little prejudiced
against common-sense; and, for my own part, I confess that I am often
tempted to think that a common-sense view is necessarily a wrong one. It
was common-sense to see that the world must be flat and that the sun
must go round it; only when those fantastical people made themselves
heard who thought that the solar system could not be quite so simple an
affair as common-sense knew it must be were these opinions knocked on
the head. Dr. Johnson, the great exemplar of British common-sense,
observing in autumn the gathered swallows skimming over pools and
rivers, pronounced it certain that these birds sleep all the winter--"A
number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and
then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lie in the bed of a
river": how sensibly, too, did he dispose of Berkeley's
Idealism--"striking his foot with mighty force against a large
stone"--"I refute it thus." Seriously, is the common-sense view ever the
right one?

Lately, the men of sense and science have secured allies who have
brought to their cause what most it lacked, a little fundamental
thought. Those able and honest people, the Cambridge rationalists,
headed by Mr. G.E. Moore, to whose _Principia Ethica_ I owe so much,
are, of course, profoundly religious and live by a passionate faith in
the absolute value of certain states of mind; also they have fallen in
love with the conclusions and methods of science. Being extremely
intelligent, they perceive, however, that empirical arguments can avail
nothing for or against a metaphysical theory, and that ultimately all
the conclusions of science are based on a logic that precedes
experience. Also they perceive that emotions are just as real as
sensations. They find themselves confronted, therefore, by this
difficulty; if someone steps forward to say that he has a direct,
disinterested, _a priori_, conviction of the goodness of his emotions
towards the Mass, he puts himself in the same position as Mr. Moore, who
feels a similar conviction about the goodness of his towards the Truth.
If Mr. Moore is to infer the goodness of one state of mind from his
feelings, why should not someone else infer the goodness of another from
his? The Cambridge rationalists have a short way with such dissenters.
They simply assure them that they do not feel what they say they feel.
Some of them have begun to apply their cogent methods to aesthetics; and
when we tell them what w