ABSTRACT
In the table of contents to his Prospectus of a History of English Philosophy, Hazlitt's general view of the subject includes the claim that philosophy is ‘little more than common sense well understood’ (ii, 289). Yet the philosophical intervention of his own by which he set most store, that ‘metaphysical choke-pear’ the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, is, as Hazlitt himself frequently concedes with some pride, far from being the straightforward clarification of common sense. He describes it less as an accessible expansion of shared assumptions not usually brought to reflection, more as a philosophical adventure, one experienced in swimming against the prevailing empiricist tide in British theoretical speculation. In any case, an exercise in the exposition of inalienable prejudices would have supported Burke's anti-speculative arguments. While Hazlitt is on the common sense school's side in most philosophical questions, as a political radical he must avoid its reputation for anti-sceptical conservatism. The complexities of his radicalism immediately emerge because he calls his opponent modern philosophy. But Hazlitt's opposition to the ‘modern’ here is above all conceived as timely. Although the experiential bias of the founder of ‘modern philosophy’, Bacon, ‘was the most needed at the time ¼ mind has for a good while past, been in some danger of being overlaid by matter. ¼ We seem to have resigned the natural use of our understanding, and to have given up our own existence as a nonentity’ (ii, 115). To be ‘modern’ tout court is precisely not to be modern, not to apprehend the philosophical needs of the age: it is to be belated.
