiation in social practices and political forms can be addressed only tangentially in the present study. The basic process, drawn from scattered suggestions of the theories under review, is outlined in the Conclusion, and some basic indicators are suggested there on how it seems to have operated in the American context, but a fully developed understanding, to say nothing of how we might apply such understanding to encourage wider and better results in varying circumstances, would require many years, perhaps generations, of assiduous work. Chapter 3 1. On Princeton’s reputation as the school of statesmen and Witherspoon’s leading part in giving it this standing, see Wertenbaker, Princeton, 115–16, and Morrison’s chapter on “Plain Common Sense: Educating Patriots at Princeton,” in John Witherspoon, 45–70. Princeton earned this appellation for turning out an unusually high number of graduates who would become high-ranking public officials, and Witherspoon himself taught so many of these graduates and so influenced the world of American higher education that one scholar has said, “Witherspoon was probably the most influential teacher in the entire history of American education.” Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist, 16. 2. The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as WJW), 4:426. 3. Gerhard Herm, The Celts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 61. 4. Witherspoon articulates these elements more explicitly and to a wider audience in his famous wartime sermon, The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men, in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, 529–58 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Dominion). Cf. Aquinas on just war, Summa Theologica 2.2.Q40. 5. John Locke, Second Treatise 2.14. 6. From Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, in Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 258. 7. This is suggested, at least, by a close reading of the Declaration of Independence and a wide reading of founding era political writings. For a more complete introduction to the relevant literature and a penetrating analysis of founding views of liberty and law, see Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding. On the particular, and significant, Scottish contributions to


237

American notions of natural rights and natural law, see Haakonssen, Natural Law, chapter 10. 8. On the near universality of the view of conscience in founding era America, see Barbara A. McGraw, Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America. 9. In all this eliciting and focusing the common sense of the people, Witherspoon plays the role of Vico’s statesman (see Chapter 2). 10. Experience alone does not make men wise; experience must be combined with judgment. Many of wide experience “persist [in foolishness] in spite of instruction, warning and example, till they feel the effects of their own folly” (WJW 4:453). 11. See Wertenbaker, Princeton, 80. 12. See Sandoz’s excellent overview of the genre of political sermons in his introduction to Political Sermons of the American Founding Era. 13. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 7.26. 14. See Voegelin’s late essay “The Beginning and the Beyond,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 28, where he explains how reason and faith are linked and why so many philosophers have failed to see the connection. People who want to say beliefs related to faith cannot be philosophical because they cannot be demonstrated miss the point about intuition and thus undermine themselves. Any arguments they might make against particular beliefs must depend on principles that are themselves indemonstrable, and so these thinkers get hoisted by their own petard. 15. Scott, Annotated Edition, 64 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as LMP). 16. Witherspoon does not take either the existence or the nature of God for granted; he gives considerable space in Lectures 6 and 7 to analyzing various proofs of God’s existence and exploring rationally the probable contours of God’s nature. 17. Witherspoon treats epistemology in Lectures 2 and 3, drawing from Locke, Reid, and Hutcheson. He describes his method (perhaps picked up from Reid) in his “Recapitulation” of the course, at the end of Lecture 16: “It is always safer in our reasonings to trace facts upwards, than to reason downwards, upon metaphysical principles” (LMP 186). Reid’s Inquiry is in the list of recommended readings appended to the Lectures. 18. As Hobbes puts it: “life is but a motion of limbs.” Introduction to his Leviathan, 3. 19. In this effort, Berkeley in fact went far beyond anything contemplated by the leading Christian philosophers of old (Augustine, Aquinas, and so on). Berkeley says that “there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives.” Principles of Human Knowledge, section 7, 91. 20. It might be added that we are equally unable to form any complete or adequate ideas of matter. 21. For a good overview of the current debates over mind-body relations, see Jerome Shaffer, “Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem,” in Philosophy of Mind (1968), 35–55. 22. At one point Witherspoon describes “true religion” as “nothing else but an inward temper and outward conduct suited to your state and circumstances in providence at any time” (WJW 3:46). 23. Washington, in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.

238


The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” In George Washington: A Collection, 521. 24. The Works of John Adams, 229. 25. Compare Witherspoon’s observation that the clear outlines of human nature are obfuscated by its corruption to Socrates’ appropriation of the myth of the sea god Glaucos in Plato The Republic 611b–12a. 26. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the classic Christian formulation of conscience in his Summa Theologica 1.2.Q94 on natural law, a formulation echoed here (though probably not intentionally) by Witherspoon. Aquinas’s technical term for conscience was synderesis, “the law of our mind . . . a habit containing the precepts of the natural law, which are the first principles of human actions.” Ibid., 1.2.Q94, A.1. These “precepts of the natural law” in turn (as we know from ibid., 1.2.Q91.A.2) are derived through a “participation of the eternal law [of God’s providence] in the rational creature.” This participation of eternal law in the rational creature for Aquinas is natural law. See Thomas Aquinas, The Political Ideas of Thomas Aquinas, 43, 13. 27. Witherspoon, citing Reid, speaks directly of the “dictates of common sense” (LMP 97) in his description of first principles (see below). On the authoritativeness of conscience, see Bishop Joseph Butler, whom the founders widely admired and whose work Witherspoon lists among his recommended readings at the conclusion of the Lectures. Joseph Butler, The Works of Joseph Butler, D.C.L., Sometime Lord Bishop of Durham. 28. Witherspoon here may mean to distance himself from Adam Smith’s socially derived “impartial spectator.” See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.1.2, 3.1.2–3. 29. Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 398, 295–96. Washington also linked “natural justice” and “natural right” in a letter to Bryan Fairfax in 1774 (George Washington, A Collection, 38), as did Hamilton and James Wilson (see next paragraph and sources cited). 30. See Allen Jayne, “Kames and the Moral Sense,” in Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology. 31. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., AdamsJefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2:509. 32. See the rules in Washington, A Collection, 6–13. He wrote them in his youth, at age sixteen, but there seems no reason to believe he would have abandoned the sentiment later. 33. Alexander Hamilton, Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 1:87. 34. “On the Law of Nature,” chapter 3, in James Wilson, Collected Works of James Wilson, ed. Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall. Wilson here gives the clearest and most complete account of the relation of conscience and natural law that is available in the founding literature.


239

35. For his most direct statement on conscience, see Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” in Selected Writings of James Madison, ed. Ralph Ketcham, 21–26. 36. See Alice Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution, 3; C. H. Van Tyne, “Influence of the Clergy, and of Religious and Sectarian Forces, on the American Revolution,” 54; Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution, 60–61. On the influence of religion on early American thought and practice more generally, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millenium in Revolutionary New England; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution; Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences; Ellis Sandoz, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, and Government of Laws. 37. See the sermons in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805; Sandoz, Political Sermons; James A. Levernier, ed., Souldery Spiritualized: Seven Sermons Preached before the Artillery Companies of New England, 1674–1774; James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes, eds., Sermons and Cannonballs: Eleven Sermons on Military Events of Historic Significance during the French and Indian Wars, 1689–1760; and John Wingate Thornton, ed., The Pulpit of the American Revolution. 38. The ancients thought of happiness as the natural goal of human striving, but happiness was for them clearly not—or at least not primarily—a life of love for moral excellence as we typically understand the term. For them, moral virtue was a step along the way to something better, though it always remained indispensable. Witherspoon seems inconsistent on this point, in light of his describing man’s highest end in The Object of a Christian’s Desire in Religious Worship as “enjoying God” (WJW 2:9), except insofar as enjoying God involves delighting in God’s moral excellence. 39. Witherspoon may have misread Hutcheson on this point. Haakonssen has made a good case that, though on Hutcheson’s account delight is inherent in the recognition of moral excellence, the element of delight is not the basis of obligation. See Haakonssen, Natural Law, 71–75. Hutcheson defines the moral sense as “a natural and immediate determination to approve certain affections, and actions consequent upon them; or a natural sense of immediate excellence in them, not referred to any other quality perceivable by our other senses or reasoning.” Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy 1.4.4. In any case Hutcheson was not as clear on the matter as he might have been. 40. Witherspoon’s account of conscience here and elsewhere in the Lectures closely mirrors that of Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham, whose brilliant series of Fifteen Sermons Preached at Rolls Chapel is a classic of British moral theory. Butler spoke of “conscience” as “a moral approving and disapproving faculty” that “from its very nature manifestly” claims “superiority” over all other principles of human nature, over all “appetites, passions, and affections.” Butler, Works, 1:327, 2:54–55, 60. 41. Witherspoon’s understanding of conscience as “a transcript of [God’s] moral excellence” strongly resembles St. Thomas’s notion of synderesis. 42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. 43. Plato described the philosopher-ruler as fashioning the city according to the divine pattern experienced after the philosophical ascent. The Republic, book 7. The problem, as Friedrich A. Hayek expressed it in his Road to Serfdom, is the impossibility of seeing and holding in mind all the vast array of particular needs and legitimate

240


desires of the people, and of coordinating an effective response to all these even if one could know them. 44. None of the things sensed or principles drawn here require any “special” or extraordinary revelation to recognize, though their precise nature and significance may. Thus, it is appropriate to class them even from a Thomistic perspective under “natural law.” 45. This “ancient tripartite division of man’s duties,” says Haakonssen, “had become an accepted part of contemporary teaching and lecturing practice, especially after Pufendorf adopted it in his Duty of Man.” Introduction to Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, Self-Government, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations, 49. It is probably no accident, in light of his Christian faith, that Witherspoon’s classes of duties seem to correspond to Christ’s “greatest commandments” to “Love the Lord your God” and “your neighbor as yourself ” (Matthew 22:37, 39). The one fundamental relation Witherspoon does not address is man’s relation to the natural world. 46. See Morrison, “‘An Animated Son of Liberty’: Revolution,” in John Witherspoon, 71–92. 47. Recent republications of some of these sermons, along with helpful editorial comments, can be found in Sandoz, Political Sermons, and Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing. 48. See introductory materials and commentary in Sandoz, Political Sermons, and Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing. 49. Hutcheson had made benevolence the highest virtue. See Haakonssen, Natural Law, 73. 50. For a varied sampling of relevant scholarship, see discussion and notes in Knud Haakonssen’s “From Natural Law to the Rights of Man: A European Perspective on American Debates,” in Haakonssen, Natural Law, 310–41; McGraw, America’s Sacred Ground; and Russell Kirk, Rights and Duties. 51. “Fifth Joint Debate: Galesburg, October 7, 1858,” The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, ed. Robert W. Johannsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 225. 52. See Haakonssen’s discussion of the point in Natural Law, 328–32. 53. As Jack Scott points out, Witherspoon follows Hutcheson especially closely in his rights scheme (LMP 113n). See Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy, book 2. It should be pointed out, however, that Hutcheson’s formulations of rights are themselves derivative. The notion of perfect and imperfect rights, for example, is taken from Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), and much of the rest of Hutcheson’s discussion of rights seems to be a reworking of Lockean rights theory. 54. On the partial surrender of natural rights for the sake of protecting what is not surrendered, see Locke’s Second Treatise, chapter 7. 55. The “particular kind affections” are the natural affections for family, friends, and country (LMP 109). 56. Note that for Witherspoon mercy extends to everything people need, not necessarily to everything they want, so that while it may soften justice it does not negate it. People need forgiveness of wrongs committed when they humbly seek it, for example, but forgiveness is not a grant of license, nor necessarily a release from temporal punishment.


241

57. See the comment on how Calvinist-Protestant Christianity “tempered the stark individualism, materialism, and acquisitiveness of Locke’s thought,” in Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, 161. As Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a robust capitalism is perfectly compatible with spartan self-denial. 58. Hans Eicholz expounds the common view in Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Ideal of Self-Government. 59. They cannot be the only central concerns, as law is only part, and a subsidiary part, of the moral formation of a people. The deeper formation, as Witherspoon has suggested, is wrought by religious experience, by that profound inward sense of the higher good and the higher law. 60. In his sermon Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving after Peace, for example, Witherspoon warned, “let us guard against using our liberty as a cloak for licentiousness; and thus poisoning the blessing after we have attained it” (WJW 3:84). He alludes here to I Peter 2:16; see also Galatians 5:13. The distinction between liberty and licentiousness is a constant refrain in the political sermon literature of the founding period. Samuel West perhaps said it best in his 1776 Election Day Sermon On the Right to Rebel Against Governors: “where licentiousness begins, liberty ends. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he becomes the slave of base passions and vile lusts; he introduces confusion and disorder into society, and brings misery and destruction upon himself. This, therefore, cannot be called a state of freedom, but a state of the vilest slavery and the most dreadful bondage. The servants of sin and corruption are subjected to the worst kind of tyranny in the universe.” Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 1:415. 61. His coupling of reason/conscience and utility may be intended as a rebuke to Hume’s reducing the standard of human behavior to utility. 62. This is not to say that affections cannot be disinterested. Witherspoon has implied they can be, as in love or admiration of God or others. But there does seem to be a connection in his overall scheme between affection and interest. 63. See Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. On Aristotle versus Locke on the family, see Aristotle The Politics 1253b1–3 and Locke’s Second Treatise, chapter 7. 64. Witherspoon notes approvingly that “our law permits [divorce] only on three accounts—adultery, willful and obstinate desertion, and incapacity.” He resists extending the legitimate causes of divorce (as Hutcheson extended it) to “contrariety of temper, incurable diseases, and such as would infect the offspring” (LMP 134–35). Clearly, he would also find Locke’s version of the marriage contract wanting. See Locke, Second Treatise, 7.82. 65. On founding views on this last point, see Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, chapter 4. 66. Compare Aristotle’s account of “natural slaves,” which seems to be less a comment on the institution of slavery than on differing rational capacities. 67. The inventory of his estate on his death lists among his property two slaves. See Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, 181. Apparently, nothing is known about the circumstances surrounding his possession of the slaves, his relationships with them, nor how he reconciled himself to what would seem to be an indefensible violation of his own clear principles.

242


68. Witherspoon subsumes adjudication, or the judicial power, under administration. “Representation,” as he uses the term here, means “appearing and acting in the name of the whole, in all transactions, with adjacent independent states, chiefly for the purpose of making war and peace” (LMP 141) and thus understood is a function of all governments, not just democratically elected ones. 69. Hamilton, in Federalist 84. 70. Regarding the actual (as opposed to theoretical) revolution, once Witherspoon decided that resistance against Britain was justified for the American colonies, he was among its most ardent advocates. On Witherspoon’s prominent role thereafter in pressing for revolution, see Morrison, “‘An Animated Son of Liberty’: Revolution,” in John Witherspoon, 171–92. 71. These remarkable similarities on central points of Madison’s political theory deserve closer scrutiny. Both of the Federalist papers for which Madison is most famous (numbers 10 and 51), seem to owe much to the influence of Witherspoon. See James H. Smylie, “Madison and Witherspoon: Theological Roots of American Political Thought,” and Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of James Madison. A thorough evaluation of Witherspoon’s particular influence on all the many statesmen who came out of Princeton would do much to illuminate his impact and that of Scottish realism on this country’s politics. Unfortunately, Witherspoon ordered most of his personal correspondence burned on his death, so such a project would not be easy. 72. See Morrison, John Witherspoon, 8, 9, 30, 126. 73. The phrase is taken from Samuel Pufendorf ’s treatise De jure natural et gentium (On the law of nature and nations). Witherspoon (and Hutcheson, too) relied heavily on Pufendorf and Grotius for their ideas on international law. 74. See especially Witherspoon’s list of perfect natural rights above. 75. His language here echoes the title of Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis. 76. Witherspoon’s discussion of war has special resonance in the early twenty-first century during the United States’ ongoing “war on terrorism.” Many of the issues raised by Witherspoon are central themes in debates about the legitimacy and legitimate conduct of that war. 77. Witherspoon explains: “National calumny [although a violation of a perfect right] is scarcely a cause for war, because it cannot be frequent or of great effect. The violation of imperfect rights cannot usually be a cause of war between nations” (LMP 151). Wars of national pride, though common, are illegitimate. 78. An example of the last is the use of “poisoned weapons” and “the poisoning of springs or provisions.” Witherspoon anticipates today’s taboo against biological and chemical weapons: they are wrong because they inflict unnecessarily extensive, indiscriminate, and horrifying death and destruction. Note also that the terrorists we are dealing with today systematically violate the norms Witherspoon articulates here, raising (along with the unusual importance of prior intelligence for defeating terrorism) difficulties about how to apply the Geneva Conventions, which do not contemplate such sweeping violations. 79. Although he allows the legitimacy of concealing plans and intentions and of strategic and tactical misdirection, Witherspoon says certain deceptions cross the line. 80. Compare Witherspoon’s treatment of contracts to Thomas Reid’s (see Chapter 2). 81. On all these matters, see Morrison, John Witherspoon.


