Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison’s line is a quiet provocation dressed as modesty: it demotes “methodology” from a priestly ritual to a disciplined version of what any alert person ought to do when confronted with messy reality. Coming from a historian who wrote big, confident narratives (and who helped popularize naval and exploratory history for broad audiences), “common sense” isn’t an anti-intellectual shrug. It’s a claim about where authority should come from: not from abstract theory, but from judgment earned in the archives, on the page, and in the friction between sources.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the mid-20th-century tug-of-war over what made history “scientific” - the rise of social-scientific models, quantification, and later, theory-heavy critiques of narrative. Morison is staking out a pragmatic middle: methods matter, but they should emerge from the problem at hand, not be imported like a prefabricated toolkit. “Applied to circumstances” is the tell; it frames the historian as a craftsperson responding to conditions, not a technician executing a universal protocol.

There’s also a cultural politics to the phrase. “Common sense” signals accessibility and a democratic posture - history as intelligible, not gated. Yet it smuggles in a warning: common sense is never neutral. It reflects what a given era deems reasonable, which can quietly enshrine prevailing assumptions (about nation, empire, whose experiences count as evidence). Morison’s intent is to defend narrative judgment against methodological fetishism, even as he risks naturalizing his own vantage point as simply “sensible.”