They form one great stage of equilibrium in the
human mind's development, the stage of common sense. Other stages
have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in
displacing it. Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if
it might be final.
In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his
freedom from excentricity, 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. Were we
lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led
to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our
experiences. It MIGHT be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that
such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the
whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those
which we actually use.
If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical
geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points
to adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely
different and vastly more potent way of handling curves.
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