Yoritomo-Tashi

“ LESSON XII COMMON SENSE DOES NOT EXCLUDE GREAT ASPIRATIONS "A very common error," says Yoritomo, "is that which consists in classifying common sense among the amorphous virtues, only applicable to things and to people whose fundamental principle is materiality.
"This is a calumny which is spread broadcast by fools who scatter their lives to the four winds of caprice and extravagance.
"Not only does common sense not exclude beauty, but it really aids in its inception and protects its growth by maintaining the reasons which produced its appearance. ”

“ LESSON VIII HOW TO ACQUIRE COMMON SENSE Common Sense is a science, whatever may be said; according to Yoritomo, it does not blossom naturally in the minds of men; it demands cultivation, and the art of reasoning is acquired like all the faculties which go to make up moral equilibrium.
"This quality," said the philosopher, "is obscure and intangible, like the air we breathe.
"Like the air we breathe, it is necessary to our existence, it surrounds us, envelops us, and is indispensable to the harmony of our mental life. ”

“ Those who defend this artificial conception of happiness, like to compare people of common sense to heavy infantry soldiers, who march along through stony roads, while they depict themselves as pleasant bird-fanciers, giving flight to the fantastic bearers of wings. ”

“ We must really pity those who are deprived of moral sense for they are the prey of all the impulses created in them by the brute-nature, which sleeps in the depths of each human creature.
The man whose moral sense is developed will live at peace with himself, for he will only know the evil of doubt when he realizes the satisfaction of having conquered it. ”

“ Common sense is solid, illusion is yielding, also illusion never issues victorious from a combat with it; during a struggle illusion endeavors vainly to display its subterfuges and cunning; illusions disappear one by one, crusht by the powerful arms of their terrible adversary—common sense.
"The worship of illusion," says Yoritomo, "presents certain dangers to the integrity of judgment, which, under such influence, falsifies the comparative faculty, and sways decision to the side of neutrality. ”

“ And, always enamored with the doctrine, which we are now assiduously maintaining, he concludes:
"Common sense is, at times, the unfolding of a magnificent force which incites us to attune our environment to actualities.
"One must not, however, fall into excess and draw a huge sword to pierce the clouds, which obscure the sun.
"If struggle is praiseworthy when we have to face a real enemy, it becomes worthy of scorn and laughter if we attack a puerile or imaginary adversary. ”

“ It is easy to reply that lawsuits are rarely instituted by men of common sense; they leave this burden to people of evil intent, who imagine thus to make a doubtful cause triumph.
It must be conceded that this means succeeds at times with them, when they are dealing with timid or irresolute persons; but those who have contracted the habit of reasoning, and who never undertake anything without consulting common sense, will never allow themselves to be drawn into the by-paths of sophistry. ”

“ To dominate oneself to the point of not allowing oneself to become the slave of miserable contingencies which appear as temptations to self-indulgence, and conceal from their pettiness the beauty of the consistent action—this is only given to the chosen few and can only be understood by those who cultivate common sense. ”

“ Common sense rarely needs to strive; it unfolds itself in an atmosphere of peace, far from the tumult of obstructions and snares that are not easily avoided.
Its flower is less alluring than many others, but it never allows itself to be completely hidden through the wild growth of neighboring branches. ”

“ In the eternal struggle between the individual and social soul, each of which, in its turn, is victorious or vanquished, a truce is declared only if self-control is allied to common sense, in order to maintain the equilibrium between individual sentiment, natural to each one of us, and the ideas of mankind as a whole. ”

“ More than ever our age of unrest makes us the prey of impulses, and to the majority of our contemporaries, the robe, half green and half yellow (by recalling to them the worship of common sense) , will become a fetish, more precious than all the amulets with which superstition loves to adorn logic, or to incorporate fantastic outline in the classic setting of beautiful jewels. ”

“ We must conclude, with Yoritomo, that illusion could often be transformed into happy reality if it were better understood, and if, instead of looking upon it through the dreams of our imagination, we applied ourselves to the task of eliminating the fluid vapors which envelop it, that we might clothe it anew with the garment of common sense.
Many enterprises have been considered as illusions because we have neglected to awaken the possibilities which lay dormant within them. ”

“ Sincere conviction, on the contrary, will lead us to refute strongly all the false arguments, which impede thought and would choke it in order to allow unadulterated pleasure to be installed on the ruins of common sense. ”

“ The man of common sense knows how to recognize falsehood wherever he meets it; he knows how vain it is to conceal a positive fact and also how dangerous it is to deceive oneself, a peril which increases in power, in proportion to the effort made to ignore it. ”

“ From the repetition of events, from their correlation, from their equivalence, from their parallelism, knowledge will be derived and will be productive of good results, in proportion as egotistical sentiment is eliminated from them; and slowly, with the wisdom acquired by experience, common sense will manifest itself tranquil and redoubtable, working always for the accomplishment of good as does everything which is the emblem of strength and peace. ”

“ If we do not endeavor to separate from our true selves the suggestions of sense-consciousness, we shall reach the point where perception is transformed into conception, that is to say, we shall no longer obtain reality alone, but a modified reality. ”

“ In ordinary life, one ought to consider this faculty of common sense as the ruling principle of conduct.
One can be lacking in thought, in audacity, in brilliant qualities, if only one possesses common sense.
It takes the place of intelligence in many people, whose minds, unaccustomed to subtle argument, only lend themselves to very simple reasoning. ”