243

Chapter 4 1. On McCosh’s participation in American public debates, see Hoeveler, James McCosh, chapters 8–9. 2. H. G. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States, 103. 3. Hoeveler, James McCosh, ix. 4. James McCosh, The Intuitions of the Mind, Inductively Investigated (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as IM). 5. McCosh, Scottish Philosophy (hereafter cited parenthetically in text as SP), 221– 22. One might add another meaning—the common feeling of a particular people, as in the common sense of American colonists that King George III and Parliament were trampling on their long-held rights and liberties as Englishmen. 6. In fact, ironically, the ambiguous use of “principles” by McCosh, as well as by Reid and other Scottish realists, may have caused as much confusion to outsiders as Reid’s incautious use of the term “common sense.” 7. McCosh’s treatment of Reid here is not a good indication of his overall assessment of the great man and his achievements. He thought Reid a keen observer of the facts of consciousness and found that “the service which Reid has done to philosophy by banishing . . . intermediaries between perception and its external object cannot be over-estimated” (SP 210). Of “the school of Reid” (he has in mind primarily Reid himself and his most formidable protégé, Dugald Stewart), McCosh concluded that its “great work . . . consists in its careful investigation, in the inductive manner, first, of the faculties of the mind; and, secondly, and more particularly, of man’s primary and intuitive convictions.” Its work was only a beginning but provided, McCosh thought, a firm foundation on which to build an understanding of the fundamental laws of mental activity (SP 306–7). 8. As a sensationalist, Hume is a major exception to this. However (modern readers tend to forget), he was decidedly out of the Scottish mainstream, and so the generalization holds. 9. The first school, but not the first thinker. Locke was the first to attempt it, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 10. McCosh, An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy, 29–30 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as EMP). In Intuitions, McCosh says abstraction “may be regarded, in an extended sense, as that operation of mind, in which, to use the language of Whately, ‘we draw off and contemplate separately any part of an object presented to the mind, disregarding the rest’ (Logic Anal. Out.) . . . . In a narrower sense, abstraction is that operation of mind in which we contemplate the quality of an object separately from the object” (IM 158–60). “Generalization,” McCosh says, “is dependent on abstraction, and arises out of it. In generalization we contemplate an indefinite number of objects as possessing a common attribute or attributes. A general notion is a notion of these objects.” Ibid., 160. 11. James McCosh, The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral, 508 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MDG). 12. Primarily, Hamilton had been led astray in his attempts to join together certain philosophical tenets of Kant with a Reidian common sense philosophy. 13. McCosh is citing John Stuart Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, 145, 146.

244


14. McCosh is citing ibid., 147. 15. It might be added that universality also serves as a negative test of self-evidence and necessity: if any alleged knowledge, belief, or judgment is clearly not universal for all rational beings who clearly apprehend a given object or truth, then it cannot be selfevident or necessary. 16. Regarding the “things” perceived and how they make themselves known, see McCosh’s treatment of “substance” and “properties” shortly after this passage. 17. Particular moral qualities here are not to be confused with particular outward actions, the moral quality of which will vary with the intentions of their agents. 18. Any moral theory founded on moral sentiments (as Hume’s and Smith’s), then, would necessarily be inadequate. 19. McCosh’s understanding of conscience here is essentially identical to Witherspoon’s. 20. See McCosh, Religious Aspect of Evolution. As suggested in the comment on sensation (see above), McCosh perhaps focuses too much on the distinction of soul and body and not enough on the connection between them. 21. McCosh lists the inclinations as the tendency to activity, desires and aversions (such as toward pleasure and away from pain), physical and mental cravings (for food, drink, and sex, also for “knowledge, esteem, society, power, property”), attraction to beauty, social affections, and moral proclivities (MDG 280–81). 22. Compare McCosh’s account of the will and its corruption with that expressed in Augustine, City of God 14.6–9. 23. The Apostle Paul describes the phenomenon in Romans 7:14–25. 24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.2.Q94.A6. 25. According to Aristotle: “Problems of what is noble and just, which politics examines, present so much variety and irregularity that some people believe that they exist only by convention and not by nature. The problem of the good, too, presents a similar kind of irregularity, because in many cases good things bring harmful results. There are instances of men ruined by wealth, and others by courage. Therefore, in a discussion of such subjects . . . we must be satisfied to indicate the truth with a rough and general sketch: when the subject and the basis of a discussion consist in matters that hold good only as a general rule, but not always, the conclusions reached must be of the same order. . . . For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits.” Nichomachean Ethics 1094b15ff. 26. By “test” here McCosh means the same thing as Witherspoon’s “rule by which [to] try every disputed practice” (LMP 83). McCosh’s standard is the same: human nature or more precisely human virtue or excellence. Both of them, then, are on this point Aristotelians. 27. This is not to deny that an action that incidentally accords with higher law is good, only that it is virtuous. Aside from the referencing of actions to God, McCosh’s account here of virtuous choice is much like Aristotle’s in Nichomachean Ethics, book 3. 28. Compare Witherspoon on other duties as subsets of our duties to God, Chapter 3. 29. Less commonly, one might add, it also makes things seem wrong that are in fact good, or at least morally neutral. 30. McCosh adds the same point as Aquinas made, that in revealing man’s eternal ends Scripture draws out the arc of man’s natural moral principles to a logical conclusion.


245

31. “Heavily” rather than “entirely,” because faith and love as he has described it may be a necessary prerequisite to fully embracing what conscience says. 32. McCosh observes that Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler, then Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown in the Scottish school, and Victor Cousin and the Eclectic school of France, all “have shown that the same facts and arguments which lead us to admit an original principle of sympathy, require us also to call in a cognitive and a motive moral power” (EMP 361–62). 33. McCosh is citing Mill, Hamilton’s Philosophy, 40, 41. 34. Witherspoon made a similar observation; see Chapter 3. 35. Again, the resemblance of McCosh’s view of these matters to Witherspoon’s is striking. James McCosh, Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics, 31 (hereafter cited parenthetically in text as OMN). 36. With acute perception McCosh observes, “The temptation on the part of the Romish Church is to claim authority over the state. The disposition of some of the Protestant churches is to make the church subject to the state. The true position is that each should have its own position.” He thinks a complete institutional separation of church and state best, “both favoring peace and high morality in a country” (OMN 46). 37. McCosh agrees with Aristotle, as Witherspoon does, on the naturalness of the household and of political society. 38. To these, we may well add the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the whole long list of recent totalitarians. 39. Self-love and benevolence were commonly put forward as fundamental principles of ethics in the ethical theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 40. Compare Mandeville’s similar arguments in Fable of the Bees. Chapter 5 1. See the opening section on “Verum and Factum,” in Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 45–47. 2. James twice references McCosh, favorably (PoP 556n, 702n). 3. As James puts it, we seem naturally to desire—and certain correspondences between our capacities and the outer world suggest—that “the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess” (WB 73). 4. William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” address delivered before the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, August 26, 1898, in William James: Writings, 1878–1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers. 5. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Buchler, Writings of Pierce, 31. 6. James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 1080. 7. Ibid., 1081. 8. See Peirce’s considered statements and restatements on pragmatism in “The Essentials of Pragmatism,” “Pragmatism in Retrospect: A Last Formulation,” and “Critical Common-Sensism.” Buchler, Writings of Pierce, chapters 17, 18, 19, respectively. 9. Brown, Radical Empiricism and Religion, 35. 10. James, “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 908. 11. Ibid., 902. That is, of course, every living man in James’s day. Even this basic common sense beginning has been jettisoned in our day by the likes of Richard Rorty, who indeed rejected common sense in general.

246


12. Ibid., 904. 13. John E. Smith, introduction, VRE xxvii. 14. In light of James’s justifiably great fame for psychological analysis, this is especially important to bear in mind. James rejects Mill’s psychological approach to understanding experience as being totally inadequate. 15. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James names mysticism as a distinct level of truth but observes that this kind is not generally accessible for validation on the level of firsthand perceptual experience, although the fruits or consequences in the lives of those who have had such experience are amenable to public validation and constitute an important body of truth (more on this when we examine James’s account of the religious foundations of order). 16. Additionally, their form reflects “the very structure of our thinking” (Pr 102). 17. “Ideas” and logical and theoretical connections, like other truths as James understands them, are themselves concrete facts of a kind, but their truth (as opposed to their mere existence) is a matter of their relation to the substantive world. 18. In pure experience, thought is purely perceptual; in common sense thinking, percepts are correlated to concepts; logic and theory deal on the purely conceptual level. See the discussion of James’s account of concepts and percepts below. 19. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (hereafter cited in text as SPP), 14. 20. Eric Voegelin appreciated this point as it was expressed by Dewey in the latter’s Human Nature and Conduct. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 28–29. (See “The Basic Elements of Common Sense,” chapter 2, for Voegelin’s comment.) 21. Note that common sense as James describes it here—as “interpolation”—is precisely what Aristotle meant, on the level of sense perception, by koine aesthesis. 22. Chauncy Wright, Philosophical Discussions, ed. C. E. Norton (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), 116n, quoted in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam, 368. 23. James’s own work Principles of Psychology was pivotal in forging our contemporary understanding. Although the common sense stage of philosophizing is ever evolving, James seems to think it must of necessity always be in place in some form. 24. William James, “German Pessimism,” in Collected Essays and Reviews, 17. 25. See Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Louis Menand, ed., Pragmatism: A Reader, 364–80. 26. Not the whole point, as James insists that theoretic satisfactoriness is only one of several concrete concerns that any complete philosophy should take into account: any complete philosophy must account for satisfaction of our active and passional needs as well. See James, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (WB 57–89). 27. James admits in “On Some Hegelisms” (WB 196–221) that mystical experiences seem to have left some with a sense that the universe is deeply monistic in just the way the philosophers of the Absolute suggest. James famously takes the verdicts of mysticism seriously, but he also notes that absolute unity of being is not a unanimous suggestion of mystical experiences (whatever other points they may have in common), and that mystically inspired judgments cannot be authoritative for those not similarly inspired, for the simple reason that the uninspired have no point of reference by which to judge the validity and meaning of a mystic’s account. It is possible, James thinks, to determine to some extent the truth value of a mystic’s claims by the fruits of his life and the consequences of his ideas, but the ontological unity or plurality of the universe is not the kind of claim that is likely to be verified in this way.


247

28. James says explicitly that his radical empiricism does not “preclude the possibility of ” either “something not experienced” or “action of experience upon a noumenon,” but he adds that he thinks it “wise not to consider any thing or action of that nature, and to restrict our universe of philosophic discourse to what is experienced or, at least, experienceable” (ERE 125). 29. See James’s full discussion of the independence or “transcendency” of objects in MT 8–10. 30. See Seigfried, Radical Reconstruction, 370–72. 31. See James’s presentation of the notion of “thick” reality and his corresponding call for philosophic discussion of the world to be “thickened up” (PU 64, 149). See also Vincent Colapietro’s fine paper, “Realism Thick and Thin,” in John R. Shook, ed., Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, 107–23. 32. Plato Apology 27b–d. 33. The interesting question from James’s pragmatic point of view, and perhaps indeed from any point of view, is whether any important practical consequences follow from believing or not believing in the soul. If so, then James would concede that the question of the soul’s existence is an important one. He finds abundant evidence of a spiritual dimension of human experience, in fact seems to understand “experience” as inherently spiritual in some sense, but cannot find that this fact necessitates belief in souls nor that any matter of significance—philosophical, scientific, or even religious—hinges on such belief. Nonetheless, many serious philosophers have taken the existence of the soul to be both logically and practically necessary, and to the extent these thinkers should be taken seriously, the theory of soul must be taken seriously. 34. Peter H. Hare, introduction (SPP xxiv). 35. Psychology: Briefer Course (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PBC), in William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 4. 36. James removed #3 here from Psychology: Briefer Course, presumably because of his epiphany about “pure experience.” Subjectivity and objectivity both, according to James’s later analysis, are recognized retrospectively to the initial experience. 37. Common sense judgments are said to be “unreflective” because they are not the product of reasoning and are frequently automatic, but they involve something more than simple awareness; they add to awareness a kind of synthetic judgment. 38. James speaks of these “two kinds of knowledge . . . knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about” in PoP 216. 39. On how to acquire such a vision, see James’s appreciative account of Bergson’s philosophic method (PU 116–17). The idea is to place yourself at the center of the movement of the perceptual flux where it touches that part of reality you wish to understand, and to allow yourself to feel all the relations and connections that unfold there. 40. Concepts always have contact with concrete experience in thought, that is, we cannot think of a concept without its being present in the stream of thought, or without its being brought into the stream of thought when our feeling of tendency has suggested its present usefulness. We might better say, for greater precision, that concepts we employ do not always have direct contact with the mainstream of experience, the stream of pure experience. 41. One wonders if there is any significance to this dual formulation, “moral sensibility and conscience.” Could James have meant by the two terms to suggest the separate but related functions of moral sensation and moral perception?

