Part 39

It is not necessary to abandon one's convictions in order to reflect principles which, without contradicting them, give them a favorable color.

Common sense can remain intact and be differently colored, according as it is applied to the arts, politics, or science.

It would not deserve its name if it did not know how to yield to circumstances, in order to adorn the momentary caprice with flowers of reason.

In the primitive ages, common sense consisted in keeping oneself in a perpetual state of defense; attack was also at times prescribed, by virtue of the principle that it is pernicious to allow one's rights to be imperiled.

Attack was also at times a form of repression.

It was also a lesson in obedience and a reminder not to misunderstand individual rights.

In later times, common sense served to make the advantages of harmony appreciated.

It directed the descendants of peoples exclusively warlike toward the secret place where science unfolds itself to the gaze of the vulgar; then it taught them to provide for their existence by working.

It has demonstrated to them the necessity of reflection, by inciting them to model their present course of life on the lessons which come from the past.

It has given them the means to evoke it easily and effectively.

It has injected into their veins the calmness which permits them to draw just conclusions and to adopt toward preceding reasonings the attitude of absolute neutrality, without which all former presentiments are marred by error.

Each epoch was, for common sense, an opportunity to manifest itself differently.

At the moment when poetry was highly honored, it would have been unreasonable to have ignored it, for the bards excited great enthusiasm by their songs which gave birth to heroes.

And now, imbued with the principles which in his day might be taken to represent what we to-day call advanced ideas, Yoritomo continues:

"Common sense can, then, without renouncing its devotion to truth, take various forms or shades, for the truth of yesterday is not always the truth of to-day.

"The gods of the past are considered simply as idols in our day and the virtues of the distant past would be, at present, moral defects which would prevent men from winning the battle of life, whose ideal is The Best for which all the faculties should strive."

The Shogun also touches lightly on a subject which, already discust in his time, has become, in our day, a burning truth; it is a question of a fault, which in the world of practical life and in that of business can cause considerable injury to him who allows it to be implanted in him.

We refer to that tendency which has been adorned or rather branded successively with the names of hypochondria, pessimism, and lastly neurasthenia, an appellation which comprises all kinds of nervous diseases, the characteristic of which is incurable melancholy.

"There are people," he says, "who are afflicted with a special color-blindness.

"Everything they look at assumes immediately to their eyes the most somber hues.

"They see in a flower only the germ of dry-rot; the most ideal beauty appears to them only like the negligible covering of some hideous skeleton.

"However, they hang on to this life which they do not cease to calumniate, and people of common sense are rarely found who will try to reason with them from a common-sense standpoint:

"'Since life is so insupportable to you, why do you impose upon yourself the obligation to struggle with it?

"'Only insane people try to prolong their sojourn in a place where they suffer martyrdom.'

"It is true that when, perchance, this argument is placed before them, they do not fail to reply by invoking the shame of desertion.

"'Well, is not then the interest of the struggle to which we are subjected a sufficient attraction to keep us at our post?'"

And, always enamored with the doctrine, which we are now assiduously maintaining, he concludes:

"Common sense is, at times, the unfolding of a magnificent force which incites us to attune our environment to actualities.