6 Sense (with Sentence, Sensibility, and Sensible)
I. INTRODUCTORY
Everyone who speaks English is familiar with two meanings for the word sense: (a) ordinary intelligence or ‘gumption’, and (b) perception by sight, hearing, taste, smell or touch, which I shall call aesthesis. In our individual linguistic histories gumption is undoubtedly the earlier meaning. We had all been told to ‘have sense’, or asked why we ‘had not more sense’, years before we ever heard sense used to mean aesthesis. The aesthesis meaning belongs to a comparatively late, bookish, and abstract stratum of our vocabulary.
On the other hand there is no evidence that we reach the meaning aesthesis by a metonymy or any other kind of extension from the meaning gumption. In modern English the two meanings are not at all related as parent and child. They can be explained only by the pre-English history of the word; not of course that most English speakers have known or cared anything about that history, but that in their daily usages they have unconsciously availed themselves of the situation it had created.
Of the thousands who use the word sense, sometimes to mean gumption, and sometimes to mean aesthesis, only the tiny minority who are interested in language ever notice that they are doing so. A sudden transition from the one meaning to the other would affect most speakers like a pun.
II. ‘SENTIRE’
Sense is from sensus, the noun that goes with the verb sentire, and at the verb our story must begin. Its central area of meaning seems to me to have been something like ‘to experience, learn by experience, undergo, know at first hand’. ‘Catiline’, says Cicero, ‘is going to learn, going to find out (sentiet), that the consuls in this town are wide awake.’ That is, he is going to learn by (bitter) experience. The braggart in Phaedrus (V, ii) assures his fellow traveller that he will pursue the man who has robbed them both and ‘see that he learns’ (curabo sentiat) what sort of people he has meddled with. The English would be ‘I’ll show him’. As prices went up, says Tacitus, the mass of the people gradually came to know (sentire) the ills of war; as we might say ‘began to find out what war really means’. It can also be used of another sort of first-hand experience; that is, like know in the Authorised Version, it can mean ‘to have carnal knowledge of, sexual intercourse with’. Thus Ovid, addressing Neptune, can say ‘Ceres knew (sensit) you in the form of a horse, Medusa knew (sensit) you as a bird, Melantho knew (sensit) you as a dolphin’. In some contexts English see would be a good translation, but with no precise restriction to visual experience (cf. ‘He has seen active service’), so that we could render Horace’s lines ‘With you I saw (sensi) the fight at Philippi and the sauve-qui-peut rout’. The same author can use sentire—perhaps with less of conscious personification than we suppose—of a vine which ‘will not feel (sentiet) the withering south-wind’. For feel we could equally well put get, catch, suffer, or perhaps, in older English, taste. But we should have to use see again for the line where Virgil’s Venus saw (sensit) that Juno had been talking disingenuously. Strictly speaking, no doubt, such a ‘seeing’ would involve rapid half-unconscious inferences, but it would be felt as immediate; and certainly as firsthand compared with any knowledge of your opponent’s motives which you could get from a report by a third party.
Now the two most obvious instances of knowledge at first hand or by experience are (a) that of our own conscious psychological state at the moment, and (b) that which we receive by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. We shall not therefore be surprised if sentire is used of both. I know or perceive or (as the French would say) experiment, my present thought and emotions; sentio will do for that. I also know or perceive or experiment the hardness of this pen, the white of this paper, and the temperature of the room; sentio will do for that too. Thus from the beginning the verb has a tendency to bifurcation of meaning. How soon, or whether at any time, the Romans felt it to have what we should call ‘two meanings’ is a question for classical scholars. We, who are concerned with the later developments, may certainly (in view of those later developments) say that the word is already bifurcated in classical Latin. We shall therefore distinguish sentire (A) from sentire (B). Sentire (A) has what may loosely (with no pretence at philosophy) be called the introspective meaning; Sentire (B), the aesthesis meaning.
