Of Adages and Common Sense.

A book that I keep by my bedside for intellectual comfort is a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. The essays are well written, and deal with issues that are still with us today: war, political strife, religious nonsense and so on. Most of all, the essays are brimming with that most sought after quality -- common sense.

A good example of such common sense is the following: "Take a beam wide enough to walk along; suspend it between two towers; there is no philosophical wisdom, however firm, which could make us walk along it just as we would if we were on the ground."

Some have deemed Montaigne's observation here to be mundane,* but surely 'mundaneness'**  is central to common sense. After all, it is 'sense' that is 'common' to us all.

Of course, this doesn't make it necessarily correct. Common sense, in terms of geography, dictates that the world is flat. It is, however, a worthwhile starting point, in that it describes a point of view that most can agree upon. To go further, we enter the world of the adage.

An example, from the Chinese: "In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly." The common sense element here is the fact that turkeys cannot fly; the extension of thought into adage posits that if conditions alter, the 'cannot' becomes a 'can'.

Let's do it again, using something a bit more complicated. Before the Arabs fell into the tyranny of religious dogma, they did some really sharp thinking. One example: "What comes from the lips reaches the ears. What comes from the heart reaches the heart." Common sense, to be sure, but making a further point -- unless both aspects are involved, we are in the realm of the meaningless. Certainly Shakespeare was aware of this dual aspect, albeit in a slightly different context, when he has Hamlet say, "My words fly up; my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to Heaven go."

This could go on and on, but I trust I have made my point. At least, in little.

Beyond adage, of course, lie the mother lodes of knowledge found in science, mathematics and philosophy (and Montaigne isn't bad here either). I must warn the reader, however, that philosophy can be tricky. This closing excerpt comes from the World Philosopher's Conference in Brighton, England:

"Any cat has one tail more than no cat. But no cat has two tails. So any cat, quite clearly, has three tails."

Q. E. D.

* Montaigne often mountaineered on the interface between the Catholicism and the classical world of letters. He had, then, his critics.

** I doubt that this is a word. --Ed.
     It is now. -- L.S.S.