248


42. Does James have Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” in mind here as a point of comparison? The idea of an impartial spectator is at the core of Smith’s moral theory (see Smith, Moral Sentiments) as James’s sense of an “ideal spectator” is at the core of his. The difference between the two notions—and (what for James would amount to the same thing) the difference that the difference makes—is deeply significant. Smith’s impartial spectator is a rational construct deployed to achieve moral objectivity; this involves recognizing the sentiments that any disinterested third party would have on discovering the motives of an actor in a given set of circumstances. These natural moral sentiments of an unbiased observer are effectively the moral sense, and the exercise of detachment Adams describes is meant to allow the impartial verdicts of one’s own moral sense to come clear. See Smith, Moral Sentiments 2.1.2, 2.1.5, 3.1, 3.3.1–7. James’s ideal spectator is realized in part, to be sure, from an act of imagination, but it is less a rational construct than a felt presence and, what is more, the presence of a very interested person. As helpful as Smith’s construct is for getting an unbiased view, it ought to be considered that the motivation for doing the right thing is vastly augmented by the notion of a “highest possible judging companion.” Still, the two spectators are not incompatible and may turn out to be closely related: the unbiased determinations of the impartial spectator may be a kind of echo in consciousness and in human nature of the unerring divine Word. 43. James means the last part of his statement literally: were the world not regular, reasoning could never have developed, because we would have lacked instances of the same, and lacking these, we could not have formed concepts. In fact, as James’s analysis of discrimination and abstraction shows, we could not even have detected distinct attributes from which to make classifications, because we must see an attribute in different contexts before we see it as an attribute, mentally separable from the object in which it may be found. 44. Sensation, as James understands it, is the ultimate basis of rationality, but common sense percepts are what enable us to get a firm grip on objects in the sensational flux. Thus, common sense, rather than pure sensation, is the “stable” basis of rationality. 45. James’s fascinating analyses of associationist and transcendentalist (Kantian) theories on the question of a substantial, pure self in this part of the Principles are not directly relevant here, but they are excellent and deserve close attention. 46. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott, 7–8. 47. The phrase “still small voice” comes from I Kings 19:11–13, where Yahweh tells Elijah, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? . . . And the Lord said unto him, Go” (King James version, italics added). The suggestion of the story is that God typically speaks not with earth-shattering voice but quietly, softly, so that one must listen attentively and attune one’s soul to more subtle intimations. There is a parallel in Greek philosophy with Plato’s image in the Laws of the golden cord of reason, which pulls gently heavenward while the steely cords of passion tug violently toward baser interests; one must learn to yield to the former and


249

counterpull against the latter (644e–45c). James, incidentally, describes the essence of religion as “appeal and response” (VRE 36). 48. Smith’s introduction (VRE xlv). 49. This theory became known as the James-Lange theory because C. Lange presented a similar theory within a year after James first introduced it in 1884. James’s theory is based on the observation that “If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind . . . and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains” (PoP 1067). Note: given that perception is made up of organized sensation, it is clear that sensation includes our purely intellectual sense of things, as well as our sense of physical feeling. “Sensation” is not to be confused with “emotion.” 50. Kant, Prolegomena, 4. Chapter 6 1. Indeed, the elegance, power, and clarity of James’s language makes it almost irresistible not to quote him extensively, and I admit to having put up no great resistance. This is partly to demonstrate conclusively the claims made here about his moral thought, which would surely otherwise be doubted. Partly it is a kind of filmmaker’s concession that there are too many great scenes here to keep the movie short, though if I had acted them all out myself it probably would have been even longer. 2. James makes the claim that Aristotelian philosophy is essentially a technical elaboration of common sense categories in Pr 90. 3. This turns out to be a misleading appearance, as James later shows that genuine obligation exists even in a moral solitude (see WB 159). 4. S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, in The Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe (London, 1896), 418, 429–30. 5. Note that on the metaphysical and casuistic questions as well as on the psychological one, Witherspoon, McCosh, and James are in fundamental agreement. 6. They (especially the more ancient ones) recommended the pleasures of understanding, beauty, and so on rather than the pleasures of bodily gratification, the higher pleasures over the lower, but Aristotle’s notion of happiness was something more than pleasure, even of the higher kind. It was an excellent state of being on every level, captured better in English by the term “fulfillment.” 7. James, “Spencer’s Definition of Mind,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 894. 8. The willingness of ideologues to sacrifice everything to their cherished ideals offends common sense and is what makes common sense so resistant to ideology. Compare James’s attitude here with Shaftesbury’s, as outlined in Chapter 2. 9. See Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. 10. Acts 6:38–39 (New International Version). 11. The current worldwide resurgence of religion, poignantly dubbed the “revenge of God,” is a powerful case in point. Western intellectuals have long assumed the world would “outgrow” its obsession with religion and that, with “progress,” secularization was inevitable. But Europe’s indigenous populations decline, while its Muslim populations explode, Christianity and Islam spread like wildfire in the Southern Hemisphere, and Hinduism thrives in India, and while the Western intelligentsia has lost the will to believe, as James might say, and with it the will to defend itself: they no longer believe in anything and so can see nothing worth fighting for.

250


12. See “Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered” (Pr 50–62). 13. Hunter Brown describes the effects of the strenuous mood in these terms in Radical Empiricism and Religion, 107. His chapter on “The Strenuous Mood” is generally excellent. 14. Quoted in Peter H. Hare’s introduction (SPP xxviii). 15. The best philosophical analysis of the spiritual process involved here is Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. 16. Compare this comment to Adam Smith’s description of conscience, his “impartial spectator,” as a “mirror” of the approvals and disapprovals of others, and of the natural sentiments that gave rise to them. Smith, Moral Sentiments 3.1.3. 17. The parallel to Adam Smith, again, is striking and suggests, together with James’s familiarity with the Scottish realists, that James studied Scottish philosophy rather carefully. 18. Bernard P. Brennan, The Ethics of William James, 120. 19. Ibid., 99–100. Brennan cites James, Some Problems of Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1948), 71, 73. 20. William James: Writings, 1902–1910, 1242. 21. Ibid., 1244, 1243, 1244. 22. William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 841, 847, 848, 847, 841. 23. See Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency,” in his System of Nature. 24. Compare Reid’s claim that free will is self-evident. 25. Eric Voegelin describes even more disturbing varieties of gnosticism in New Science of Politics, chapter 6. 26. This emphasizing of differing satisfactions does not imply relativism but is in fact necessary for achieving maximum fullness of truth. Different persons find a theory unsatisfactory because it fails to account for certain facts and experiences they know. The multiple perspectives result from seeing different sides of the same reality. 27. Aristotle Politics 1252b30–53a3. 28. William James, “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” 1246. 29. William James, Essays in Philosophy, 170. 30. Ibid., 195. 31. On the importance of storytelling see Plato’s Republic books 3 and 10. I extrapolate to this understanding of foundational education from James’s obvious appreciation for and employment of fiction in, most notably, his Talks to Teachers, and from his comment about the importance of “biographical history” as an approach to teaching the important works of the various disciplines. 32. Recall the last words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. 33. James, “Social Value of the College-Bred,” 1245–46. 34. See Jefferson’s letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 579. 35. James, “Social Value of the College-Bred,” 1247–48. 36. Cotkin, Public Philosopher, 117, cited in William D. Dean, The Religious Critic in American Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 41. Chapter 7 1. See Eric Voegelin, “What Is Right by Nature?” along with “What Is Nature?” and “What Is Political Reality?” in Anamnesis.


251

2. James uses the term denkmittel in connection with common sense concepts (Pr 88). 3. Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, in Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 398. 4. Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 295–96. 5. See McGraw, America’s Sacred Ground, and Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, x. 6. Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 656–57. 7. See McGraw, America’s Sacred Ground. 8. The Works of John Adams, 229. 9. Federalist 55. 10. Federalist 51. 11. Compare Thomas Jefferson’s comment in his letter to Peter Carr dated August 10, 1787: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Koch and Peden, Thomas Jefferson, 398. Witherspoon would certainly have agreed that artificial rules detached from experience tend to lead men astray. 12. James, “Social Value of the College-Bred,” 1245–46. Plato and Aristotle took these to be the central questions for any regime. 13. See Witherspoon’s entire remarkable sermon “The Trial of Religious Truth by Its Moral Influence,” where, like James, he makes religion’s moral fruits the acid test. James on several occasions describes the appropriate test of people’s character and opinions to be the “fruits” that spring from them (see the discussion of the saintly character in Chapter 6). 14. Voegelin’s collected works, a massive volume of material, have been published recently by the University of Missouri Press. 15. Now widely accessible through Miller, Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. It is regrettable we did not have occasion here to examine the Lectures on Eloquence, or his very witty religious satire in Ecclesiastical Characteristics (also in Miller’s collection), which shows the good humor endemic to common sense.

Selected Bibliography Primary Sources James, William. Collected Essays and Reviews. Edited by Ralph Barton Perry. New York: Russell and Russell, 1920; repr., 1969. ———. Essays in Philosophy. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. ———. Essays in Psychical Research. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. ———. Essays in Radical Empiricism. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. ———. Essays in Religion and Morality. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. ———. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. ———. A Pluralistic Universe. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. ———. Pragmatism. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. ———. The Principles of Psychology. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. “The Social Value of the College-Bred.” In William James: Writings, 1902–1910. 253

254


———. Some Problems of Philosophy. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. ———. William James: Writings, 1878–1899. Edited by Gerald E. Myers. New York: Library of America, 1992. ———. William James: Writings, 1902–1910. Edited by Bruce Kuklick. New York: Library of America, 1987. ———. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. In The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. ———. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. McCosh, James. An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy, Being a Defense of Fundamental Truth. London: Macmillan, 1866. ———. First and Fundamental Truths, Being a Treatise on Metaphysics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889. ———. The Intuitions of the Mind, Inductively Investigated. London: John Murray, 1860. ———. The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral. New York: Robert Carter and Bros., 1869. ———. Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892. ———. Realistic Philosophy, Defended in a Philosophic Series. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. ———. The Religious Aspect of Evolution. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890. ———. The Scottish Philosophy: Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875. Witherspoon, John. An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon. Edited by Jack Scott. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982. ———. The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men. In Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991. ———. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Edited by Thomas Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.


255

———. The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon. Edited by John Rodgers. 4 vols. Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1801–1802. There is a second edition, “Revised and Corrected,” dated 1802.

Secondary Sources Adams, John. The Works of John Adams. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851. Aquinas, Thomas. The Political Ideas of Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Dino Bigongiari. New York: Hafner Press, 1953. ———. Summa Theologica. London: Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1912. Aristotle. Aristotle: On the Soul; Parva Naturalia; On Breath. Loeb no. 288. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. ———. De Anima. Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin Books, 1986. ———. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962. ———. The Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1994. Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by Robert Dyson. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Baldwin, Alice. The New England Clergy and the American Revolution. New York: Frederick Unger, 1928. Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll With William James. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Bellah, Robert. “Civil Religion in America. http://hirr.hartsem.edu/Bellah/articles_5.htm, reprinted from Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1977. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998. Berry, Christopher J. Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Brandom, Robert B., ed. Rorty and His Critics. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Brennan, Bernard P. The Ethics of William James. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1961.

256


Brown, Hunter. William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Buchler, Justus, ed. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover, 1955. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Butler, Joseph. The Works of Joseph Butler, D.C.L., Sometime Lord Bishop of Durham. Edited by W. E. Gladstone. 2 vols. Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1897. Campbell, T. D. “Francis Hutcheson: ‘Father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment.” In The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, 167–85. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982. Cappon, Lester J., ed. Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. 2 vols. in 1. 1959; repr., New York, 1971. Chinard, Gilbert. Jefferson et les idéalogues. Manchester, N.H.: Ayer Publishing, 1979. Cicero. The Republic and The Laws. Translated by Niall Rudd. Cambridge, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998. Collins, Varnum Lansing. President Witherspoon. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeâ•‚ ton University Press, 1925; repr., New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969. Come, Donald Robert. “The Influence of Princeton on Higher Education in the South before 1825.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1945): 359–96. Cotkin, George. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Cuneo, Terence, and René van Woudenberg, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dewey, John. A Common Faith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934. ———. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997. ———. The Moral Writings of John Dewey. Edited by James Gouinlock. Rev. ed. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994. ———. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954. D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry. Good Sense. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004. ———. System of Nature. Translated by H. D. Robinson. Manchester, Eng.: Clinamen Press, 1999.


257

Dworetz, Steven M. The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Edie, James M. William James and Phenomenology. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Eicholz, Hans. Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Ideal of Self-Government. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Fontinell, Eugene. Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Gale, Richard M. The Divided Self of William James. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Gettier, Edmund L. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121–23. Green, Ashbel. Life of John Witherspoon, D.D., LL.D. Edited by Henry Lyttleton Savage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. Grotius, Hugo. The Rights of War and Peace. Edited by Richard Tuck. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005. Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hall, Mark David. The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742– 1798. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Hamilton, Alexander. Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Edited by Harold C. Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Clinton Rossiter. New York: Mentor, 1961. Hatch, Nathan O. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millenium in Revolutionary New England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Heimert, Alan, and Perry Miller, eds. The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1688. Translated by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994. Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Holthoon, Frits van, and David R. Olson. Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.

258


Howe, David Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Howell, Wilbur Samuel. “The Declaration of Independence and EighteenthCentury Logic.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1961): 463–84. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by J. B. Schneewind. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983. ———. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hutcheson, Francis. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. Edited by Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002. ———. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Edited by Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. ———. A System of Moral Philosophy. 2 vols. in one. Glasgow, 1755; repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. Hyneman, Charles S., and Donald S. Lutz. American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983. Jayne, Allen. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. ———. “Kames and the Moral Sense.” In Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson: Selected Writings. Edited by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2003. Kallen, Horace M. William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life, and Responses and Reviews. In Early Defenders of Pragmatism, vol. 4, ed. John R. Shook. Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996. ———. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. 2nd ed. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Ketcham, Ralph. “James Madison at Princeton.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 28 (Autumn 1966): 24–54. Koch, Adrienne, and William Peden, eds. Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Modern Library, 1998. Paperback edition. Krois, John Michael. “Vico and Peirce’s ‘Sensus Communis.’“ In Vico: Past and


259

Present. Ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981. Kuehn, Manfred. Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lamberth, David C. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Levernier, James A., ed. Souldery Spiritualized: Seven Sermons Preached before the Artillery Companies of New England, 1674–1774. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1979. Levernier, James A., and Douglas R. Wilmes, eds. Sermons and Cannonballs: Eleven Sermons on Military Events of Historic Significance During the French and Indian Wars, 1689–1760. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1982. Levinson, Henry S. Science, Metaphysics, and the Chance of Salvation: An Interpretation of the Thought of William James. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978. Lincoln, Abraham. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Edited by Robert W. Johannsen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1960; repr., 1988. Madison, James. Selected Writings of James Madison. Edited by Ralph Ketcham. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Edited by E. J. Hundert. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Mansfield, Harvey C. Selected Writings: Jefferson. 2nd ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1979. McGraw, Barbara A. Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America. New York: SUNY Press, 2003. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. ———, ed. Pragmatism: A Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Meyer, D. H. The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Mill, John Stuart. Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the

260


Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867. ———. John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of Scientific Methods. Edited by Ernest Nagel. New York: Hafner Press, 1950. Morrison, Jeffry. John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by Justus Buchâ•‚ ler. New York: Dover, 1955. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. Great Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classics, 2008. ———. The Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Pufendorf, Samuel. On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Edited by James Tully. Translated by Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Active Powers of Man. In Works of Thomas Reid. ———. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. In Works of Thomas Reid. ———. Inquiry and Essays. Edited by Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983. ———. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. In Works of Thomas Reid. ———. Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, SelfGovernment, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. The Works of Thomas Reid, D. D., Now Fully Collected, with Selections from His Unpublished Letters. Edited by Sir William Hamilton. Edin-


261

burgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1872; facsimile edition, Elibron Classics, 2005. www.elibron.com. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Roth, Robert J. British Empiricism and American Pragmatism: New Directions and Neglected Arguments. New York: Fordham University Press, 1993. Sandoz, Ellis. A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. ———, ed. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991. ———. Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Santayana, George. The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana. Edited by Douglas L. Wilson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. Schaeffer, John D. Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Schultz, Bart, ed. Essays on Henry Sidgwick. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Scott, Jack, ed. An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press, 1990. Seth, Andrew. Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume. 2nd ed. New York: Burt Franklin, 1885. Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper]. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shain, Barry Alan. The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sheldon, Garrett Ward. The Political Philosophy of James Madison. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ———. The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

262


Sher, Richard B., and Jeffrey R. Smitten. Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Shook, John R., ed. Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982. Smith, H. Shelton. Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in Theology since 1750. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955. Smylie, James H. “Madison and Witherspoon: Theological Roots of American Political Thought.” Princeton University Library Journal 22 (1961): 118–32. Stoner, James R. “Is There a Political Philosophy in the Declaration of Independence?” Intercollegiate Review 40, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 3–11. Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Thornton, John Wingate, ed. The Pulpit of the American Revolution. Charleston, S.C.: BiblioLife, 2008. Thorp, Willard, ed. The Lives of Eighteen from Princeton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeâ•‚ ton University Press, 1946. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Townsend, H. G. Philosophical Ideas in the United States. New York: America Book Company, 1934. Van Tyne, C. H. “Influence of the Clergy, and of Religious and Sectarian Forces, on the American Revolution.” American Historical Review 19 (1913/1914): 44–64. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Edited by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. ———. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Translated by L. M. Palâ•‚ mer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. ———. On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated by Elio Gianturco. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Voegelin, Eric. Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics. Vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Translated by M. J. Hanak, edited by David Walsh. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. ———. Autobiographical Reflections. Edited by Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.


