Odd that it should be called “common sense,” when the quality that those words have been appointed to describe is itself not only uncommon but extremely rare. Everyone will have his own notions of what constitutes common sense, and mine include an ability to tote up accurately the debits and credits that any complex decision presents; sufficient detachment to be able to remove one’s own emotions and personal interests in order to gain maximum lucidity in understanding; a gift for grasping and articulating the obvious point that eludes everyone else; and, above all, a superiority of perspective that permits one to realize how issues and questions that agitate minds and stir hearts today will appear five and ten and fifty years from now. “Mere common sense,” we say, but so unusual is it that we might as well say “mere transcendent beauty” or “mere wisdom.”

Common sense has not been notable among German philosophers, French literary critics, professors of all nationalities, psychotherapists, and most people who earn their livings with their minds. Not that it is the preserve of the working classes or common people. It pops up with a randomness Darwinism cannot account for or common sense itself quite comprehend. A French diplomatist might have it, or a Texas politician, or a Jewish grandmother. How charming that it should have shown up, in heightened form, in a portly English clergyman born in 1771 who bore the name of Smith—though Macaulay, when told that a man named Smith