I DETEST the incompetent philosopher—the philosopher who is so presumptuous as to treat difficult problems as simple ones; and the philosopher who is a dilettante and an amateur and seeks amusement in the discussion of sacred things.

But I have a real affection for the non-philosopher, the man who stands unimpressed and indifferent before the thinker’s distinctions and syllogisms and dialectics; the man who has the whole truth in a few simple fundamentals, expressed in limpid maxims, which serve as unfailing guides to his right thinking and his right doing—the man who has good sense, in other words, and who, moreover, is wise.

It is not that I admire him as an ideal of what a man ought to be. It is very clear to me that each of us has his peculiar work to do in this world. To the philosopher fall the doubts and the problems of humanity. His is the task of perfecting old ideas or of finding new ones. This is the vineyard where he must labour and gather his vintage of suffering and of joy. So I would not change places with the “man of common sense.” For one thing, if the latter has none of the trials and troubles of the thinker, he has plenty of his own, as all mortal creatures have. Not even the plain man is truly happy!

Strange as the confession may sound, I love him rather as the child of the philosopher! What other children—to explain more fully—might the philosopher have? Pupils, perhaps? Followers? No, because pupils and followers never inherit the philosopher’s thought, but just his phrases. Other philosophers? Philosophers who have minds of their own? These much less: for they, to turn a phrase of Carducci, “are sons of the laborious earth,” born not of a parthenogenesis of philosophy, but of the new events and new needs of their own times, which they comprehend and interpret, establishing the connections of their thought not with the thought before them but with all the history of mankind before them—wider, vaster connections, that is. Or can it be that the philosopher is in some way congenitally deprived of the consolations of parenthood? Is he alone, among all men, predestined to sterility?

The “man of common sense” comes along just in time to rescue the philosopher from this humiliating predicament. For the “common sense” of the “man of common sense” is the heritage left by the philosophies preceding him, an inheritance continually increased by the capacity it has for absorbing the net products of new thought. Common sense is not a gift of nature, but a historical growth, a distillation of the thinking of the ages; and since it takes over the results of thought, and never the processes by which those results were obtained, it accepts them without subtleties and without reservations, without any of the paraphernalia of doctrine. Philosophy makes its way into the mind of the man of common sense as a simple statement of self-evident truths; and these are ready and eager at any moment to step forward as principles of practical action—as principles of reform in social and moral life, as principles of restoration or revolution in political life.

The man of common sense is the son of the philosopher and the only offspring the philosopher cares to have.

So the poet’s work is not intended to create other poets. New poets will come into the world, but in new times and under new conditions. And they too will be, not children of poets, but “sons of the earth,” enfants de la nature. The poet will set other souls to vibrating with his words, souls that have not lived his hopes and fears and errors and redemptions. The latter can feel the beauty in the works he has created and derive therefrom an inspiration that will uplift their hearts and a vision that will bring them deeper and broader knowledge of the reality of things.