263

———. The New Science of Politics. Modernity without Restraint. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Edited by Manfred Henningsen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. ———. On the Form of the American Mind. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Translated by Ruth Hein; edited by Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. ———. Order and History. Vols. 14–18 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Edited by Maurice P. Hogan, Athanasios Moulakis, Dante Germino, Michael Franz, Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000, 2001. ———. What Is History? And Other Late, Unpublished Writings. Vol. 28 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Edited by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Walsh, John J. Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic: Scholasticism in the Colonial Colleges. New York: Fordham University Press, 1935. Washington, George. George Washington: A Collection. Edited by W. B. Allen. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988. Welchman, Jennifer. Dewey’s Ethical Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Princeton, 1746–1896. Princeton, N.J.: Princeâ•‚ ton University Press, 1946. West, Thomas G. Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Wild, John. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969. Wills, Garry. Explaining America: The Federalist. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1981. Wilson, James. Collected Works of James Wilson. 2 vols. Edited by Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Yarbrough, Jean M. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Index Absolutism, 147 Abstraction: and first principles, 211; James on, 5, 19, 175, 180-82, 191, 196, 206, 212, 248n43; and mathematics, 233n105; McCosh on, 106, 211, 243n10; and natural law, 82; Reid on, 50; and theory of ideas, 50 Absurdity, 44-45 Academia and academic philosophy, 17-20, 57-58, 64, 104 Acutezze (wit), 31-32, 230n39 Adams, John, 75, 78, 207, 220 Addams, Jane, 134, 223 Affections: Aristotle on, 52, 77; Butler on, 239n40; Hutcheson on, 88, 239n39; James on, 173-74, 192, 201; McCosh on, 114, 121-23, 125, 127-28, 130, 244n21; Reid on, 34, 52-53; Shaftesbury on, 29, 33, 88; Thomas Aquinas on, 16; Witherspoon on, 76-77, 86-88, 90-91, 240-41n55, 241n62 Afterlife, 61, 82 Agnosticism, 202 Alienation, 45, 222 Altruism, 195 American common sense, 2-3, 5-9, 21, 5762, 100, 124, 216-23. See also American founding/founders; Common sense; Declaration of Independence; and specific American founders American founding/founders: and common sense, 100-101, 119, 216-22; and conscience, 78-79, 87, 238n27; and correspondence of rights and duties, 85, 86, 218; and Declaration of Independence, 6-8, 23, 65, 66-67, 78, 89, 91, 94, 96, 218-21, 226n8, 235n147; and family, 91-92; influence of Scottish Common Sense on, 58, 64, 100-101; and liberty, 6-8, 23, 66-67, 89, 90, 91, 218,

221-22, 235n147, 241n60; and mercy, 86; and natural law, 56, 57; and religion, 72, 75, 78-79, 84, 100, 101, 219-20, 238n23; and rule of law, 99. See also Revolutionary War; and specific founders American mind, 64, 94, 100, 101, 134, 216-23 American Revolution. See Revolutionary War Anamnesis (Voegelin), 236n168, 251n1 Apology (Plato), 71, 151 Appetites/appetencies. See Passions/appetites/ appetencies Aquinas, Thomas: on affections, 16; on conscience, 238n26, 240n41; on human nature, 234n133; on just war, 236n4; on law, 98; on natural law, 16, 57, 226n8, 234n133, 238n26, 240n44; on revelation, 245n30 —work: Summa Theologica, 26-27, 238n26 Aristocracy, 94-95, 207 Aristotle: on affections, 52, 77; on aim of human community, 56; as common sense philosopher, 24-27, 45, 215, 229n10, 233n100; on community, 81; on dianoia, 45, 46; on education, 207, 216; on ethics, 117, 176; on first principles, 16, 27, 44, 146, 226n8, 233n100, 233n103; on the good, 73, 244n25; on ground of existence, 70; on habits, 207, 216; on happiness, 25-26, 81, 88, 183, 249n6; on homonoia (concord), 26, 27, 52, 54; on human nature, 51-53; influence of, on Reid, 26, 41, 45, 233n100; on intellection, 26; James on, 249n2; on justice, 54, 55; on koine aesthesis (common sensation), 25-27, 102, 104, 246n21; on marriage and family, 91, 92, 241n63, 245n37; on morality, 52-53; on natural right, 26; on natural slaves, 241n66; on nous, 45, 46, 49, 52, 57, 103, 160, 213; on phronesis (practical

265

266 wisdom), 26; political theory of, 87, 91; on prudence, 70; on rational speech, 53; realism of, 133; on uncorrupted form of individual and statesman, 76; on virtue, 25-26, 244n27 —works: De Anima (On the Soul), 25; Nichomachean Ethics, 25, 26, 244n25, 244n27; Parva Naturalia, 25, 229n10; Politics, 91, 241n63 Athenian plague, 129 Augustine, 116, 182, 244n22 Autobiographical Reflections (Voegelin), 246n20 Bacon, Francis, 105, 106, 117 Balance, 10, 80, 95, 128, 129, 169, 203, 215, 216, 221 Baldwin, Alice, 79 Beattie, James, 35-36, 41 “Beginning and the Beyond, The” (Voegelin), 237 Being: James on, 12–13, 137, 212; McCosh on, 111; and nous, 70-71, 212; Plato on, 70, 71; Withespoon on Divine Being, 80, 82 Belief(s): and common sense philosophy generally, 16-17, 215; Hamilton on, 59, 109; James on, 139, 146, 152, 159, 175-76, 184-89, 200, 203-4, 211, 247n33; McCosh on, 109-13, 115, 117, 211, 212; Mill on universal beliefs, 109; Peirce on, 135; Plato on, 151; primitive beliefs, 112; Reid on, 34, 39-42, 51, 60-61; Witherspoon on, 80; Wright on, 145. See also Faith Benevolence, 73, 84, 88, 120, 131, 240n49, 245n39 Bentham, Jeremy, 122, 177, 183 Bergson, Henri, 19, 247n39, 250n15 Berkeley, Bishop George, 6, 10, 42-43, 74, 136, 140, 152, 237n19 Bible. See specific books of Bible Bill of Rights, 94, 221 Body: Hobbes on, 237n18; James on, 170, 172-74, 195; McCosh on, 109-10, 115, 128; and mind-body connection, 75; physiological foundations of psychology, 172-74; Witherspoon on spirit and, 7477, 87, 112. See also Passions/appetites/ appetencies; Sensation and sense perception Bradley, F. H., 147 Brain, 155, 165, 172-73, 199-200. See also Body; Mind; Reason/intelligence

Index Brennan, Bernard P., 196 Brown, Thomas, 60, 134 Bugter, S. E. W., 27 Burke, Edmund, 187 Butler, Bishop Joseph, 238n27, 239n40, 245n32 Calvinism, 87, 116, 134, 241n57 Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 17, 35 Capitalism, 87, 241n57 Carlson, Thomas, 145 Carr, Peter, 78, 218-19, 251n11 Cause/causation: Hume on, 37-39, 107; Kant on, 37, 39, 108, 231n66; Reid on, 36-40, 231n66 Chemical and biological weapons, 242n78 Children, 92, 117, 125 Christianity: and Christ’s greatest commandments, 240n45; current resurgence of, 250n11; and faith, 70-71; and hope, 70-71; and human nature, 220; McCosh on, 115, 116, 119, 121; and mercy, 86; and sin, 70, 73; Toynbee on, 70; and will, 197; Witherspoon on common sense and, 70-72. See also God; Religion and religious experience Church and state, 75, 126, 245n36 Cicero, 27, 29, 56 Civilization/civilized living: and American common sense, 216-23; and Christianity, 70-72; and common sense, 15-16, 62-63, 68, 70-73, 128, 186-88, 203-5, 213, 214, 216-23, 236n168; definition of, 217; James on, 186-88, 203-5; and justice and dignified living, 63; McCosh on, 128; and soul, 166; tasks for cultivation of, 222-23; Voegelin on, 236n168 Civil Rights Act (1964), 221 Civil War literature, 101 Claims: James on, 13, 140, 144, 180-82, 185, 189-92, 196, 198; McCosh on, 126, 12930; Witherspoon on, 66, 69-70, 83-86, 95-96 Classic philosophy, 21, 23-24 Clifford, W. K., 61 Cognition: James on, 155, 211; Kant on a priori cognitions and judgments, 211, 231n66; McCosh on, 18, 104, 110-13, 115, 117, 211, 212, 215. See also Knowledge; Mind Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 180 Columbia University, 21

Index Common Faith, A (Dewey), 11, 189, 227n22 Common good, 33, 52, 54-55, 81, 85-86, 99, 124, 206-7. See also Good Common sense: Aristotle on, 24-27, 102, 229n10; basic elements of, 21-24; as basic rationality, 2, 8, 10-11, 15-17, 19-20, 24, 26-28, 45; and Christianity, 70-72; and civilized society, 15-16, 62-63, 68, 70-73, 128, 168, 186-88, 203-5, 213, 214, 216-23, 236n168; and community, 2, 14, 23, 25, 26, 28-29, 31-32, 52, 53, 132, 141, 173, 174, 186-88, 204, 208, 216, 223; concepts regarding, 14-15, 21-63, 14246; conclusions on, 213-16; cultivated common sense, 1, 2, 8, 14-15, 16, 24, 27, 62, 214, 220-23; epistemological interest in, 25; as foundational level of truth, 53, 62, 84, 91, 98-99, 144, 173, 177, 215; as gift of nature, 68; as good sense/good judgment, 14-15, 22, 31, 67-68, 102-4, 141, 142, 214, 215; grounding of, in concrete knowledge, 4; Hamilton on, 58-59; as human faculty or capacity, 1-2, 14-15, 67; Hume on, 33-34; Hutcheson on, 32-33; and ideology, 7, 128, 249n8; as interpolation, 154-56, 158, 162, 173, 208, 214, 215, 246n21; as intuition of selfevident facts or truths or first principles, 6-7, 15, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 79, 146, 215, 226n8, 233n100, 238n27; James on, 13435, 141-63, 202-8, 215; and judging things on the whole, 9, 30, 52, 81, 95, 100, 184; Kant on, 16, 25, 27-28, 34-43; language of, 173-74, 223; McCosh on, 102, 215; meanings of, 2, 14-15, 21-25, 102-4, 14146, 214-16; as middle way, 5, 48, 74, 203, 209-10; as mode of consciousness, 14-15, 22, 214, 215; and moral perception, 3234, 48-53, 72-79, 117, 145, 173, 175-91, 194, 196, 211-12, 231n66; as nous, 45, 49, 52, 57, 62, 70-72, 103, 160, 212, 213, 236n168; philosophical tradition of, 2428; and politics, 24, 68; as practical sense, 5, 12, 18, 26, 45, 64, 102-4, 118-19, 13438, 142-52, 215, 217-18; and psychology, 151-63; and radical empiricism, 4, 14651; as regulative, 144-45; and saintliness, 192-93; and sense perception, 40-44, 49, 103, 104, 111-12, 151-52, 155, 162-63, 166, 173-74, 208, 233n100, 248n44; Shaftesbury on, 28-33; and Stoic koine ennoiai, 24-25, 27-28; strengthening

267 of, by exercise and education, 68; as unequal among humans, 67-68; Vico on, 25, 28-29, 31-32, 62; Voegelin on, 21-22, 24; as what is commonly sensed, 23, 141, 158-59, 176, 215; Witherspoon on “plain common sense,” 67-68. See also American common sense; Common sense philosophy; Gemeinsinn (common sense); Nous; Sensus communis (common sense) Common sense attitude, 22-23, 41, 233n100 Common sense philosophy: in America, 57-62; and Aristotle, 24-27, 45, 229n10, 233n100; context of, 2; definition of, 24; grounding of, in concrete knowledge, 4; Hamilton on, 58-59; mode of philosophizing in, 1-2; and Plato, 25, 233n100; roots of, 23-24; Voegelin on, 21-22. See also Common sense; James, William; McCosh, James; Reid, Thomas; Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism; Witherspoon, John Common sense tradition, 21-63 Common sensibles, 158-59, 176 Communists, 129 Communitarianism, 58, 86, 91 Community: Aristotle on, 81; and common sense, 2, 14-15, 23, 25, 26, 28-29, 3132, 52, 53, 132, 141, 173, 174, 186-88, 204, 208, 216, 223; and common sense rhetoric, 223; duties of communities, 125; James on, 204-5; Vico on, 28 Concepts/conception: of common sense, 14-15, 21-63, 142-46; and concreteness, 247-48n40; empirical concepts, 46; and experience, 247-48n40; James on, 156-58, 214; percepts/perception distinguished from, 143, 152, 155-56, 214, 246n18; relation between moral concepts and moral percepts, 196-97 Concreteness: and common sense philosophy generally, 4, 62-63; and concepts, 24748n40; James on, 4, 12, 135-44, 148-53, 156, 161-64, 167, 178, 180-82, 186, 190-91, 209, 213, 246n17, 246n26; McCosh on, 107, 117, 213; and Pragmatism, 9-10; and Scottish Common Sense, 9-10, 209-11 Confucius, 188-89, 222 Conscience: and American founders, 64, 7879, 218, 219, 239n34; Butler on, 239n40; corruption of, 116, 126-32; Hume on, 113; James on, 134, 219, 248n41; Jefferson

268 on, 218-19; McCosh on, 104, 113-16, 118-21, 123, 126-32, 219, 245n31; Mill on, 113; and natural law, 66; perverted conscience, 127; psychological and social effects of bad conscience, 127; Reid on, 48-49; revolt against, 129; Adam Smith on, 250n16; Thomas Aquinas on, 238n26, 240n41; troubled conscience, 127; unenlightened conscience, 127; unfaithful conscience, 127; Witherspoon on, 67, 69, 76-78, 80-82, 87-88, 90, 96, 98-100, 115, 118, 213, 219, 240n41, 241n61. See also headings beginning with Moral Consciousness: balanced consciousness, 216; Hamilton on, 59; human nature and awakened consciousness, 63; James on, 103, 104, 150-51, 153-55, 170; McCosh on, 103, 106-9; principles of, 106; and ratiocination, 106-7; self-consciousness as instrument of observation, 105; as sensorium of reality, 103; stream of consciousness, 105, 137, 154, 157, 16566, 171 Consent, 15, 66, 89, 93-94, 99, 110-11, 201-2, 219-20 Consequences: James on, 5, 136, 138, 149, 161, 177, 192, 201, 246n15, 247n27, 247n33; McCosh on, 5, 113, 120-24, 126; Scottish Common Sense on, 59; Witherspoon on, 80, 82 Conservatism, 187, 188, 203, 207 Constitutions/forms of government, 98. See also U.S. Constitution Continental Congress, 84 Contingency, 69 Contingent first principles, 46-48, 51 Contract: definition of, 98-99; Hobbes on, 53; and justice, 55; Locke on, 53, 89, 94; Reid on, 53; social contract, 93, 94; Witherspoon on, 86, 93, 98-99 Conventional morality, 183-84, 187-88 Conviction: and common sense philosophy generally, 215, 216; Hume on, 232n94; James of, 141, 159, 175-76, 192; McCosh on, 106, 109-10, 117, 122, 123, 243n7; Reid on, 232-33n94 Corruption: Christian view of generally, 220; McCosh on, 116, 126-32; Witherspoon on, 75-77, 88, 91, 238n25, 241n60. See also Sin; Vice Cotkin, George, 208 Cousin, Victor, 108

