In this highly engaging book, André Gushurst-Moore surveys twelve of history’s greatest men of Anglo-American letters: Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Henry Newman, Orestes Brownson, Benjamin Disraeli, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Russell Kirk. Along the way, he explores several interrelated themes, all intended to illuminate “the common mind.”
What is this common mind? It is that which rests upon the uniformity of human nature, and which encompasses qualities and values shared by people throughout history simply by virtue of their common humanity. Predicated on this is the idea of common sense and a properly formed conscience, the “faculty that negotiates . . . moral action.” The accumulation of insights and wisdom imparted by such a conscience over the centuries represents what Gushurst-Moore then calls “the wisdom of the integrated person” and “the integrated wisdom of the group”—what we might call “custom” and “tradition.”
As Gushurst-Moore explains, the common mind is really an “integrative” mind, bringing together the best of the modern, the medieval, and the classical. In the works of Thomas More, with whom these essays start, it is reflected in the influence of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Cicero, Lucian, Thucydides, and Sallust. In short, the common mind is “the mind of Europe, the settled mind of the West.”
Its opposite is “the disintegrative mind.” This is the mind of the sophist, the Pyrrhonist, Ockhamist nominalist, radical skeptic, and deconstructionist—anyone
