SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ART 521
committing nobody to anything, the process of concrete applica-
tion, in testing the actual forms of work and wealth which make
up industry, gave to it a continual increase of meaning. While
the widest divergence would be found in the formal definitions of
such terms as “human welfare’ or “social progress,” a large and
growing body of agreement would emerge, when a sufficient num-
ber of practical issues had been brought up for consideration. The
truth of our standard and the validity of our calculus are estab-
lished by this working test. It is not wonderful that this should
be so, for the nature and circumstances of mankind have so much
in common, and the processes of civilisation are so powerfully as-
similating them, as to furnish a continually increasing community
of experience and feeling. It is, of course, this fund of ‘com-
mon sense’ that constitutes the true criterion. The assumption
that ‘common sense’ is adequate for a task at once so grave and
delicate may, indeed, appear very disputable. Granting that
human experience has so much in common, can it be claimed that
the reasoning and the feeling based on this experience will be so
congruous and so sound as to furnish any reliable guide for con-
duct? Surely ‘common sense’ in its broadest popular sense can
go a very little way towards such a task as a human interpreta-
tion of industry.
There is no doubt a good deal of force in this objection. If we
are to invoke ‘common sense’ for the purposes of an interpreta-
tion or a valuation, it must evidently be what is termed an
‘enlightened common sense.” And here at once we are brought
into danger lest enlightenment should not supply what is re-
quired, viz., a clearer or more fully conscious mode of common
sense, but a distorted or sophisticated mode. How real this
danger is, especially in the conduct of public affairs, may be re-
cognised from the excessive part played by certain highly con-
scious and over-vocal interests of the commercial and intellect-
ual classes in the art of government. The most pressing task of
civilisation in the self-governing nations of our time is so to spread
the area of effective enlightenment as to substitute the common
sense of the many for that of the few, and to make it prevail. It
is this common sense, more or less enlightened, that the disin-
terested statesman takes for the sanction of his reading of the
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