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4. McCosh's Scientific Intuitionism
- University of Missouri Press
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101 4 McCosh’s Scientific Intuitionism Thefeaturesof AmericanmoralconsciousnessthatWitherspoonrepresented continued essentially unchanged to James McCosh’s presidency at Princeton, approximately the time that outlook transitioned to something new (though not entirely new). American religious understanding had not suddenly transmogrified since Tocqueville marveled at American religiosity in the 1830s. The language of duty to God, neighbor, and country was still ubiquitous, as even a cursory review of Civil War literature makes clear. In terms of American outlook , Witherspoon and McCosh can be taken as symbols of the age: this phase of the American mind corresponds closely in time and substance with the reign of Scottish realism in the American academy. Given the historical continuity, McCosh’s writings with respect to American common sense are of interest primarily as a further differentiation of Witherspoon’s version, and no effort is made here to point out American correspondences at every step. And although McCosh was a public intellectual of consequence, he was not a statesman as Witherspoon was, nor could his public commentary on social affairs match the reach and power of that founder.1 So we won’t bother to consider McCosh as common sense practitioner, either. On this score, Witherspoon’s example is quite sufficient. Rather, we will focus here on McCosh’s extraordinary account of the nature and operation of certain intuitions and how they ground his ethical theory; on his illuminating treatment of the relation between conscience and the larger natural order; and on how his thought reveals on other points certain fatal weaknesses of Scottish realism as it stood in the late nineteenth century, weaknesses that made a turn in American thought all but inevitable. H. G. Townsend wrote in 1934 that “Scottish realism . . . found in [McCosh] a culmination and a crystallization.”2 This is undoubtedly true. As J. David Hoeveler has said, McCosh was “clearly the last major voice of the Scottish 102 America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense Enlightenment and the system of philosophical realism for which it is best known,” and his chief philosophical writings are collectively a monument to clarity and precision.3 His greatest work, The Intuitions of the Mind, certainly should be ranked among the more important in the Scottish realist tradition, as it contains perhaps the most thorough, lucid, and convincing analysis of the rudiments of rationality that tradition provides.4 McCosh did not himself like the moniker“common sense,”believing it vague and misleading. “The word sense seems to associate the faculty [of intuition] with the bodily organism, with which certainly it has no connection,” he says, and the stipulation (implied, for instance, by Hutcheson and Witherspoon, see “Common Sense Moral Philosophy” in Chapter 3, above) that “common sense” refers to a kind of internal mental sense does not come close to clearing matters up: In its connotation as an internal sense the term has been used variously to mean a “sense common to all mankind,” providing “an original inlet of knowledge”;“good sense”or“practical sense,”gained through cumulative intelligent experience;“the knowledge imparted by the senses in common” (Aristotle’s koine aesthesis); and“the aggregate of original principles planted in the minds of all, and in ordinary circumstances operating in the minds of all.”5 The ambiguity of the term, McCosh says, has bred confusion for those outside the Scottish Common Sense tradition, and even for those within it.As McCosh sees it, Reid wanted to make use of two meanings, both good sense and the mind’s original principles; but McCosh insists,“It is only in this last sense that [common sense] can be legitimately employed in overthrowing skepticism, or for any philosophic purpose” (SP 222).6 He observes that common sense as good sense is according to an old saying, the most uncommon of the senses. This valuable property is not common to all men, but is possessed only by a certain number; and there are others who can never acquire it, and it is always the result of a number of gifts and attainments, such as an originally sound judgment and a careful observation of mankind and the world. In this signification, common sense is not to be the final appeal in philosophy, science, or any other department of investigation; though in all it may keep us from much error (SP 221). Common sense in this meaning, McCosh says, cannot be a final appeal because it can be wrong.“Practical sense, as it claimed to be, long opposed the doctrine of there being antipodes...