the
strongest hold of it. By doing this habitually and skillfully with
respect to the various impressions and circumstances with which our
experience makes us acquainted, it forms a series of unpremeditated
conclusions on almost all subjects that can be brought before it, as
just as they are of ready application to human life; and common sense is
the name of this body of unassuming but practical wisdom. Common sense,
however, is an impartial, instinctive result of truth and nature, and
will therefore bear the test and abide the scrutiny of the most severe
and patient reasoning. It is indeed incomplete without it. By ingrafting
reason on feeling, we 'make assurance double sure.'

'Tis the last key-stone that makes up the arch...
Then stands it a triumphal mark! Then men
Observe the strength, the height, the why and when
It was erected; and still walking under,
Meet some new matter to look up, and wonder.

But reason, not employed to interpret nature, and to improve and perfect
common sense and experience, is, for the most part, a building without a
foundation. The criticism exercised by reason, then, on common sense may
be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe.
Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy or
bigoted prejudice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up
the avenues of knowledge, and 'shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.' It
is not enough to show that there is no reason for a thing that we do
not see the reason of it: if the common feeling, if the involuntary
prejudice sets in strong in favour of it, if, in spite of all we can do,
there is a lurking suspicion on the side of our first impressions,
we must try again, and believe that truth is mightier than we. So, in
ordering a definition of any subject, if we feel a misgiving that there
is any fact or circumstance emitted, but of which we have only a vague
apprehension, like a name we cannot recollect, we must ask for more
time, and not cut the matter short by an arrogant assumption of the
point in dispute. Common sense thus acts as a check-weight on sophistry,
and suspends our rash and superficial judgments. On the other hand, if
not only no reason can be given for a thing, but every reason is clear
against it, and we can account from ignorance, from authority, from
interest, from different causes, for the prevalence of an opinion or
sentiment, then we have a right to conclude that we ha