Index Creator/Maker, 74, 78, 80, 83. See also God Critique of Pure Reason, The (Kant), 41, 232n79 Crito (Plato), 188 Cultivated common sense, 1, 2, 8, 14-16, 16, 24, 27, 62, 214, 220-23 Culture, 44, 121, 188, 207, 217 Cuneo, Terence, 36, 40 Darwinism, 9, 57, 115, 145, 227n18 De Anima (On the Soul; Aristotle), 25 Death of God, 6, 11 Declaration of Independence, 6-8, 23, 65, 66-67, 78, 89, 91, 94, 96, 218-21, 226n8, 235n147 Deduction, 44, 45, 50, 105, 158 De iure belli ac pacis (The Rights of War and Peace; Grotius), 58, 240n53, 242n75 Deliberation, 50-51, 56, 77, 124, 198, 200 Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving after Peace (Witherspoon), 84, 241n60 Demands, 166-67, 172, 178-81, 183-87, 19091, 221 Democracy, 14, 94, 206-7, 220, 223 Denkmittel, 215, 251n2 De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the study methods of our time; Shaftesbury), 28, 32 Dependence on God, 80, 83, 119, 125. See also God Descartes, René, 41, 42, 209, 232n80, 232n87 Desires, 120, 181-83, 195, 196 Determinism, 168, 200-202 Dewey, John: compared with James, 10-14; on existence, 11-12; Hegel’s influence on, 6; on metaphysical foundations of human ethics, 13; Pragmatism of, 8, 10-11, 15, 227n16; on religion, 10-14, 189, 228n27; on self, 227n19; on truth, 148; and Voegelin, 21, 246n20 —works: A Common Faith, 11, 189, 227n22; Human Nature and Conduct, 21 D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, 22, 250n23 Dianoia, 45, 46-47 “Dilemma of Determinism, The” (James), 202 Ding an sich (thing in itself), 43, 107, 232n91 Divorce, 92, 125-26, 241n64 “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (James), 151, 167 Dogmatism, 74, 105 Dominion of Providence over the Passions of

Index Men, The (Witherspoon), 68-70, 84, 95, 96, 236n4 Doubt, 6, 10, 39-44, 118, 159, 203, 215. See also Skepticism Douglas, Stephen, 221 Douglass, Frederick, 222 Dred Scott decision, 221 Dualism, 90, 149-51, 165 Duty/duties: definition of, 125; to God, 78, 79, 83-84, 125, 220, 240n45; and interest, 81-82; Locke on, 66; to man, 79, 84-86, 125-26, 220, 240n45; McCosh on, 117, 124-26, 185, 212; particular duties, 84-86; and public and private interests, 81-82; and rights, 75, 84-86, 185, 218; to self, 82, 86-87, 126; Witherspoon on, 73-74, 75, 80-87, 185, 212, 240n45. See also Obligation Education: Aristotle on, 207, 216; and biographical history, 250n31; classical education in colleges and universities, 222-23; James on, 198-99, 206-7, 213; Princeton’s influence on American higher education, 235n159, 236n1; Socrates on, 198; strengthening of common sense by, 68; and values, 213; Witherspoon on, 220; Witherspoon’s influence on American higher education, 235n159, 236n1 Eidoi, 42 Elijah, 248-49n47 Emotions, 114, 120, 131, 173, 249n49. See also Passions/appetites/appetencies Empirical concepts, 46 Empirical method/analysis, 62 Empiricism: British empiricism, 24; pragmatic radical empiricism of James, 4, 18, 60, 133-74, 247n28; in Scottish philosophy, 59; traditional empiricism, 152-53 Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume), 34, 235n146 Epicureans, 183 Epistemology, 34, 74, 237n17 Equality, 23, 29, 91, 92, 218, 220-21 “Essay on Necessary Connection” (Hume), 36 Essays in Philosophy (Fraser), 60 Essays in Philosophy (James), 205, 250n29 Essays in Radical Empiricism (James), 4, 13637, 140, 146-51 Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Reid), 34, 40-41, 54-55

269 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Reid), 34, 37-38, 40-41, 45, 54-55, 226n9, 233n95 Essentialism, 9-10 Eternal moral order, 13, 14, 175, 190, 210 Ethics: Aristotle on, 117, 176; definition of, 117, 119; Dewey on, 13; Hume on, 122; James on, 13-14, 176-91, 193-202; McCosh on, 116-26; Plato on, 176; Reid on, 231n74; Schleiermacher on, 117; Utilitarian ethics, 122; Witherspoon on, 73, 79-83, 87, 97, 119. See also headings beginning with Moral Evil. See Sin; Vice Evolution. See Darwinism Examination of J. S. Mill’s Philosophy, An (McCosh), 59, 106-10, 122-24, 211 Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, An (Mill), 59, 108-9 Example, 13, 191-93, 205, 206 Existence, 11-13, 70, 107-8, 111-13, 137, 172 Existential basis for natural law, 62, 236n169 Experience: and common sense attitude, 22-23; and concepts, 247-48n40; funded experience, 141, 186, 208; Hume on, 38; James on, 60, 136-40, 196, 228n27; and judgment, 237n10; and justice, 196; long run of, 139, 186, 192, 197, 203; and mindbody connection, 75; and natural law, 82; personal experience, 138, 175, 184, 222; primary experience, 22; pure experience, 137-38, 140-41, 149-50, 211, 213-15, 246n18, 247n36, 247-48n40; retrospective experience, 137-38; as test or touchstone of truth, 54, 138-39; as whole, 9, 13, 30, 140; Witherspoon on, 81, 82, 251n11 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 81, 245n40 Faith, 70-72, 98, 108, 189-90, 202-3, 210, 237n14, 245n31. See also Belief(s) Family/household, 91-92, 125-26, 128, 129, 240-41n55, 241n64 Federalist, 91, 95, 220, 242n71 Feelings. See Emotions Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 108 First principles: application of, 56-57; Aristotle on, 15, 27, 44, 146, 226n8, 233n100, 233n103; and common sense, 79, 238n27; contingent first principles, 46-48, 51; and ethics, 117; and induction, 233n105; James’s neglect of, 145-46; mind’s capacity to grasp, 234n125; of

270 morals, 50, 52, 79; and nous, 45-46, 49, 52; and Pragmatism, 60; and reasoning, 44, 79; Reid on, 39, 44-50, 52, 57, 79, 233n104; Scottish realists on generally, 209, 210; truth of, 211. See also Intuition; Natural law Foundationalism, 9-10, 42 Foundational level of truth, 53, 62, 91, 98-99, 144-45, 173, 177, 215 Foundations: of civilization, 63; common sense as foundational level of truth, 53, 62, 84, 91, 98-99, 144-45, 173, 177, 215; Dewey on metaphysical foundations of human ethics, 13; James on metaphysical foundations of human ethics, 13-14; physiological foundations of psychology, 172-74; Reid on ethical-political foundations, 45-57 Founding of America. See American founding/founders; Declaration of Independence; Revolutionary War; and specific founders, such as Jefferson, Thomas Fourier, Charles, 129 France, 6, 7, 22, 129 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 60 Free will, 168-70, 200, 205, 250n24. See also Will French Revolution, 6, 7, 129, 221 Gemeinsinn (common sense), 25, 27-28 George III, King, 7, 65, 96, 218, 243n5 Germany, 5, 22 Gibbon, Edward, 129 Givens, 41, 44, 145, 216 Gnosticism, 201-2, 250n25 God: Coleridge on, 180; as Creator/Maker, 74, 78, 80, 83; dependence on, 80, 83, 119, 125; desires of, 182-83, 191, 196; duty and obligation to, 78, 79, 83-84, 125, 180-81, 213, 220, 240n45; and Elijah, 248-49n47; as giver of rights, 23; glory of, 72; James on, 179-83, 188-89, 191, 196, 202; Jefferson on, 66-67; as judge, 66, 194, 219; as lawgiver, 66, 77, 120, 212; love of, 83-84; McCosh on, 114, 119, 120; as Providence, 66, 69, 70, 83, 238n26; Reid on, as First Cause, 36, 71; relations between humans and, 234n132; as symbol whose meaning can never adequately be grasped, 71; Witherspoon on, 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80-84, 237n16,

Index 239n38; worship of, 72, 84, 125; wrath of, 66-67, 76. See also Christianity; Religion and religious experience Good: Aristotle and Plato on, 70-73, 244n25; and experience of goodness, 211-12; James on, 178, 183-87, 191, 200, 202; McCosh on, 123, 124, 131; Mill on, 122, 124; prioritizing goods, 183-87; Witherspoon on, 76-77, 81-84, 90. See also Common good; Virtue Government, 75, 84, 94-95, 126, 128, 129, 219-20, 242n68. See also Rulers “Great Men and Their Environment” (James), 205 Grotius, Hugo, 56, 58, 67, 86, 235n151, 240n53, 242n73, 242n75 Grounded mode of consciousness, 22 Ground of existence, 70 Guilt, 53, 76, 116, 120, 126-27 Haakonssen, Knud, 32-33, 58, 239n39, 240n45 Habits: and American Mind, 216-17; Aristotle on, 207, 216; and civilization generally, 18; and common sense generally, 223; Hume on, 34; James on, 145, 170, 172-73, 177, 199-200, 207-8, 213; McCosh on, 122, 126, 130-31; Reid on, 47; Thomas Aquinas on, 238n26; Tocqueville on “habits of the heart,” 217; Washington on, 238n23; Witherspoon on, 97-98 Hamilton, Alexander, 78, 85, 94, 95, 238n29 Hamilton, Sir William, 21, 39, 58-60, 108-9, 123, 134, 233n100, 233n103, 243n12 Happiness: Aristotle on, 25-26, 81, 88, 183, 249n6; Epicureans on, 183; as human end, 239n38; James on, 183, 185, 192-93; McCosh on, 122, 131; pursuit of, 91, 235n147; and Utilitarian ethics, 122-24; Witherspoon on, 79-82, 85, 88, 89 Hare, Peter H., 152 Harvard University, 58 Hebrews, Letter to, 70, 71 Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 10, 108, 147, 152, 174 Heraclitus, 10 Hobbes, Thomas: on contract, 53; on human nature, 74, 76; on justice, 54-55; on natural law, 15-16; Reid on, 53-55; on rights, 219; Shaftesbury on, 30; on state of nature, 88 —work: Leviathan, 237n18 Hoeveler, J. David, Jr., 5, 101-2

Index Homonoia (concord), 26, 27, 52, 54 Honor, 77-78, 130 Hope, 70-71, 131 Horace, 29 Household. See Family/household Humanitas, 27 Human nature: American view of, 220; Aristotle on, 51-53; communist theories of, 129; corruption of, 75-77, 88, 91, 116, 126-32, 220, 238n25; Hobbes on, 74, 76; and human inclinations, 115, 159, 244n21; and human powers/ capacities, 22-23, 25-27, 47, 50-53, 67, 89, 159-60, 167-68, 171-72, 197, 199, 215, 233n107, 245n3; James on, 151-72, 193-95, 223; law of, 52, 78, 233n107; McCosh on, 112, 115-16, 126-32; moral philosophy and knowledge of, 73; nobility and degradation of, 63; Reid on, 51-52; and self-evident probability, 50-51; and selfishness, 76, 128, 195; and sense of right and wrong, 159-60, 200, 220; Thomas Aquinas on, 234n133; Witherspoon on, 72, 74-82, 88, 90, 116, 238n25. See also Conscience; Individuals; Psychology; Self Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey), 21, 24n20 Hume, David: and Cartesian doubt, 41; on causation, 37-39, 107; on conscience, 113; on contradictions, 235n146; on ethics, 122; on experience, 38; and implications of common sense rationality, 16; on impressions, 59; on instinct, 34, 57; James on, 140; on justice, 54-56; Kant on, 35; on knowledge, 38, 43, 232n94; on mind, 107; moral theory of, 33-34, 49, 55; on power, 38; on psychological phenomena, 152; on reason, 222; on Reid, 8; Reid on, 34, 36, 234n111; on sensation, 107, 167, 243n8; Shaftesbury’s influence on, 32; skepticism of, 6, 8, 34, 39, 59, 74; and theory of ideas, 42; on utility, 241n61; and Witherspoon, 17-18; zealotry opposed by, 33 —works: Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 235n146; “Essay on Necessary Connection,” 36 Humility, 40-41, 130 Humor. See Wit Hutcheson, Francis: on affections, 239n39; on benevolence, 73, 84, 120, 240n49; on

271 common sense, 8, 18; influences on, 32, 242n73; on interest, 73; on international law, 242n73; on love, 33, 73; on moral approbation, 49-51, 80; on moral excellence, 33, 79-80, 239n39; on moral sense and moral qualities, 32-34, 72-73, 77, 239n39; on rights, 85, 86, 240n53; and Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism, 8, 18; on society, 88; on sympathy, 245n32; and Witherspoon, 18, 58, 65, 72-73, 77, 79-88, 102, 120, 235n158, 237n17, 239n39, 240n53, 241n64, 242n73; zealotry opposed by, 33 —works: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 235n158; A System of Moral Philosophy, 235n158 Idealism: of Berkeley, 6, 10, 74, 136; German idealism, 5 Ideals, 7, 13, 61, 160, 176-91, 197-99, 205, 208, 241n8 Ideas: Hume on, 42; James on, 136, 246n17; Kant on, 42, 43; Locke on, 42-43, 108; Peirce on, 135-36; Plato on, 42, 232n87; Reid on, 42, 43, 50; theory of, 42-43, 50, 232n87 Ideology, 7, 16, 128, 187, 227n12, 249n8 Illusion, 43, 232n93 “Importance of Individuals, The” (James), 206 Individualism, 91, 241n57. See also Individuals Individuals: Aristotle on uncorrupted form of, 76; James on, 203-8; Locke on, 91; McCosh on, 112-13, 117, 125, 127, 132; Witherspoon on, 93-96, 99. See also Human nature; Self Induction, 46-47, 105-7, 233n105 Inductive method, 105-6, 209 “Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit” (Shaftesbury), 33 Inquiry into the Human Mind, An (Reid), 34, 41, 54-55, 103, 232n80, 232n92, 237n17 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An (Hutcheson), 235n158 Instinct, 34, 57 Intelligence. See Reason/intelligence Interest: and duty, 81-82; Hutcheson on, 73; private interest, 81-82; public interest, 81-82; self-interest, 30, 73; Witherspoon on, 73, 81-82, 99-100, 185

272 International relations, 95-96, 242n73. See also Just war Interpolation, 154-56, 158, 162, 173, 208, 214, 215, 246n21 Introspection, 106, 108-9 Intuition: confidence in, undermined, 234n125; definition of, 106, 214; and human nature, 63; and justice, 56; McCosh’s scientific intuitionism, 101-32, 211, 224; modern reduction of intuition to feeling, 50; moral intuitions, 113-15; and natural right, 56-57; and noetic grasp of higher being, 71; and Pragmatism, 60; and reason, 71; Reid on, 44, 49, 51-52, 54, 56-57, 60; Scottish realists on generally, 59, 209, 210; tests of, 110-11 Intuitionists, 134, 145, 160, 177 Intuitions of the Mind, The (McCosh), 102, 106-13 Jacobi, Friedrich, 50 James, William: on abstraction, 5, 19, 175, 180-82, 191, 196, 206, 212, 248n43; on affections, 173-74, 192, 201; on beliefs, 139, 146, 152, 159, 175-76, 184-89, 200, 203-4, 211, 247n33; on body, 170, 172-74; on civilization, 186-88, 203-5; on claims, 13, 140, 144, 180-82, 185, 189-92, 196, 198; on common sense, 134-35, 141-63, 202-8, 215, 227n17; on common sensibles, 158-59, 176; compared with Dewey, 10-14; compared with Witherspoon and McCosh, 3-8, 14, 62, 179, 185, 209-13, 223, 249n5; on concepts/conception, 156-58, 214; on concreteness, 4, 12, 135-44, 148-50, 148-53, 156, 161-64, 167, 178, 180-82, 186, 190-91, 209, 213, 246n17, 246n26; on consciousness, 103, 104, 150-51, 153-55, 170; on consequences/effects, 5, 136, 138, 149, 161, 177, 192, 201, 246n15, 247n27, 247n33; and Darwinism, 145; on deliberation, 198, 200; on demands, 166-67, 172, 178-81, 183-87, 190-91; on democracy, 206-7; on desires, 181-83, 195, 196; on education, 198-99, 206-7, 213; on ethics, 13-14, 176-91, 193-202; on existence, 11-13; on experience, 60, 136-40, 228n27; on fitnesses between things, 159-60, 177, 211, 231n66; on free will, 168-70, 200, 205; on gnosticism, 201-2; on God, 179-83, 188-89, 191, 196,