III. ‘SENTIRE (A)’
Although sentire (A) is itself a product of bifurcation, within it another bifurcation immediately threatens us. Of this subordinate bifurcation I do not think the Romans were aware. Our more analytic minds impose it. As translators we have to decide in each case whether we are going to render sentio (A) by ‘I feel’ or ‘I think’. Very often we cannot decide, and possibly a Roman would not have understood what we are asking. At the end of the first chapter of his Histories (Book 1) Tacitus congratulates himself on the felicity of a period in which you can sentire (feel? or think?) what you please and say quid sentias (what you think? or feel?). Seneca says to Lucilius, ‘I want my letters to run just as my talk would run if we were sitting or walking together . . . if possible I would rather show than say quid sentiam (what I feel? or think?) . . . This at least I’d like to assure you of: my sentire (my really thinking? my feeling? my really meaning?) all I said’. Cicero says of some philosopher ‘If he sensit as he speaks, he is depraved’. If he meant what he says? If he felt as he talks? If he thought as he talks?
There is an apparent (but, I think, only apparent) parallel to this in modern colloquial English, ‘I feel that last step in your argument is a bit doubtful’. But feel here is almost certainly used as a polite litotes, a deliberate understatement. To avoid the rudeness of saying ‘I have detected a non sequitur which I will now demonstrate’, we feign that what is really, or what we take to be, a rational perception, is merely a fugitive emotion. The mixture of think and feel in sentire has almost certainly nothing to do with understatement.
There is, then, a central semantic area of sentire (A) which resists our efforts to dichotomise. But there are also usages which fall neatly on one side or other of the line we want to draw, giving us sentire (A1) (to feel) and sentire (A2) (to think).
Sentire (A1) can be illustrated from the famous couplet in Catullus: ‘I love and hate. You ask me how? I don’t know; but I feel it (sentio) happening and it is torture’ (LXXXV). So also in Seneca, ‘to feel (sentire) grief at the loss of a friend’. The usage is not, however, very common.
Sentire (A2), on the other hand, is common and unambiguous. The verb here means not only to think or opine, but to ‘take a view’, to arrive at an opinion and give formal expression to it. Thus in Cicero, ‘I joined in opinion (assensi) with those who seemed to take the mildest opinion’ (lenissime sentire); or in Aulus Gellius, ‘if the judges take a view, come to a decision (senserint), in my favour’. This meaning was of great importance for later linguistic history.
IV. ‘SENTIRE (B)’
This is the aesthesis meaning: to perceive by one of the ‘senses’. It is quite simple and need not detain us. ‘We perceive (sentimus) the various smells of things’, says Lucretius (I, 298), or ‘You can perceive (sentire) the sound’ (IV, 560). It is often assumed, I fancy, that this is the oldest meaning of sentire, but that assumption would not make the general history of the word easier to understand.
V. THE NOUNS
The verb sentire is privileged to have two nouns. One is sentientia (like conscientia with conscire) which in classical Latin has become sententia. The other is sensus. There is a difference between them. Sententia is the noun of sentire only in its A-meaning; but sensus is the noun of sentire in all its meanings.
VI. ‘SENTENTIA’ AND ‘SENTENCE’
1. Since sentire (A2) means to think or opine, a man’s opinion, what he thinks, is his sententia. This usage is familiar to everyone from the often-quoted Terentian quot homines, tot sententiae, ‘There are as many opinions as there are men’. Middle English sentence retains this meaning; ‘the commune sentence of the peple false is’. By an important specialisation, sententia can mean the considered, final opinion of a judge: ‘Cato as judge gave his sententia,’ says Cicero. Hence English sentence comes to mean the judge’s decision about the punishment and finally the punishment itself—‘the sentence was death’. This is an excellent example of the merely homophonic status to which the different uses of a word are finally reduced. If you said ‘Jeremy Taylor can boast the longest sentence of any English writer’ and someone replied ‘Poor Wilde had a longer one’, this would be a pure pun.
2. A man’s opinion or sententia, what he thinks, can of course be distinguished from the words in which he expresses it. From this point of view sententia comes to signify meaning as opposed to words, content as opposed to form. ‘The Stoic doctrine about living according to Nature has, I believe, the following meaning (sententia)’, says Cicero. Old French and Middle English sentence can both be used in the same way. ‘This is the meaning (sentence) of Plato’s words in French’, says Jean de Meung. Chaucer boasts of giving us ‘playnly every word’ of Troilus’ song and not merely the sentence, the drift or meaning.
