le idea of the humps, the tortuosities, the
dislocations we have inflicted upon ourselves in order to depart from
simple common sense; and at our own expense we learn that one does not
deform himself with impunity. Novelty, after all, is ephemeral. Nothing
endures but the eternal commonplace; and if one departs from that, it is
to run the most perilous risks. Happy he who is able to reclaim himself,
who finds the way back to simplicity.

Good plain sense is not, as is often imagined, the innate possession of
the first chance-comer, a mean and paltry equipment that has cost
nothing to anyone. I would compare it to those old folk-songs,
unfathered but deathless, which seem to have risen out of the very heart
of the people. Good sense is a fund slowly and painfully accumulated by
the labor of centuries. It is a jewel of the first water, whose value he
alone understands who has lost it, or who observes the lives of others
who have lost it. For my part, I think no price too great to pay for
gaining it and keeping it, for the possession of eyes that see and a
judgment that discerns. One takes good care of his sword, that it be not
bent or rusted: with greater reason should he give heed to his thought.

But let this be well understood: an appeal to common sense is not an
appeal to thought that grovels, to narrow positivism which denies
everything it cannot see or touch. For to wish that man should be
absorbed in material sensations, to the exclusion of the high realities
of the inner life, is also a want of good sense. Here we touch upon a
tender point, round which the greatest battles of humanity are waging.
In truth we are striving to attain a conception of life, searching it
out amid countless obscurities and griefs: and everything that touches
upon spiritual realities becomes day by day more painful. In the midst
of the grave perplexities and transient disorders that accompany great
crises of thought, it seems more difficult than ever to escape with any
simple principles. Yet necessity itself comes to our aid, as it has done
for the men of all times. The program of life is terribly simple, after
all, and in the fact that existence so imperiously forces herself upon
us, she gives us notice that she precedes any idea of her which we may
make for ourselves, and that no one can put off living pending an
attempt to understand life. Our philosophies, our explanations, our
beliefs are everywhere confronted by facts, and these fac