Index 202; on habits, 145, 170, 172-73, 177, 199-200, 207-8, 213; on happiness, 183, 185, 192-93; on human nature, 15172, 193-95, 223; on ideals, 19-99, 160, 176-91, 205, 208; on individuals, 203-8; influences on, 60; on interpolation, 15456, 158, 162, 173, 208, 214, 215, 246n21; on justice, 195-96; on knowledge, 16, 155, 156, 158, 160, 164, 177, 213-15, 228n30, 247n38; on limits, 134, 139, 144, 153, 164, 169, 172, 183, 186-87, 189-90, 193-94, 201, 203; on metaphysics, 13, 144, 159, 166, 177, 178, 182, 184-86, 212, 249n5; methodical postulate of, 60; method of, 19; on model/example, 13, 191-93, 205, 206; moral and social theory of, 61-62, 160, 175-206, 211-13, 248n41; on moral imperatives, 185-89, 228n30; on moral order, 13, 14, 61-62, 175, 190, 210; on moral perception and moral percepts, 145, 173, 175-91, 194, 196-97, 211-12, 231n66; on moral relations, 175-79, 182, 185-86, 190, 212-13; on moral sense, 159-60, 177, 182, 201, 213; on mysticism, 190, 246n15, 246-47n27; and natural law, 134, 175, 196; on objectivity, 135, 137, 139, 142, 147-49, 153-54, 175, 179, 184-85, 189, 196, 200-202, 210, 213, 228n30, 247n36; on obligation, 133-34, 178-83, 185, 195-96, 249n3; on perception, 151-52, 154, 155, 184, 214; on percepts, 143, 152, 155-56, 158, 162-63, 166, 172, 175-76, 196, 246n18, 248n44; on philosophy, 105, 136, 142; on physiological foundations of psychology, 172-74; pragmatic radical empiricism of, 4, 18-19, 60, 133-74, 247n28; Pragmatism of, 3-4, 7, 8, 18-19, 133-74, 209-12, 227nn16-17; psychology of, 151-74, 19395, 223; as public philosopher, 208; on pure experience, 137-38, 140-41, 149-50, 211, 213-15, 246n18, 247n36, 247-48n40; radical empiricism of, 4, 18-19, 60, 133-74, 247n28; on reality, 105, 136-42, 212, 247n31; on reason and reasoning, 160-63, 248n43; on relations, 148-49; on religion, 10-14, 72, 171, 190, 202-3, 246n15, 246-47n27, 249n47, 251n13; on saintliness, 13, 191-93, 213; and Scottish Common Sense, 60, 133-34, 145; on self, 112, 163-72, 193-94, 204, 248n45; on sensation and sense perception, 104, 139,

Index 151, 155, 158-59, 177, 184, 249n49; on skepticism, 60-61, 179, 203; on society, 203-8; on soul, 61, 145, 149-50, 163, 166, 167, 247n33; on still small voice, 170-71, 197, 248-49n47; on stream of consciousness, 105, 137, 154, 157, 165-66, 171; on strenuous mood, 171, 189, 190, 192; study of recommended, 223; on subconscious, 171; on subjectivity, 137, 148, 156, 163, 165, 179, 228n30, 247n36; on truth, 61, 135-42, 162, 178, 182, 203-4; on values, 157-58, 160, 184, 189, 196, 199, 206, 213; on will, 168-70, 197-98, 200202, 205; writing style of, 174, 249n1 —works: “The Dilemma of Determinism,” 202; “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 151, 167; Essays in Philosophy, 205, 250n29; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 4, 136-37, 140, 146-51; “Great Men and Their Environment,” 205; “The Importance of Individuals,” 206; The Meaning of Truth, 4, 135, 140-41, 144, 148; “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 145, 176-91, 197, 211; “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 199; A Pluralistic Universe, 171, 212; Pragmatism, 109, 133, 137-47, 150, 151, 154, 203-4; “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” 135; The Principles of Psychology, 3, 13, 134, 137, 149, 151, 153-56, 158-61, 163-66, 170-73, 180, 193-202, 207-8, 211, 246n23, 248n45; Psychology: Briefer Course, 157, 159, 172, 247n36; “Reflex Action and Theism,” 202-3; “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” 206-7; Some Problems of Philosophy, 157-58, 205; Talks for Teachers, 199, 250n31; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 60, 134, 151, 154, 168, 171, 190-93, 203, 208, 227n19, 246n15; “The Will to Believe,” 61; The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 171, 176-91, 200-202, 208; “A World of Pure Experience,” 140, 149 Jefferson, Thomas: on common sense, 218-19, 226n10; on conscience, 218-19; and Declaration of Independence, 8, 91, 94, 218-19; on God, 66-67; on liberty, 66-67; on moral sense, 78, 251n11; on natural aristoi, 207; on rights, 78, 85, 219, 226n11; on slavery, 219; study of recommended, 222 Jesus Christ, 188-89

273 Judgment: common sense as good sense/good judgment, 14, 22, 31, 67-68, 102-4, 141, 142, 214; common sense judgments, 247n37; and experience, 237n10; primitive judgments, 112-13; Reid on moral principles and moral judgment, 48-53, 57, 73; Witherspoon on, 77 Jurisprudence: natural jurisprudence, 18, 5457; Witherspoon on, 97-99 Justice: Aristotle on, 54; and contracts, 55; Hobbes on, 54-55; Hume on, 54-56; and intuition, 56; James on, 195-96; McCosh on, 120, 122; Reid on, 54-57; and utility, 55, 66; Witherspoon on, 86, 96-97. See also Natural law; Obligation Just war, 66-70, 88, 96-97, 126, 221, 236n4, 242nn76-79 Juvenal, 29 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 18, 219 Kant, Immanuel: on appearances, 111; on a priori cognitions and judgments, 211, 231n66; and Cartesian doubt, 41; on causation, 37, 39, 108, 231n66; compared with Reid, 34-45; on Gemeinsinn (common sense), 25, 27-28; Hamilton on, 59; and implications of common sense rationality, 16; on knowledge, 111; language of, 174; McCosh on, 107; on mind, 107-8; on reasoning about phenomena, 46; on Reid, 35-36, 40-41, 44, 51, 103, 174; on sensations and sense perception, 43, 167; significance of, 34; and theory of ideas, 42, 43; on thing in itself, 43, 107, 232n91; and Transcendental Ego, 166-67 —works: The Critique of Pure Reason, 41, 232n79; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 35-36, 40 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 221, 223 Kings, First Book of, 248-49n47 Kinship with nature, 44-45, 71 Knowledge: a posteriori knowledge, 37, 38, 117, 211; a priori knowledge, 35, 37-38, 105, 108, 117, 211, 231n66; by acquaintance, 155, 156, 158, 160, 164, 177, 213-15, 247n38; desire for, 130; Hume on, 38, 43, 232n94; James on, 16, 155, 156, 158, 160, 164, 177, 213-15, 228n30, 247n38; Kant on, 111; and knowing, 148, 150, 154-55, 165, 209-10; knowledge-about, 247n38; Locke on, 43;

274 McCosh on, 111-12. See also Cognition; Intuition; Mind Koine aesthesis (common sensation), 25-28, 102, 104, 246n21 Koine ennoiai, 24-25, 27-28 Koinonoemosune (commonly perceived or thought, like-mindedness), 28 Language: Aristotle on speech, 53; common sense language, 173-74, 223; and intelligence, 50; James on, 173-74; of Kant, 174. See also Speech Law: civil law, 55, 56, 75, 87, 97-99; and conscience, 99-100; and contracts, 98-99; God as lawgiver, 66, 77, 120, 212; higher law, 77, 78, 80, 95, 212, 213, 222, 241n59; of human nature, 52, 78, 233n107; obedience to, 98, 128; and public utilities, 99; Witherspoon on, 75, 87, 97-98. See also Natural law Lectures on Eloquence (Witherspoon), 223, 251n15 Lectures on Law (Wilson), 78 Lectures on Moral Philosophy (Witherspoon): annotated edition of, 5; on common sense moral philosophy, 72-79; on conscience, 99-100; distribution of, in unpublished form, 58; on ethics, 79-82; on human duties, 83-87; Hutcheson’s influence on, 65; on jurisprudence, 97-99; on natural rights, 58, 85, 88-89, 91; on political theory, 87-97; publication of, 4; significance of, 17, 235n159 Lee, Henry, 7 Lewis, C. S., 27, 57 Liberalism, 100 Liberty: and American common sense, 22122; in Declaration of Independence, 6-8, 23, 91, 218, 235n147; Jefferson on, 66-67; licentiousness versus, 89, 241n60; rights of, 6-7, 23, 55, 85-86, 88, 91, 235n147; in U.S. Constitution, 89, 221; Witherspoon on, 69, 85-86, 88-91 License, 89 Limits: common sense philosophy on generally, 215, 221-23; James on, 134, 139, 144, 153, 164, 169, 172, 183, 186-87, 18990, 193-94, 201, 203; McCosh on, 111, 116, 121, 124, 126, 128-29; Witherspoon on, 85, 87, 89, 92-93, 98-100 Lincoln, Abraham, 85, 221, 222-23, 250n32 Locke, John: and American founders, 64; on

Index contract, 53, 89, 94; on family, 241n63; on ideas, 42-43, 108; James on, 16; on knowledge, 43; on natural law and natural rights, 15, 56, 58, 66, 100, 219, 226n8; on psychological phenomena, 152; on rights, 86, 88, 240n53; sensationalist epistemology of, 74; on sense perception, 43; on society, 30, 88, 89; on state of nature, 66, 88; on war, 66 —works: Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 243n9; Two Treatises of Government, 86 Logic: and Aristotle, 233n100; and Bacon, 105; and common sense philosophy, 23, 30, 62; James on, 141, 144, 161-62, 185, 189-90, 246nn17-18; and Kant, 41; McCosh on, 107-8; and partial facts, 16; and Peirce, 136; and principle of noncontradiction, 39; Reid on, 42-44; and Schiller, 228n30 Logic and reality, 57, 107, 141, 161 Love: and Christ’s greatest commandments, 240n45; duty to love man, 84, 87, 121, 125, 213, 240n45; duty to love self, 125, 126, 131; humans’ duty to love God, 8384; Hutcheson on, 33, 73; James on, 173, 192, 213; McCosh on, 116, 120, 121, 122, 125, 132, 245n31; Plato on, 26; self-love, 131, 195, 245n39; Witherspoon on, 73, 82, 83-84, 213 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 76, 97 Madison, James, 78-79, 91, 95, 100, 220, 242n71 Mandeville, Bernard, 81, 245n40 Man in His Natural State (Witherspoon), 75-76 Marcus Aurelius, 29 Marriage, 91-92, 125-26, 241n64 Master-servant relationship, 91, 93, 117, 125 Materialism, 6, 57, 87, 241n57 Matthew, Gospel of, 240n45 McCosh, James: on abstraction, 243n10; on affections, 114, 121-22, 125, 127-28, 130, 244n21; on appetites/appetencies and emotions, 115, 127, 130; on belief(s), 109-13, 115, 117, 211, 212; on Bible, 121, 245n30; on Christianity, 115, 116, 119, 121; on cognition, 18, 104, 110-13, 115, 117, 211, 212, 215; on common sense, 102, 215; compared with Witherspoon and James, 3-8, 14, 62, 113, 118, 119-20,

Index 126, 179, 185, 209-13, 223, 244n26, 249n5; on concreteness, 107, 117, 213; on conscience, 104, 113-16, 118-21, 123, 126-32, 219, 245n31; on consciousness, 106-9; on consequences, 5, 113, 120-24, 126; on conviction, 106, 109-10, 117, 122, 123, 243n7; and Darwinism, 57, 115, 227n18; on duty, 117, 124-26, 185, 212; epistemology of, 105-13; on ethics, 11626; on God, 114, 119, 120; Hamilton’s influence on, 58-59; on happiness, 122, 131; on human nature, 112, 115-16, 126-32; on Hutcheson, 32; influence of, on James, 134; on intuition, 101-32, 211, 224; James on, 245n2; on judgment, 102, 110-18, 122; on justice, 120, 122; on Kant, 107-8; on love, 116, 120, 121, 122, 125, 132, 245n31; on Mill, 59, 108-10, 113, 122-24; on mind, 104, 106-14; on moral intuitions, 113-15, 212; on natural law, 114-15; on natural order, 101, 119, 121, 128-29, 132; and nous, 103; philosophical relevance of, 18; Princeton presidency of, 4, 58, 101, 132; realism of, 133; on Reid, 102, 103, 105, 243n7; Reid’s influence on, 58; on religion, 114-15, 119-20, 123, 125-26, 129-30, 132; scholarship on, 5; scientific intuitionism of, 101-32, 211, 214; and Scottish Common Sense/ Scottish realism, 4-5, 7-8, 18, 101-6; on Scottish philosophy, 105-6, 122; on sin/ corruption, 116, 123-24, 126-32; on tests of intuitions, 110-11; on utilitarianism, 122-24; on virtue, 120-24, 244n26, 244n27 —works: An Examination of J. S. Mill’s Philosophy, 106-10, 122-24, 211; The Intuitions of the Mind, 102, 106-13; Method of the Divine Government, 107, 113-22, 127-32; Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics, 124-26; Realistic Philosophy, 4; The Scottish Philosophy, 102-3, 105-6, 122 Meaning, 71-72, 136, 156-58, 177-78, 205, 212, 228n34 Meaning of Truth, The (James), 4, 135, 14041, 144, 148 Meno (Plato), 44, 71 Mercy, 69, 86, 89, 241n56 Metaphysics: and common sense philosophy generally, 15, 16; and Dewey, 13, 15; and Hamilton, 58-59; and Hume, 35-37, 107;

275 and James, 13, 144, 159, 166, 177, 178, 182, 184-86, 212, 249n5; Kant on, 35-36; and McCosh, 18, 106, 249n5; and Peirce, 13; and Reid, 18, 37; and Witherspoon, 237n17, 249n5 Method of the Divine Government (McCosh), 107, 113-22, 127-32 Middle way of common sense philosophy, 5, 48, 74, 203, 209-10 Mill, J., 140, 177 Mill, John Stuart: on conscience, 113; critique of realism by, 59; on experience, 140; on Hamilton, 59, 108-9; on happiness, 183; James on, 246n14; McCosh on, 59, 108-10, 113, 122-24; on moral sense, 123; psychological approach of, 59, 109, 246n14; on psychological phenomena, 152, 177; on sensation and sense perception, 109-10; on universal beliefs, 109; on virtue, 122-24 Miller, Thomas, 5 Mind: James on, 145, 149, 153-54, 171, 185; McCosh on, 104, 106-14, 120; Reid on, 104; subconscious of, 171; Witherspoon on body and, 74-77, 87, 112. See also American mind; Brain; Cognition; Consciousness; Knowledge; Psychology; Reasoning; Reason/intelligence Modern philosophy, 5, 30, 35, 37, 44, 49, 50, 57 Modern political science, 31 Monism, 147, 152, 202 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 94, 95 Moore, George Edward, 24 Moral approbation, 49-51, 80 Moral dilemma, 190-91, 197, 202 Moral energy, 132, 171, 182-83, 189 Moral excellence, 33, 49, 79-80, 115, 185, 212, 239n39 Moral imperatives, 99, 185-89, 228n30 Moral order, eternal, 13, 14, 175, 190, 210 Moral perception and moral percepts: and common sense, 32-34, 48-53, 73, 117; definition of, 177-78; as “directly felt fitnesses,” 159-60, 177, 211, 231n66; James on, 145, 173, 175-91, 194, 196-97, 211-12, 231n66; relation between moral concepts and, 196-97. See also Moral philosophy; Moral sense “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, The” (James), 145, 176-91, 197, 211