3. If a man’s meaning can be contrasted with his words, so the meaning of words can of course be contrasted with their sound. Thus we find Lucretius saying that you may be able to hear the sound of someone talking in the next room when you cannot make out the sententia or meaning (IV, 561).
4. Because sententia is ‘meaning’, the minimum unit of speech or writing which has a complete meaning can be a sententia. Thus Quintilian says the whole point of Lysias’ style would have been lost if he had had a system (ratio) for ‘beginning and ending sententias, his sentences’ (IX, iv).
5. When we say that an utterance is ‘full of meaning’ we do not merely claim that none of it is meaningless; we claim that it is profound, worth chewing on, ‘significant’. Just in the same way sententia can signify not bare ‘meaning’ but ‘depth of meaning’, meaningfulness, pith, profundity. Speaking of the old maxim ‘know thyself’, Cicero says it was attributed to a god because it has so much sententia—goes so deep, has ‘so much in it’. This is an important usage of Middle English sentence. The speech of Chaucer’s clerk was ‘short and quik and full of heigh sentence’; economical, full of life, and pregnant. There was no dead wood.
6. Both the preceding usages may have helped sententia to the meaning ‘maxim, saw, apophthegm, aphorism’. Quintilian rightly regards sententia, in this usage, as the equivalent of Greek gnome (VIII, v). A style full of sententiae is a gnomic style. English sentence long retained this as one of its commonest meanings: ‘a sentence or an old man’s saw’, we read in The Rape of Lucrece (l. 244). Overbury’s ‘Meere Scholer’ is one who ‘speaks sentences’. As late as Johnson’s time we find ‘A Greek writer of sentences’, an aphorist.
From sententia meaning a maxim, through sententiosus, we get our adjective sententious. Originally it had no derogatory implication. In his Second Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer Latimer observes ‘it is better to say it sententiously one time than to run over it an hundred times with humbling and mumbling’. To say it sententiously is to say it meaningfully, thinking of what you say. When Milton describes the Greek tragedians as teaching by ‘brief sententious precepts’ he is referring simply to their gnomic manner. By Fanny Burney’s time the word is beginning to have its modern force; in Caecilia (IV, 1) the truth of a remark can ‘palliate’ its ‘sententious absurdity’. The development had long been prepared, for ever since the sixteenth century the conversation of those who dealt much in saws and adages had been despised. Overbury’s ‘mere scholar’ we had a moment ago; you may add Donne’s clownish mistress, ‘natures lay Ideot’, whose talk, till he taught her better, had consisted of ‘broken proverbs and torne sentences’. The word has also, I suspect, been infected by the phonetic proximity of pretentious. A word needs to be very careful about the phonetic company it keeps. The old meaning of obnoxious has been almost destroyed by the combined influence of objectionable and noxious, and that of deprecate by depreciate, and that of turgid by turbid.
VII. ‘SENSUS’ AND ‘SENSE’
The least specialised meaning of this noun seems to me to correspond exactly to that given for the verb in paragraph II. Sensus is first-hand experience, immediate awareness of one’s own mental and emotional content. We have sensus of that which is erlebt. Ovid in exile envies Niobe for being turned into stone because she thus lost the sensus of her sorrows. Cicero’s own sensus tells him how strong love between brothers can be. In English he might have said ‘I know from what I feel myself’ or ‘My own heart tells me’. But it would be better to render it ‘I know because I’ve tried’ (or ‘because I’ve been through it’), for we must not fix a too narrowly emotional meaning on sensus. We want a meaning which will cover another Ciceronian passage. In the Republic (I, xxxviii) one disputant says to another ‘Use the evidence of your own sensus’. ‘My sensus of what?’ comes the reply. The required sensus turns out to be that of controlling anger by reason. In this context it is hardly possible to translate sensus by any word but ‘experience’; in others ‘awareness’ or (sometimes) ‘consciousness’ will do.