“ Each inventor has pursued an illusion, but those whose names have lived to reach our recognition, have caught a glimpse of the vertiginous course they were following, and no longer have allowed themselves to get too far away from their base—science. ”

“ But whereas intuition, a sensation altogether moral, concisely stated, is composed of mental speculations, impulses always resolve themselves into acts and resolutions to act.
Intuition is a sort of obscure revelation, which reason controls only after its formation.
Impulse never engages common sense in the achievements which it realizes. It never decides upon them in advance, and almost always engenders regrets.
It is the result of a defeat in self-control, which will-power and the power of reasoning alone can correct. ”

“ If we wished to appeal to common sense we should acknowledge, too often, that in the search for expansion we have only recognized the opportunity to satisfy the inclination which urges us to seek for pleasure. ”

“ The most elementary common sense counsels then cool-headedness when exchanging ideas, even when the discussion is of quite an amicable nature.
From this habit there will result a very praiseworthy propensity to exercise self-control, which is only a sort of superior cool-headedness.
It is also the cause of a noble pride, because it is more difficult to win a victory over one's passions than to conquer ordinary enemies, and he who, with the support of common sense, succeeds in ruling himself, can calculate, without arrogance, the hour when he will reign over the minds of others. ”

“ Finally, common sense is the chosen purpose of every one, courted, demanded, desired or accepted, but it exists, and under the penalty of most serious inconveniences it does not permit us to forget its existence. ”

“ Beauty exists everywhere; it dwells in the most humble objects, makes all around us resplendent and, if we refuse to see it, we are blinded by an unjust prejudice, or our minds are not open to the faculty of contemplation. ”

“ The most admirable inventions would never have been known if common sense had not helped them to be produced, strengthening those who conceived them by the support of logic, which demonstrated to them the truth of their presumptions. ”

“ The moral sense is the common sense of the soul; it is the superior power of reasoning which stands before us that we may be prevented from passively following our instincts; it is by its assistance that we succeed without too much difficulty in climbing the steep paths of duty. ”

“ If, for any reason, passion should create confusion of ideas, clearness of understanding would be seriously compromised and firmness of judgment, by deteriorating, would cast aside the manifestation of common sense. ”

“ We should outrage common sense in presenting a workman with a gorgeous robe suitable for great ceremonies, in which to do his work, but reason would be equally outraged if one put on a shabby costume to go to the palace of the Mikado. ”

“ Common sense represents for some the care of public affairs; for others those of the family; for us all the great desire to leave intact to our descendants the name which we have received from our fathers. ”

“ Modest but self-sustaining, it is seen blossoming far from the struggles which always retard the blossoming of plants and which render their flowering slower and, at times, short-lived.
A most absurd prejudice has occasionally considered common sense to be an inferior quality of mind. ”

“ Intuition is less spontaneous than impulse.
It is a very brief mental operation, but, nevertheless, very real, which, very indistinctly, touches lightly all the phases of reasoning, in order to reach a conclusion so rapidly that he who conceives it has difficulty in making the transformations of the initial thought intelligible.
It is none the less true that intuition is always inspired by a predicted reflection, but, in spite of this fact, an existing reflection.
Impulse, on the contrary, only admits instinct as its source of existence. ”

“ To reason about a thing is to dissect it, to examine it from every point of view before adopting it, before deferring to it or before rejecting it; in one word, to reason about a thing is to act with conscious volition, which is one of the phases essential to the conquest of common sense. ”

“ An exact conception of things is more indispensable to perfect success than a thousand other more brilliant but less substantial gifts.
"However," says Yoritomo, "in order to make success our own, it is not sufficient to have the knowledge of things, one must above all know oneself.
"On the great world-stage, each one occupies a place which at the start may not always be in the first rank.
"Nevertheless, work, intelligence, directness of thought and, above all, common sense, can exert a positive influence on the future superiority of the situation. ”

“ Under the immediate impression of the perception of an act they are ready for a struggle to the death; but this ardor is quickly extinguished, and inertia, in its turn, having become an impulse, makes them throw far away from them the object which determined the effort. ”

“ This propensity to see all in the ideal would be enviable if it did not wound common sense, which revenges itself by refusing to these improvident people the help of the reasoning power necessary to sustain them in the crisis of discouragement which brings about irresistibly the establishment of error. ”

“ The events which multiply about us, Yoritomo says, ought to be, for each master, an opportunity for awakening in the soul of his disciples a perfect reasoning power, starting from the inception of the premises to arrive at the conclusions of all arguments. ”

“ Sentimentality and its derivatives, puerile pity and false sensitiveness, can create illusion for those who do not practise the art of reasoning, but the friends of common sense do not hesitate to condemn them for it. ”

“ The Nippon philosopher teaches us also the part which he assigns to the habitual practise of goodness.
"We are too easily persuaded," he says, "that goodness, like beauty, is a gift of birth.
"It is time to destroy an error rooted in our minds for too many centuries.
"Goodness is acquired by reasoning and logic, as are so many other qualities, and it is common sense which governs its formation. ”

“ Nothing that we see thus confusedly is found on the plane which belongs to common sense; the ideas, associated by a capricious tie, bind and unbind themselves, without imposing the necessity of a solution. ”

“ It is no longer the effort to conquer the impossible, which endeavor saps our vital forces; it is a contingency which study and common sense strip of all aleatory principles, in order to give a form which becomes more tangible and more definite every day. ”