276 Moral philosophy: and conscience, 67, 69, 7678, 80-82, 87-88, 90, 96, 98-100, 240n41; definition of, 73; and duties, 73-74, 75, 80-87, 240n45; and ethics, 73, 79-83, 87, 97; of James, 145, 176-203, 212-13; and jurisprudence, 97-99; overview of Witherspoon’s common sense moral philosophy, 72-79, 212; and political theory, 87-97; Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 4, 5, 17, 58, 65, 72-100. See also Moral perception and moral percepts; Moral sense Moral qualities, 72-73, 112, 234n132, 244n17 Moral relations, 72-73, 83, 175-79, 182, 18586, 190, 212-13 Moral rules/standards, 81, 124, 187-88 Moral sanctions, 66, 80, 98, 123 Moral sense: Aristotle on, 52-53; and common sense, 32-34, 48-53, 72-79, 117, 145, 173, 175-91, 194, 196, 211-12, 231n66; and conscience, 48-49, 99-100; and conventional morality, 183-84, 18788; as “directly felt fitnesses,” 159-60, 177, 211, 231n66; first principles of morality, 48; Hume’s moral theory, 33-34, 49, 51, 55; Hutcheson on, 32-34, 73, 77, 239n39; and “ideal spectator”/higher judging companion, 248n42; James’s moral and social theory, 61-62, 160, 175-208, 21213, 248n41; Jefferson on, 78, 251n11; McCosh on, 112, 113-15, 129-30; Mill on, 123; recognition of moral qualities, 112, 113, 239n39; Reid on moral principles and moral judgment, 48-53, 57, 79; as sense of divine expectations, 66, 196, 219; and Shaftesbury’s and Vico’s sensus communis, 30-33; truth of moral judgments, 57; Witherspoon on, 77, 7980, 90, 99-100, 212. See also Conscience; Ethics; Moral philosophy; and other headings beginning with Moral Moral sentiments, 32, 57, 244n18, 248n42 Mores, 217 Morrison, Jeffry H., 5 Mortality, 128 Mystery, 48, 107, 204 Mysticism, 190, 234n125, 246n15, 246-47n27 Natural jurisprudence, 18, 54-57. See also Natural law Natural law: Cicero on, 56; and conscience, 66; and Declaration of Independence,

Index 78; existential basis for, 62, 236n169; Grotius on, 58, 67, 235n151; history of, 62; Hobbes on, 15-16; instantiation of, in social practices and political forms, 63, 236n170; just war and natural equity, 67; Locke on, 15-16, 56, 58, 66, 100, 226n8; McCosh on, 114-15; and natural rights, 55-58; Plato on, 63; Reid on, 15-16, 54-57; Thomas Aquinas on, 15-16, 57, 226n8, 234n133, 238n26, 240n44; Vico on, 28; Witherspoon on, 78, 79, 82, 83, 96, 100. See also First principles; Necessary truths/conclusions Natural order, 101, 119, 121, 128-29, 132 Natural rights: Aristotle on, 26; in Declaration of Independence, 6-8, 23, 6667, 78, 91, 218, 221, 235n147; Hamilton on, 78; and James, 175; Jefferson on, 78, 219; Locke on, 15-16, 56, 58, 66, 100, 219, 226n8; Reid on, 55-57; Witherspoon on, 58, 85, 88-89, 91 Nature: kinship with, 44-45, 71; laws of, 46-47, 233n107; rationality in, 45; Reid on, 36, 47, 233n107; and self-evident probability, 50-51 Necessary truths/conclusions, 1-2, 110, 150, 211-12, 214, 215, 231n66 Necessity, 110 New Science (Vico), 62 Newton, Sir Isaac, 36, 105 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 25, 26, 244n25, 244n27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17 Noesis, 70-72, 77 Noll, Mark A., 5 Normality, 76 Norton, David Fate, 33-34 Nous: Aristotle on, 45, 46, 49, 52, 57, 103, 160, 213; and being, 70-71, 212; as common sense, 45, 49, 52, 57, 62, 70-72, 103, 160, 212, 213, 236n168; dynamic quality of, 71; and first principles, 45-46, 49, 52; and McCosh, 103; movement of, 212; Plato on, 70; and Reid, 52; Voegelin on, 62, 236n168; and Witherspoon, 70-72 Objective relations, 148-49 Objectivity: and common sense philosophy generally, 153, 216; consequences of focus on, 54; and Hegel, 152; and Hume, 34; and Hutcheson on moral sense, 33; James on, 135, 137, 139, 142, 147-49, 153-54,

Index 175, 179, 184-85, 189, 196, 200-202, 210, 213, 228n30, 247n36; and Kant, 232n91; McCosh on, 119, 213; and Adam Smith, 248n42; and Witherspoon, 213 Object of a Christian’s Desire in Religious Worship, The (Witherspoon), 72, 239n38 Obligation: and desire, 181-83; to God, 180-81, 213; James on, 133-34, 178-83, 185, 195-96, 249n3; Reid and Scottish Common Sense on, 55-57; Witherspoon on, 73, 77-81, 85, 95, 99, 119, 212, 213. See also Duty/duties Obvious, 6-7, 31, 205, 215 Olson, David R., 22 “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (James), 199 “On the Philosophy of Common Sense; or Our Primary Beliefs Considered as the Ultimate Criterion of Truth” (Hamilton), 59 Order. See Moral order; Natural order Order and History (Voegelin), 62 Oswald, James, 35, 36 Ought, 49-50, 179-81 Our Moral Nature: Being a Brief System of Ethics (McCosh), 124-26 Owen, Robert, 129 Paine, Tom, 64, 226n10 Parent-child relationship, 92, 117, 125 Parret, Herman, 24-25, 27-28 Parva Naturalia (Aristotle), 25, 229n10 Passions/appetites/appetencies: Hume on, 222; James on, 61, 195; McCosh on, 115, 127, 130; Reid on, 54; relation between reason and, 234n132; Witherspoon on, 69-71, 75, 81, 89. See also Body; Emotions Peace, 89, 96, 97, 130, 177, 187, 201, 242n68, 245n36 Peirce, Charles S., 8, 13, 135-36, 227n16 Perception: concepts/conception distinguished from, 143, 152, 155-56, 214, 246n18; James on, 151-52, 154, 155, 17778, 184, 214. See also Moral perception and moral percepts; Sensation and sense perception Percepts, 143, 152, 155-56, 158, 162-63, 166, 172, 175-76, 196, 246n18, 248n44 Perry, Ralph Barton, 147 Personal experience. See Experience Perspectivity, 154 Pessimism, 200-201

277 Phaedo (Plato), 61, 232n87 Philosophy: academia and academic philosophy, 16-18, 57-58, 64, 104; classic philosophy, 21, 23-24; and faith, 71, 108, 189-90; James on function of, 136; James’s definition of, 142; modern philosophy, 5, 30, 35, 37, 44, 49, 50, 57; Plato on, 71. See also Common sense; Common sense philosophy; Moral philosophy; Pragmatism; Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism; and specific philosophers Phronesis (practical wisdom), 26 Physiology, 172-74 Piety, 72 Plato: on affections, 77; on afterlife, 61; and common sense way of philosophizing, 25, 215, 233n100; and death of Socrates, 63; on education, 198; on eidoi, 42; on ethics, 176, 182; on the Good, 70-73; influence of, on Reid, 41; on kinship with nature, 44, 71; on love, 26; on natural law, 63; on nous, 70; on philosopher-ruler, 81, 240n43; on philosophic quest, 71; on reason, 115-16, 249n47; on soul, 26, 115; on spiritual things, 151; and theory of ideas, 42, 232n87 —works: Apology, 71, 151; Crito, 188; Meno, 44, 71; Phaedo, 61, 232n87; The Republic, 26, 71-72, 198, 232n87, 238n25, 240n43, 250n31; Symposium, 232n87 Pleasures and pains, 76, 249n6 Pluralism, 147, 201, 202 Pluralistic Universe, A (James), 171, 212 Polis, 217 Political science/political theory: of Aristotle, 87; James on society, 203-8; of Locke, 88, 89; of Witherspoon, 68, 75, 87-98 Political sermons, 68-70, 84, 87, 95, 96, 236n4, 237n4, 241n60 Politics (Aristotle), 91, 241n63 Postmodernism, 17, 45, 228n34 Power, 38-39, 130, 245n3 Practicality: common sense as practical sense, 5, 12, 18, 26, 45, 64, 102-4, 118-19, 134-38, 142-52, 215, 217-18; and James, 134-36, 138, 142-52, 166, 173-74, 184, 190-99, 201-2, 217, 247n33, 277n17; McCosh on practical rules, 119; phronesis (practical wisdom), 26; Reid on practical ethics, 231n74; and self-evident truths, 27, 226n8, 233n100

278 Pragmatism: and common sense, 141-62; compared with Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism generally, 3-11, 14, 209-13, 223, 227n17; and criterion of satisfactoriness, 246n26; and criterion of “what works,” 231n75; of Dewey, 8, 10, 15, 227n16; and effects/consequences, 11-14, 135-38, 158-62, 171, 177, 247n33; and first principles, 60; and foundationalism and essentialism, 9, 10; grounding of, in concrete knowledge, 4; and human nature, 151-74; of James, 3-4, 7, 8, 18, 133-74, 209-12, 227nn16-17; misunderstanding of, 135-37; of Peirce, 8, 227n16; and physiological foundations of human psychology, 172-74; Pragmatic method, 3-4, 144; “Pragmatic principle,” 135-36, 150; and psychology, 151-63; and radical empiricism, 146-51; roots of, 23; of Rorty, 228n34, 246n11; Santayana on, 8; and self, 163-71; and theory, 141, 144, 146-47, 150, 158-59; and truth, 40, 60, 61, 135-41. See also James, William; Pragmatists Pragmatism (James), 109, 133, 137-47, 150, 151, 154, 203-4 “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (James), 135 Pragmatists, 7-10, 13, 40, 60, 138-39, 146, 148, 215, 227n17, 231n75. See also James, William; Pragmatism Prayer, 84, 171, 194 Priestley, Joseph, 35, 36 Primitive beliefs, 112 Primitive judgments, 112-13 Princeton University, 4, 5, 58, 64, 68, 101, 132, 235n159, 236n1 Principles: common sense principles, 9, 15-16, 62, 79, 222, 226n9, 233n100; of consciousness, 106; ethical/moral principles, 48-53, 57, 79; McCosh on, 102, 243n6; “Pragmatic principle,” 135-36, 150; and prudence, 70; and Revolutionary War, 69-70; secondary principles, 45, 49; self-evident principles, 27, 46-47, 226n8. See also First principles Principles of Psychology, The (James), 3, 13, 134, 137, 138, 149, 151, 153-56, 158-61, 163-66, 170-73, 180, 193-202, 207-8, 211, 246n23, 248n45 Private interest. See Interest Private property. See Property

Index Probability, 50-51 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant), 35-36, 40 Property, 55-56, 69, 85-86, 90-91, 104, 125, 126, 130-31, 221 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 241n57 Providence, 66, 69, 70, 83, 238n26. See also God Prudence, 69-70, 122 Psychology: common sense perspective of, 151-63; James on, 151-74, 193-95, 223; physiological foundations of, 172-74; rationalist psychology of Hegel, 152; and traditional empiricism, 152-53. See also Human nature; Self Psychology: Briefer Course (James), 157, 159, 172, 247n36 Public interest. See Interest Pufendorf, Samuel, 240n45, 242n73 Punishments. See Rewards and punishments Pure experience, 137-38, 140-41, 149-50, 211, 213-15, 246n18, 247n36, 247-48n40 Radical empiricism: and common sense, 4, 146-51; of James, 4, 18, 60, 133-74, 247n28 Radicalism, 187-88, 220-21 Ratiocination, 106-7. See also Consciousness Rationality. See Reasoning; Reason/ intelligence Realism: of Aristotle, 133; of James generally, 133, 147-48; of McCosh, 133; Mill’s critique of, 59; of Vico, 133. See also Pragmatism; Scottish Common Sense/ Scottish realism Realistic Philosophy (McCosh), 4 Reality: consciousness as sensorium of, 103; as continuum, 105; as independently existing things, 140; James on, 105, 13642, 212, 247n31; truth as correspondence with, 60, 135-41; truth as leading toward, 141; as whole, 30, 105, 107, 139-42 Reasoning: and first principles, 44, 79; Hutcheson on, 33; inductive reasoning, 46-47; James on, 160-63, 248n43; McCosh on, 113, 127; mistakes in, 47-48, 61; moral reasoning, 77; Witherspoon on, 74-77, 80-82. See also Reason/intelligence Reason/intelligence: and faith, 71, 237n14; Hutcheson on, 33; intuitive dimension of, 71; James on, 160-63, 197-98; and

Index language, 50; Lewis on, 57; McCosh on, 115; modern philosophy on, 57; Plato on, 115-16, 249n47; reduction of, to reasoning, 222; Reid on, 40, 41, 45-46; relation between passions and, 234n132; trust in, 44; and will, 197-98; Witherspoon on, 74-77, 80-82, 89-90, 96, 97-98, 241n61. See also Mind; Reasoning Reductionism, 30, 222 “Reflex Action and Theism” (James), 202-3 Regime, 217 Regret, 186, 200-201 Reid, Thomas: Aristotle’s influence on, 26, 41, 45, 233n100; on Berkeley, 6; on causation, 36-40, 231n66; on command, testimony, promise, and contract, 53-54; on common sense and ethical-political foundations, 45-57; on conscience, 4849; on contingent first principles, 46; on First Cause, 36, 71; on first principles, 39, 44, 45-50, 52, 57, 79, 233n104; on Grotius, 235n151; Hamilton on, 59; on Hume, 34, 36, 234n111; influence of, on James, 134; on intuition, 44, 49, 51-52, 54, 60; Kant on, 35-36, 40-41, 44, 51, 103, 174, 232n79; McCosh on, 102, 103, 105, 243n7, 245n32; on meaning of common sense, 22, 102, 103, 118, 213, 215; on moral principles and moral judgment, 48-53, 57, 73, 79; on natural law, 15-16, 54-57, 235n151; on natural rights, 55-57; on nature, 36, 47, 233n107; on passions and false opinions, 54; on political significance of common sense, 24; on power, 38-39; on practical ethics, 231n74; on reason, 40, 41, 45-46; ridicule used by, 44, 233nn95-96; on rights, 55-56, 85, 92; scholarship on, 17, 34-35; and Scottish Common Sense/ Scottish realism, 8, 15-18, 21, 34-45; on self-evident truths, 47; on sensation and sense perception, 40, 42, 43; significance of, 57; on skepticism, 60-61, 233n95; on “taking for granted,” 44; on theories versus facts, 231n68; on theory of ideas, 42, 43, 50; on truth, 44, 54, 232-33n94; on virtue, 49, 52; and Witherspoon, 58, 65, 71, 73, 77, 79, 84-85, 92 —works: “Account of Aristotle’s Logic,” 233n100; Essays on the Active Powers of Man, 34, 36, 40-41, 54-55; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 34, 37-38, 40-