Such unspecified awareness is of course a common meaning of sense. ‘Of the highest vertue’, says Bacon, the common people ‘have no sense or perceiving at all’; compare Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused’. In much the same way we are said to have or lack a sense of honour, decency, danger, inferiority, or almost what you will. This meaning now exists, in an almost fossilised condition, in ‘sense of humour’. We hardly remember that this was originally an awareness of humours (idiosyncrasies) in our neighbours.
So much for the central, hardly differentiated, meaning of the word. We have now to follow its A- and B-bifurcations—its intellectual and sensory meanings.
VIII. ‘SENSUS’ AND ‘SENSE (A)’
1. Like sententia, it can mean opinion. ‘His sensus about politics pleases me greatly’, says Cicero—I like his political views. This may be the meaning of sense when Shakespeare says, ‘For in my sense ’tis happiness to die’. It is certainly so when Macaulay speaks about ‘the unanimous sense of the meeting’ or ‘the sense of the best jurists’.
2. Sensus is also used in the Vulgate to render Greek nous. Nous is a hard word. When St Paul says ‘Every one must be fully confident in his own nous’ and the Vulgate translates ‘Every one must be full to overflowing (abundet) in his own sensus’, one is tempted to equate nous with opinion—in which cases sensus would have exactly the same force as in the preceding examples. But I think nous comes to mean something like opinion only because it means mind (as we also, till lately, could have said ‘I told him my mind on the question’) and our next example confirms this. St Paul speaks of the nous which God cannot accept; Vulgate translates this as reprobum sensum. Nous and sensus here mean something like ‘frame’ or ‘state’ of mind. Both passages are important for their effect on the vernaculars. Thanks to the first, it was good French centuries later for Descartes to say chacun abonde si fort en son sens; thanks to the second, Burton can say ‘They are in a reprobate sense, they cannot think a good thought’, and Milton, ‘Insensate left or to sense reprobate’. In all three passages this meaning is derived, ultimately from the Vulgate. It entered English through the Rheims version of 1582, which reads at xiv. 5 ‘let every man abound in his own sense’, and at i. 28 ‘a reprobate sense’. That English and Protestant authors, one of them a good Greek scholar, should depend for a scriptural phrase either on Vulgate or Rheims will seem strange to many. Very ill-grounded ideas about the exclusive importance of the Authorised Version in the English biblical tradition are still widely held.
3. Like sententia, sensus, and of course sense, signify the meaning of a word. ‘This was the sensus of the word’, says Ovid. The whole of this book is about the senses of words. Here we have a usage from which, even without the help of developments still to be noticed, the meaning ‘gumption’ might have been developed. ‘Talk sense’ and ‘Have sense’ are very similar rebukes. But the first follows easily from sense signifying meaning: ‘Say things that have some meaning, stop uttering the non-significant.’ ‘He has no sense’ could have arisen (though the actual history is more complicated) as an ellipsis of ‘His conversation has no sense’.
4. By exaggeration sense (meaning) is often used loosely for important or pertinent meaning, so that, like sententia, it is equivalent to ‘depth of meaning’. The passage from Overbury, which I gave in a truncated form above, runs in full, ‘A meere scholar speaks sentences more familiarly than sense’. I do not think this means that his discourse was often meaningless, in the strict use of the word—only that it was, as we say, ‘gas’, there was ‘nothing in it’. Similarly when Herbert says of the sermon
if all want sense,
God takes a text, and preacheth patience,
he hardly envisaged a preacher who talked actual gibberish; the ‘want of sense’ would be vapidity, emptiness, ignorance or the like. This usage also can clearly help us towards the meaning ‘gumption’.
5. Like sententia, sensus can also mean a grammatical sentence. ‘It is best by far’, says Quintilian, ‘to end the sensus with a verb’ (IX, iv). So in Dryden, ‘Mr Waller first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs’.
