It would be difficult to find any type of mentality more inhospitable to new ideas than is that of the complacent exponent of a dominant religion—whatever that religion may be. Entrenched in the faith of his fathers, and fortified by the approval of the unthinking majority, such a man embodies his settled beliefs in the formulas of a self-declared common sense, and then makes of those formulas a permanent barricade against spiritual enlightenment and progress. The result of this human tendency, in these days of uneasy faith and shifting creeds, is that appeal to the platitudes of common sense, as pretext or justification for mental and spiritual inertia, which is sadly overworked. It is time that it be relieved, in part at least, of its heavy burden.
What is common sense? State any contingency, and ask a hundred men for a common-sense solution, and you may receive scores of answers. Yet every one of the hundred will accept as true the dictionary definition of common sense: "native, practical intelligence, such that, if a person be deficient therein, he is accounted mad or foolish." But put to the test, this practical intelligence is subject to widely divergent interpretation. In practice common sense signifies little more than the personal criterion of judgment, surprisingly complacent and final in its pronouncements. Common sense is "my" good judgment; nonsense is the "other fellow's" differing judgment. The man distinguished for common sense is the man who most nearly agrees with his fellows, or, differing from them, is too discreet to offend them. This is as true of communities as it is of individuals, for common sense is essentially a community affair, be the grouping one of race or creed, of culture or ignorance, or whatever else it may be that unites men in support of some self-approved notion of good form.
Community common sense resolves itself into a sense of things held in common, whose sole authority is common consent; and here is its danger. The illusion of the mass is only the illusion of its units intensified. Both must be judged by the same standard. The mass has no wisdom of its own. Indeed, the sense of the mass or of the mob is of an even lower order than that of its individuals components. A mob is born of and maintained by fear or hate; and such qualities paralyze intelligent action and initiate in its place blind and unreasoning impulse. Human society shows its kinship with the mob, whenever society lends itself to the sway of unreasoned prejudice, untrained impulse and fear, or to the thoughtless defense and perpetuation of barren or destructive institutions; whenever it makes the institutions of its own creation an end in themselves, rather than a means to higher ends; whenever it contends for things as they seem to be, rather than for things as they should be.
