Laudator Temporis Acti

Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Samuel Johnson (1944; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 363:

Another way to describe the circumstances which made the age particularly favorable to conversation would be to say that the eighteenth century was the golden age of the amateur, and that conversation is an art of which amateurs are the best practitioners. It flourishes most exuberantly when reasonableness rather than expert knowledge is the thing most trusted, when the assumption is that truth can most often be arrived at not, as the Middle Ages believed, by metaphysical argument and not, as we profess to hold, by scientific method, but by the application of "common sense"; and we may define "common sense" as the acceptance of certain current assumptions, traditions and standards of value which are never called into question because so to question any of them might be to necessitate a revision of government, society and private conduct more thoroughgoing than anyone liked to contemplate.