6. To lack awareness (sensus), to have no opinion (sensus), to utter what has little or no meaning (sensus); all these are the marks of an unintelligent man. And sensus can also mean ‘frame of mind’. Here are four semantic pressures helping the word sensus to some meaning like ‘intelligence’ or ‘gumption’. In post-classical Latin it yields to them. We read in the Digest that neither a beast nor a madman has sensus. We also find the adjective sensatus used to mean ‘sensible, intelligent’ (classical Latin would probably have said cordatus). This development may also have been encouraged by an expression which we must now investigate.
IX. ‘COMMUNIS SENSUS’ AND ‘COMMON SENSE’
This has in its time borne a good many different meanings.
1. Koinos is the Greek for ‘common’, and we have already seen that sensus can be used as a translation of Greek nous. Koinos nous is defined by Epictetus thus: ‘There are some things which undistorted men perceive by the use of their common faculties. This state of affairs is called Koinos nous’ (III, vi, 8). Here we have, almost exactly, what common sense often means; the elementary mental outfit of the normal man. Communis sensus would be a very natural way of turning Koinos nous into Latin, but clear examples of communis sensus to mean intelligence are not very easy to find. This, from Phaedrus, is, I think, certain. The Fox, finding a tragic mask, remarks after sniffing and trundling it ‘What a fine physiognomy to have no brain inside it!’ The moral applies, says Phaedrus, to those people who have office and fame but no sensus communis (I, vii).
2. Distinct from this, so far as I can see, is the use of communis sensus as the name of a social virtue. Communis (open, unbarred, to be shared) can mean friendly, affable, sympathetic. Hence communis sensus is the quality of the ‘good mixer’, courtesy, clubbableness, even fellow-feeling. Quintilian says it is better to send a boy to school than to have a private tutor for him at home; for if he is kept away from the herd (congressus) how will he ever learn that sensus which we call communis? (I, ii, 20). On the lowest level it means tact. In Horace the man who talks to you when you obviously don’t want to talk lacks communis sensus. To say ‘lacks common sense’ would be a mistranslation. But the fact that the mistake is so tempting and the alteration so comparatively slight shows that these two semantic regions have at least a strip of common frontier. In that way even this usage may have made some small contribution to the later meaning.
3. Quite distinct from these is communis sensus or ‘common wit’ as a technical term in medieval psychology; originally, I presume, a rendering of Greek Koine aisthesis. The old psychologists gave man five ‘outward’, and five ‘inward’, wits (or senses). The five outward wits are what we call the five senses to-day. Sometimes they are called simply the senses, and the five inward ones are called simply the wits; hence in Shakespeare ‘my five wits nor my five senses’. Which five you lose, or whether you lose all ten, when you are frightened ‘out of your wits’ or ‘out of your senses’, I don’t know; probably the inward ones.
The five inward wits were originally memory, estimation, fancy, imagination, and common wit (or common sense). By Burton’s time the list has been reduced to three, but common sense is still one of them, and his account of it will serve our turn; it is ‘the judge or moderator of the rest . . . by whom we discern all differences of objects; for by mine eye I do not know that I see, or by mine ear that I hear, but by common sense, who judgeth of sounds and colours: they [sc. the eye and ear] are but the organs to bring the species (appearances, sense-data) to be censured (judged)’. It is in fact something like apperception; it turns mere sensation into coherent experience. We see its function in the 1590 Arcadia (III, xviii, 9) when Sidney explains how two combatants could go on fighting despite their severe wounds—‘Wrath and Courage barring the common sense from bringing any message of their case to the minde’.
It will be noticed that a man in whom the common sense or wit is suspended is not entirely in his right mind. One in whom it was permanently lacking would be an imbecile. Here we have yet another semantic pressure which could help common sense towards the meaning ‘gumption’.
4. Sensus, as we have seen, means all the erlebt; our experience, emotions, thoughts, apprehensions, and opinions. The communis sensus of mankind is what all men have ‘been through’ (e.g. pain and pleasure), or feel emotionally (fears and hopes), or think (that half a loaf’s better than no bread) or have some apprehension of (the comic, the praiseworthy), or agree to be true (that two and two make four).
Now the word communis is here ambivalent.
