Common sense is the substratum of all logic. Common sense is the natural sense of mankind. It is founded on common observation and experience. It is modest and plain and unsophisticated. It sees with everybody's eyes and hears with everybody's ears. It has no capricious distinctions, no partialities, and no mysteries. It never equivocates and never trifles. Its language is always the same, and is always intelligible. It is known by its perspicuity of speech and singleness of purpose. The most prudent of all the children of fact, it never forsakes nature or reason. Some outline laws for its employment, if they can be indicated, must be better than its popular aimless and desultory use.
One has no right to make a literary subject political--that is, to make it partisan; but to give a political motive which concerns all equally, for promoting a literary study, is allowable, and does not partake of the nature of party politics. One may, like Cobbett, look on literature with political eyes, without, like him, making it a vehicle of party attacks.
In this country, where the political genius of the people lies in self-government--where the public growth of the people and their internal liberty depend upon their capacity to manage their own affairs--the art of public speaking has political importance to every aide in politics.
To be able to take a subject well in hand, like a stage-coach driver does his horses--to hold the reins of your arguments firmly--to direct and drive well home the burden of your meaning, is a power which every man ought to study to attain, who rises to address a council, or stands up on a platform to convince a meeting.
It is a humiliating reflection that mankind never reasoned so ill as when they most professed to cultivate the art of reasoning.--Life of Galileo, p. 1. society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
Common sense--the foundation of logic--first received (to a limited extent) the regularity of an art and the certainty of a science, from the master hand of Aristotle. Impartial scholars, familiar with his writings on logic, allow them to have not only ingenuity but real merit; and his admirers contend that he has been misunderstood by some and abused by others. This is highly probable, as we are certain that when his works were interpreted by the schools, and his logic proclaimed the great text-book of knowledge and the only weapon of truth, 'men's minds, instead of studying nature, were in an endless ferment about occult qualities and imaginary essences; little was talked of but intention and remission, proportion and degree, infinity, formality, quiddity and individuality.'* Logic then was jargon, controversy chicane, and truth a shuttlecock, with which the disputants respectively played, or the object which they mutually disguised. Logic was a labyrinth in which the subtlest lost their Way--a bourne from which the traveller after truth seldom returned.