COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY, or "the philosophy of common sense," is the usual designation of the Scottish philoso phy or the Philosophy of the Scottish school consisting of Thomas Reid (I 710-1796), Adam Ferguson (1724-1816), Dugald Stewart (1 7 J3-1828) and others. This trend of thought was a reaction or revolt against the scepticism of Hume and the subjective ideal ism of Berkeley, both of which were regarded as the consequences of a false start, namely an excessive stress on ideas, and as reduc tions to absurdity of the premises from which they started. For the false start Descartes and Locke were held to be chiefly re sponsible inasmuch as they gave to ideas an importance that in evitably made everything else succumb to them. "Ideas (says Reid) seem to have something in their nature unfriendly to other existences . . . they have by degrees supplanted their constitu ents, and undermined the existence of everything but themselves. First, they discarded all secondary qualities of bodies ; and it was found out by their means that fire is not hot, nor snow cold, nor honey sweet; and, in a word, that heat and cold, sound, colour, taste and smell, are nothing but ideas or impressions. Bishop Berkeley advanced them a step higher, and found out, by just reasoning from the same principles, that extension, solidity, space, figure and body, are ideas, and that there is nothing in nature but ideas and spirits. But the triumph of ideas was completed by the Treatise on Human Nature, which discards spirits also, and leaves ideas and impressions as the sole existences in the universe" (Works, i. p. 109) . In the actual perception of the normal un sophisticated man, sensations are not mere ideas or subjective im pressions but carry with them the belief in corresponding qualities as belonging to external objects. Such beliefs, Reid insists, "be long to the common sense and reason of mankind," and in matters of common sense "the learned and the unlearned, the philosopher and the day-labourer, are upon a level." Kant was too much under the influence of idealism to respect the philosophy of common sense, which is the natural enemy of idealism, and so we find him speaking contemptuously of common sense as "one of the subtlest inventions of modern times, by which the emptiest talker may coolly confront the profoundest thinker, and hold out against him" (Prolegomena, Introduction). That, however, did not kill the philosophy of common sense. Not only was it adopted as the official philosophy of France from 1816 till 18 7o, but in one form or another it has survived to this day, and contemporary thinkers still oppose certain subjective and idealistic tendencies by an appeal to common sense.
See J. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy (1875) and the articles on the philosophers named. (A. Wo.)