Reason and Common Sense

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REASON AND COMMON SENSE REASON AND COMMON SENSE AN INQUIRY INTO SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY by R. G. MAYOR with a Preface by SIR DESMOND MACCARTHY, L. L. D. ROUTLEDGE KEGAN PAUL LTD Broadway House, 68-74 Garter Lane London NOTE ROBERT GROTE MAYOR died in 1947, leaving Reason and Common Sense in typescript. It is here printed in an abridged form, which has been prepared and edited by J. P. Corbett, Fellow and Jowett Lecturer in Philosophy, Balliol College, Oxford, and E. Oilman, Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, Manchester University. PREFACE ROBERT MAYOR RBERT JOHN GROTE MAYOR, Robin to all his friends, was born in 1869. Both his parents belonged to gifted families. His father was the Rev. J. B. Mayor, Professor at Kings College, London, and the author of a first-rate book on Greek philosophy. Two of his Mayor uncles were also Fellows of St. Johns, Cambridge one was a mathematician, the other that eminent scholar J. E. B. Mayor, who edited Juvenal, became Regius Professor of Latin at Cambridge and according to the Dictionary of National Biography, revelled in classical literature from the age of six. His mother was the niece of George Grote, the author of that History of Greece which for many years remained superior to all others he was also a banker, an important M. P., and an original founder of the first London University, and he was duly buried in Westminster Abbey. His brother, John Grote, won a considerable reputation as a Benthamite, and became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. Francis Galton, who collected evidence of ability running in families, would have been interested in Robin Mayors descent. He entered Eton as a K. S. in 1882 and before he left he had won The Newcastle, the prime classical award, and also a scholarship at Kings. To Cambridge he went in 1888. He had been, as might have been expected, happy at Eton, for he was born friendly, modest and cheerful, and he was also athletic. I cannot, however, imagine him glorying much either in retrospect or at the time, over his school successes. I picture him at Eton as an even-tempered, independent boy, conscientious, but un censorious, privately fastidious, not very talkative, laughing a good deal with other boys, reading much, working hard and sometimes craving for more rational conversation than was often available the sort of boy with whom other boys occasionally take viii PREFACE council, though they never pour out to him their grievances, ambitions, and troubles. It must have always been a great pleasure to teach him with his alert, clear mind and accurate, retentive memory, and that innate modesty which was characteristic of him. He seldom talked about his school-days. Indeed, he was one of those who, if the present is tolerable, seldom live much in the past, although I am inclined to make an exception of those years he spent at Cambridge they, I think, were never far from his mind. His university years as often happens with men of intellect who are responsive to friendship seemed to him to have held if not the richest portion of life, what, at any rate, is almost better, the richest promise. He was in the first class in both parts of the Classical Tripos, won both the Bell and the Craven scholarships and was proxime accessit for the Chancellors Medal. Incidentally, he also captained the University Hare and Hounds, and won in 1891 the Inter-University Cross Country Championship. Yet it is safe to say that these gratifying successes, academic and athletic, were of less importance to him than his friendships, and what he learned from talk with his friends. In 1894 he obtained a Research Fellowship on the strength of a dissertation on The Oligarchical Revolutions in Athens at the Close of the Fifth Century...