(a) It may contrast the sensus of the human race in general, unfavourably, with what experts think and know or what choicer spirits apprehend and feel. Common, taken that way, is ‘common or garden’, nothing above the ordinary; if you like, vulgar.
Thus Cicero says that in all arts except one (oratory) that is best which is furthest from the sensus of the ignorant; but in public speaking you have to stick to the common mode of speech and the custom of the communis sensus. You are not addressing men of learning or fine feeling; you can use only what will ‘find an echo in every bosom’. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the ‘godlike recompense’ of study or learning is to know ‘things hid and barr’d from common sense’ (I, i, 55–7), things beyond the thought and apprehension of ordinary men. When Spenser says that the pains of lovers seem ‘’gainst common sense, to them most sweete’ he does not mean, as we should if we used the same words, that the lovers are fools who like their pains contrary to all reason. He means that the gentle heart finds somehow sweet what the ‘swainish and ungentle breast’ with its merely ‘common’ apprehension would find simply disagreeable.
(b) But common may also contrast the sensus of humanity in general, favourably, with what is thought or felt by the irrational, the depraved, the sub-human. Common, so taken, has no association with vulgar. It is the quod semper, quod ubique, the normal and indeed the norm.
It is this, though he happens not to use the words common sense, that Hooker is thinking of when he says that ‘the general and perpetual voice of man is as the sentence of God himself’ (I, viii, 3). So is Cicero, when he says that some principle is vouched for ‘by truth and the nature of things and the sensus of every man’. Seneca is particularly illuminating. He first produces philosophical authority to show that the wise man is self-sufficient. But then he confirms it from a passage out of a comic poet in order to show that these sensus (plural) are communes, are ‘universal convictions’. The ‘common sense’ or vote or sentence of humanity is august enough to confirm even the teachings of the Stoics. St Augustine speaks of people ‘divorced by some madness from the communis sensus of man’. Centuries later the Jesuit Mariana writes that communis sensus ‘is, as it were, the voice of Nature whereby we may discern good from evil’.
Thus the ambivalence of the word common brings it about that one’s sense may be disparaged by that adjective; but equally, one’s sense may be all the better for its ‘commonness’. But it is time to return to the B-branch.
X. ‘SENSUS’ AND ‘SENSE (B)’
1. Sensus is the sensory awareness of anything. ‘If’, says Cicero, ‘an organism admits the sensus of pleasure, it also admits that of pain.’ So in English: ‘then first with fear surpris’d and sense of pain’.
2. A faculty of sensory perception, one of the five senses or outward wits. ‘Every organism has sensus [plural]’, says Cicero in the place I have just quoted. What before fruition pleased the lovers in all ways, afterwards ‘takes [charms] but one sense’, said Donne. In English there is (or perhaps was) a common use of the singular sense, collectively, to mean all the senses, the whole life of what medieval psychologists called the sensitive (as distinct from the vegetable or rational) soul. This appears in Donne’s reference to ‘dull sublunary lovers, love Whose soul is sense’, or Tennyson’s ‘sense at war with soul’—that is, in older and more precise terms, the sensitive soul at war with the rational. There is little doubt that sense is being thus used collectively when Hamlet says (III, iv, 71), ‘Sense, sure you have, Else you could not have motion’. One might be momentarily tempted to take sense here for gumption or judgement; but if it meant that, only a rather strained and remote connection with motion could be made out. If, on the other hand, Hamlet means ‘You must have senses, must have a sensitive soul’, he is making a clear and simple application of the maxim, originally Aristotelian, that ‘the external senses are found in all creatures which have the power of locomotion’.
(Since we have here run across the sensitive soul it may be worth noticing that its name in Middle English is sometimes ‘sensualitee’. That is why Chaucer’s Parson says that sensualitee ‘sholde have lordshipe . . . over the body of man’. When our foot ‘goes to sleep’, sensualitee, the sensitive soul, has suffered a local loss of lordship over the body. Needless to say, the word, thus used, has no ethical content.)