279 41, 45, 54-55, 226n9, 233n95; An Inquiry into the Human Mind, 34, 41, 54-55, 103, 232n80, 232n92, 237n17 Relativism, 6, 10, 136 Religion and religious experience: Adams on, 75; American religiosity, 72, 75, 78-79, 84, 100, 101, 219-20, 238n23; and churchstate relations, 75, 126, 245n36; current resurgence of, 250n11; Dewey on, 10-14; James on, 10-14, 72, 171, 190, 202-3, 249n47, 251n13; McCosh on, 114-15, 119-20, 123, 125-26, 129-30, 132; and saintliness, 13, 192, 213; Witherspoon on, 72, 75, 84, 238n22, 241n59, 251n13. See also Christianity; God Religion of humanity, 189, 227n22 Religious experience. See Religion and religious experience Remorse, 80 Representation, 93, 242n68 Republic, 75, 94, 218 Republic, The (Plato), 26, 71-72, 198, 232n87, 238n25, 240n43, 250n31 Revelation, 121, 245n30 Revolt against reason/common sense/God, 129, 216 Revolution, 94, 187-88, 220-21 Revolutionary War, 7, 64-70, 84, 242n70 Rewards and punishments, 82, 98 Rhetoric, 32, 223 Ridicule, 44, 233nn95-96 Rights: acquired rights, 85; alienable and inalienable rights, 23, 85; of authority, 86, 92; in Bill of Rights, 94; contract rights, 86; in Declaration of Independence, 6-8, 23, 66-67, 78, 91, 218, 221, 235n147; and duties, 75, 84-86, 185, 218; Grotius on, 56, 58, 86, 240n53; Hobbes on, 219; Hutcheson on, 85, 86, 240n53; Jefferson on, 78, 85, 219, 226n11; of liberty, 6-8, 23, 55, 85-86, 88, 91; Locke on, 86, 88, 219, 240n53; of nations, 95-96; perfect and imperfect rights, 56, 85-86, 88-89, 92, 9596, 240n53, 242n77; property rights, 5556, 85-86, 91, 221; Reid on, 55-56, 85, 92; of revolution, 94; of rulers and subjects, 93-94; Witherspoon on, 84-86, 88-94. See also Natural rights Roman Civil Law, 55, 56 Roman Empire, 129 Rorty, Richard, 228n34, 246n11 Royce, Josiah, 147

280 Rulers: good and bad rulers distinguished, 220; Plato on philosopher-ruler, 81, 240n43; and tyranny, 7, 65, 69, 89, 94-95; Witherspoon on rights of, 93-94. See also Government Saintliness, 13, 191-93, 213 St. Simon, Henri de, 129 Salmasius, 28 Santayana, George, 8 Satisfactions and satisfactoriness, 246n26, 250n26 Schaefer, John D., 28, 31, 32 Schiller, F. C. S., 148, 228n30 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 117 Scholasticism, 50 Schopenauer, Arthur, 200 Science, 68, 73, 75, 79, 102-3, 105, 112, 117, 143 Scientism, 14 Scott, Jack, 5, 235n159, 240n53 Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism: academicization of, 104; and American common sense philosophy, 57-59, 6465, 235n159; compared with James’s Pragmatism generally, 3-11, 14, 20913, 223, 227n17; demise of, 104; and Hutcheson, 8, 17; importance of, for academic philosophy, 16-18, 235n159; and James, 60, 133-34, 145; Kant on, 35-36, 40-41, 232n79; and natural jurisprudence, 54-57 Scottish Enlightenment, 8, 17-18, 101-2 Scottish Philosophy, The (McCosh), 102-3, 105-6, 122 Scottish realism. See, See also Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism Secondary principles, 45, 49 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 148 Self: duties to, 82, 86-87, 126; James on, 112, 163-72, 193-95, 204, 248n45; love of, 131, 195, 245n39; material self, 163, 193-94; and pure Ego, 163, 166; social self, 163, 193-95, 204; spiritual self, 163-68, 193, 204. See also Human nature; Individuals; Psychology Self-evidence and self-evident truths, 6-7, 2224, 27, 45-47, 50-53, 110, 113, 146, 174, 215, 218-19, 226n8, 226n10 Self-government, 87 Self-interest, 30, 73, 87, 195, 219 Selfishness, 76, 128, 195

Index Self-love, 131, 195, 245n39 Seneca, 29 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, 221 Sensation and sense perception: Aristotle on, 233n100; and common sense, 40-44, 49, 103, 104, 111-12, 151-52, 155, 16263, 166, 173-74, 208, 233n100, 248n44; compared with moral sense, 77; Descartes on, 42; Hume on, 107, 167, 243n8; James on, 104, 139, 151, 155, 158-59, 177, 184, 248n44, 249n49; Kant on, 43, 167; Locke on, 43; McCosh’s definitions applied to, 111; Mill on, 109-10; in psychology generally, 153; Reid on, 40, 42, 43 Sense of humor. See Wit Sense of sameness, 156, 211 Sensus communis (common sense), 26-33, 52, 176, 216-17, 233n95 Sententiae (wise sayings), 31 “Sentiment of rationality,” 161-62 Sentiments. See Emotions Sermons. See Political sermons Servant-master relationship, 91, 93, 117, 125 Sexual relationships, 125-26 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord, 8, 28-33, 44, 61, 233n95, 245n32 Shame, 77-78 Sin: McCosh on, 116, 123-24, 127, 129, 130; Witherspoon on, 70, 73, 75-76, 241n60. See also Corruption; Vice Skepticism: and classical foundationalism, 42; of Descartes, 232n80; of Hume, 5, 6, 8, 34, 39, 59, 74; James on, 60-61, 179, 203, 209; of Kant, 39-42, 45; McCosh on, 118-19; and postmodernism, 45, 228n34; Reid on, 60-61, 233n95; Scottish realists on generally, 209; and Witherspoon, 74 Slavery, 67, 93, 95, 219, 221, 241n66, 242n67 Smith, Adam, 17-18, 238n28, 248n42, 250nn16-17 Smith, John E., 140 Social science, 206. See also Political science/ political theory; Psychology “Social Value of the College-Bred, The” (James), 206-7 Socrates: death of, 63; on education, 198; on kinship with nature, 44; moral power of, 188-89; on mystery, 48; on myth of sea god Glaucos, 238n25; on philosophy and philosophic ignorance, 71; as revolutionary, 188; on soul, 61; on spiritual things, 151; on theory of ideas, 232n87

Index Some Problems of Philosophy (James), 157-58, 205 Soul: and common sense philosophy generally, 149; James on, 61, 145, 149-50, 163, 166, 167, 247n33; McCosh on, 115; Plato on, 26, 61, 115; Socrates on, 61; Witherspoon on, 74-75, 80, 87 Speech: Aristotle on, 53; James on, 173. See also Language Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 94 Spirit/spiritual substance, 74-77, 87, 149-51, 163-68, 237n19. See also Religion; Soul Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 223 State of nature, 65-66, 88 Stewart, Dugald, 60, 134, 243n7, 245n32 Still small voice, 170-71, 197, 248-49n47 Stoic philosophy, 21, 23-24, 27-29 Stream of consciousness, 105, 137, 154, 157, 165-66, 171 Studies in Words (Lewis), 27 Subconscious, 171 Subjectivism, 136, 147, 200-201, 210 Subjectivity, 28, 107-8, 137, 148, 156, 163, 165, 179, 228n30, 247n36 Substance, 42, 70-71, 74-76, 107, 113, 150, 167, 232n91, 237n19 Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas), 26-27, 238n26 Sympathy, 122-25, 130, 131, 193, 199, 245n32 Synderesis (conscience), 238n26, 240n41 Taking for granted, 27, 35, 44, 64, 84, 94, 145, 153, 169-70, 184, 216 Talks for Teachers (James), 199, 250n31 Tao, 44 Terrorism, 242n76, 242n78 Theism, 202 Theoretical truth, 141 Theory: and Pragmatism, 141, 144, 146-47, 158, 158-59 Theory of ideas. See Ideas Thing in itself, 43, 107, 232n91 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas, Thomas Thucydides, 129 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 101, 217, 223 Townsend, H. G., 101 Toynbee, Arnold, 70 Transcendental Ego, 166-67 “Trial of Religious Truth by Its Moral Influence, The” (Witherspoon), 251n13 Trust, 41, 44, 45, 50, 54, 83-84, 122, 203, 213, 216

281 Truth: common sense as foundational level of, 53, 62, 84, 91, 98-99, 144-45, 173, 177, 215; as correspondence with reality, 60, 135-41; experience as test or touchstone of, 54, 138-39; and intuition, 54; James on, 61, 135-42, 162, 178, 182, 203-4; as leading toward reality, 141; logical truth, 141; of moral judgments, 57; necessary truths/conclusions, 1-2, 110, 150, 211-12, 214, 215, 231n66; objectivity of, 54; and Pragmatism, 40, 60, 61, 135-41; Reid on, 44, 54, 232-33n94; self-evident truth, 6-7, 22-23, 47, 50, 110, 113, 174, 215, 218-19, 226n10; Shaftesbury on, 31, 32; tests of truth/intuitions, 110-11; theoretical truth, 141; universality of, 110-11, 244n15; Witherspoon on goodness and, 90 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 86 Tyranny, 7, 65, 69, 89, 94-95, 127, 218, 241n60 Understanding, 76, 113 U.S. Constitution, 75, 89, 91, 94, 99, 218, 220, 221 Universality, 110-11, 211, 244n15 University of Edinburgh, 58, 60 Utilitarianism, 5, 19, 122-24 Utility: Hume on, 54-55, 241n61; James on, 177; McCosh on, 124, 126; Mill on, 124; and Pragmatists’ criterion of “what works,” 231n75; Witherspoon on, 66, 8990, 96, 97, 99-100, 124, 126, 241n61 Values: and common sense philosophy generally, 215; in Declaration of Independence, 218; Dewey on, 12, 13; and education, 213; James on, 157-58, 160, 184, 189, 196, 199, 206, 213; Plato on, 71-72; Vico on, 28 Van Holthoon, Frits, 22, 26-27 Van Kessel, Peter, 25 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (James), 60, 134, 151, 154, 168, 171, 190-93, 203, 208, 227n19, 246n15 Vice, 120-22, 131-32. See also Sin Vico, Giambattista, 25, 28-29, 31-32, 52, 62, 133, 215, 222 Virtue: American view of, 220; ancient philosophers on, 239n38; Aristotle on, 25-26, 244n27; benefits of, 82; Hutcheson on, 120, 240n49; James on heroic virtues, 205; McCosh on, 120-24, 244n26, 244n27; Mill on, 122-24; Reid on, 49,

282 52; and rewards and punishments, 82; Shaftesbury on, 33; Witherspoon on, 75, 77-78, 81, 82, 84, 91, 97 Voegelin, Eric: on alienation, 222; and classic political philosophy, 228n33; on common sense, 21-22, 24, 236n168; and Dewey, 21; on gnosticism, 250n25; methodological environment of, 228n1; on nous, 62, 236n168 —works: Anamnesis, 236n168, 251n1; Autobiographical Reflections, 246n20; “The Beginning and the Beyond,” 237; New Science of Politics, 250n25; Order and History, 62 Voting Rights Act (1964), 221 War. See Just war; Revolutionary War “War on terrorism,” 242n76, 242n78 Washington, George, 78, 238n23, 238n29, 238-39n32 Wealth. See Property Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, 235n159 Western civilization, 70 Whewell, William, 106 Will: Christian understanding of, 197; free will, 168-70, 200, 205, 250n24; James on, 168-70, 197-98, 200-202, 205; McCosh on, 114-16; and morality, 114-16, 120; and reason, 197-98; relation of, to reason and conscience, 114-16, 126-27; Witherspoon on, 76-77 “Will to Believe, The” (James), 61 Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, The (James), 171, 176-91, 200-202, 208 Wilson, James, 78, 238n29, 239n34 Wit, 31-32, 33, 61, 203n39, 230n37, 251n15 Witherspoon, John: on affections, 76-77, 86-88, 90-91, 240-41n55, 241n62; on artificial rules, 251n11; on benevolence, 73, 84, 88; on body and spirit, 74-77, 87, 112; and Christianity and common sense, 70-72; common sense defined by, 67-68; and common sense philosophy in action, 65-70; compared with James and McCosh, 3-8, 14, 62, 113, 118, 11920, 126, 179, 185, 209-13, 223, 244n26, 249n5; on conscience, 67, 69, 76-78, 80-82, 87-88, 90, 96, 98-100, 115, 118, 213, 219, 240n41, 241n61; on contracts, 86, 93, 98-99; Druid essays by, 65-68, 96; on duty, 73-74, 75, 80-87, 185, 212,

Index 240n45; on epistemology, 237n17; on ethics, 79-83, 87, 97, 119; and faith, 70-72, 98; on family, 91-92; on God, 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80-84, 237n17, 239n38; on government, 94-95, 220; and Hamilton, 85, 94, 95; on happiness, 79-82, 85, 88, 89; on human nature, 72, 74-82, 88, 90, 116, 238n25; and Hutcheson, 18, 58, 65, 72-73, 77, 79-88, 102, 120, 235n158, 237n17, 239n39, 240n53, 241n64, 242n73; on interest, 73, 81-82, 99-100, 185; on jurisprudence, 97-99; on just war, 66-70, 88, 96-97, 242nn76-79; on law, 75, 87, 97-98; on liberty, 69, 85-86, 88-91; and Locke, 66, 74, 86, 88-89, 91, 94, 100; on love, 73, 83-84, 213; and Madison, 78-79, 91, 95, 100, 220, 242n71; on masterservant relationship, 91, 93; on moral philosophy, 4, 5, 17, 58, 65, 72-100, 212; on moral sense, 77, 79-80, 90, 99-100, 212; on natural law, 78, 79, 82, 83, 96, 100; and nous, 103; on obligation, 73, 77-81, 85, 95, 99, 119, 212; personal correspondence of, 242n71; philosophical relevance of, 17-19 ; political theory of, 68, 75, 87-98; as Princeton faculty member and president, 4, 5, 57-58, 64, 68, 235n159, 236n1; on property, 69, 85-86, 90-91; on providence, 66, 69, 70, 83; on prudence, 69-70; on reason, 74-77, 80-82, 89-90, 96, 97-98, 241n61; and Reid, 58, 65, 71, 73, 77, 79, 84-85, 92; on religion, 72, 75, 238n22, 241n59, 251n13; on remorse, 80; on rights, 84-86, 88-94; on rulers, 93-94; scholarship on, 5; and Scottish Common Sense/Scottish realism, 4, 7-8, 17-18, 64-65; significance of, 100, 235n159, 236n1, 242n71; on sin, 70, 73, 75-76; on sin/corruption, 70, 73, 75-77, 88, 91, 238n25, 241n60; and skepticism, 74; as slave owner, 93, 242n67; on soul, 74-75, 80, 87; study of recommended, 222; on utility, 66, 89-90, 96, 97, 99-100, 124, 126, 241n61; on virtue, 75, 77-78, 81, 84, 91, 97; wartime writings by, 65-70, 237n4 —works: Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving after Peace, 84, 241n60; The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men, 68-70, 84, 95, 96, 236n4; Ecclesiastical Characteristics, 251n15; Lectures on Eloquence, 223, 251n15; Lectures on Moral

Index Philosophy, 4, 5, 17, 58, 65, 72-100; Man in His Natural State, 75-76; The Object of a Christian’s Desire in Religious Worship, 72, 239n38; “The Trial of Religious Truth by Its Moral Influence,” 251n13 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 34, 42 “World of Pure Experience, A” (James), 140, 149

283 Worship, 72, 84, 125 Woudenberg, René van, 40 Wright, Chauncy, 145 Wrongdoing. See Sin; Vice Zealotry, 33

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics) (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-century Literature (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Rethinking Rights: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science

Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

The American Way Of Peace: An Interpretation (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Common Sense: A Political History

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Eric Voegelin in Baton Rouge

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Relativity and Common Sense

THE COMMON SENSE OF SCIENCE

Rediscovery of common sense

The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics)

Hitler and the Germans (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin)

Common Sense

Common Sense

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics) (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-century Literature (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Rethinking Rights: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science

Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

The American Way Of Peace: An Interpretation (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy)

Common Sense: A Political History

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (ERIC VOEGELIN INST SERIES)

Eric Voegelin in Baton Rouge

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Relativity and Common Sense

THE COMMON SENSE OF SCIENCE

Rediscovery of common sense

The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics)

Hitler and the Germans (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin)

Common Sense

Common Sense

Recommend Documents