‘Common sense,’ said Descartes in his famous Discourse on Method, ‘is the best distributed commodity in the world.’ By common sense he implied, I imagine, superb reason lowly manifested, for reason too has hierarchies of understandments. To see a rose properly one has to apply the whole of our awakeness to it, the aristocracies of colour, the centrifugal form it unfolds itself in, the emergent perfume it ordinates and excites, and so on, and at each level, between the artist who sees the magnificence of the flower, and the grower and the buyer and the child and the old man, between the policeman and the sailor, the king (or Prime Minister Nehru always wore a red-rose on his tunic) and the palace chamberlain or his beguiling mistress, the rose is never the same rose. Finally, of course, nobody sees the same object in the same way as another, and even the same person does not see the object in the same manner twice in the same way (as Heraclitus and modern science have so wisely made us understand)4—thus all men at all times are rational but at different degrees of apprehension. Common sense therefore is the lowest common denominator of reason in all men.

This lowest common denominator suddenly took on such airs through the Renaissance, the Renaissance which gave poetry to everything human, and thus made of common sense a portent of divinity, that through the philosophers, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, wanting so to throw away the debris of smelly majesty, irrational, cruel, and expensive, they brought out the goddess of reason, a slut from some Parisian street, and dragged her, in their exaltation, in a befitting classical chariot (the revolution wanted to go back to fundamentals and so to the Greeks)—the slut was dragged through the streets of Paris and the liberty-drunk populace chanted her high praise—all that they remembered was, she was not Marie Antoinette. The queen was murdered, and the slut became goddess. And the selfsame populace later on murdered that great man of reason, Robespierre, for his reason had in its turn made him slit off many more heads than Louis XVI had ever dared.