XI. ‘SENSE’ AND ‘SENS’ IN LATER TIMES
1. The first thing to notice is the continued, and equal, vigour both of what I have called ‘the introspective’, and what I have called ‘the aesthesis’, meanings. Preserved by the insulating power of the context, they flourish happily side by side without the slightest mutual contamination. Here are two lines from Pope:
What thin partitions sense from thought divide.
While pure Description held the place of sense.
In the first it would never have occurred to Pope, and has never occurred to any reader of Pope, to give sense any meaning but aesthesis—perception by the five outward wits. Equally, when we read sense in the second line, the idea of aesthesis never comes into our heads. This is obviously Herbert’s use (‘if all want sense’). Description fills up the void left by the lack of profundity, of pertinent comment on life, of intellectual meat. In a word, sense in the second line is almost synonymous with ‘thought’ in the first line, there contrasted with sense. The intrusion of either meaning into the wrong line would produce nonsense. No one commits it. No one needs any semantic gymnastics to avoid it. No one notices that there was anything to avoid. Both meanings are ‘handed to us on a plate’, as separate as if they were accidental homophones.
2. In earlier sections of the chapter we have seen sense signifying thought, awareness, meaning, depth of meaning, apprehension, and (in Late Latin) intelligence. We have seen common sense signifying apperception, and then the convictions common to all undepraved or normal men. As Epictetus was pretty well known (he is one of Pepys’s favourites) his koinos nous had probably gone into the pot too. All these, simmering together, finally give the meaning gumption. For there is no need to distinguish sens from le bon sens or le sens commun, nor sense from ‘good sense’ and ‘common sense’. Whatever the idea (or ideas) of a common sense contributed to the final flavour of the brew, it is now indistinguishable. Thus Descartes opens his Discourse on Method with a definition of le bon sens ou la raison; but by the second paragraph it has changed into la raison ou le sens. Descartes does not notice the change. With or without bon, sens is a synonym for raison.
3. An unexpected phenomenon now meets us. The passages quoted above from Seneca, Mariana, and Hooker make the common sense of mankind something very august. It is the voice of Nature, or even ‘is as the sentence of God himself’. Lay beside these Descartes’ statement that le (bon) sens is pretty equally bestowed on all men by nature; or Locke’s ‘He would be thought void of common sense who asked . . . why it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’. What has happened? There is no logical contradiction. But there is a change of atmosphere; the temperature has dropped. There are causes behind this which I cannot here properly develop; a weakening in the Renaissance conception of the dignity of Man, and a growing tendency to assign moral premisses to some faculty other than reason, so that reason (or sense) is now concerned only with truth, not also with good. But the ambivalence of common has also been at work. This permits what may be called either a maximising or a minimising view of that sense (or reason) which is common to all men. On the one hand, because it is universal, cutting across all frontiers and surviving in all epochs, it may be reverenced. On the other, if it is as common as that—like having two legs or a nose in your face—it can’t be anything very wonderful. To fall below it may be idiocy; to come up to it can’t possibly be a ground for self-congratulation. Locke’s words bring this out; a man doesn’t plume himself on grasping the principle that two contraries can’t both be true.
Now the curious thing is that the age which of all others made sense or good sense or common sense its shibboleth, is also the age which invariably approached it in this minimising spirit. For Locke, as we have seen, it is merely the opposite of imbecility. When Boileau says that the works of Scudéri are formed en dépit du bon sens, or that il faut, mesme en chansons, du bon sens, he means mere ‘reasonableness’. ‘A general trader of good sense is pleasanter company than a good scholar,’ says Addison. Something homely and unspectacular is suggested. ‘If we suppose him vexed’, says Johnson, ‘it would be hard to deny him sense enough to conceal his uneasiness.’ All that was needed was the most elementary prudence; not to be a fool. Pope says
But, as the slightest sketch, if justly traced,
Is by ill colouring but the more disgraced,
So by false learning is good sense defaced.
Sense is a ‘slight sketch’. It may be spoiled by false learning, but it will need a lot done to it before it becomes wit or wisdom.
At first it seems strange that the age which so constantly demanded sense should never speak of it with enthusiastic admiration. But presently one sees. The word has stooped to conquer. The implication of the whole Augustan attitude is ‘We’re not asking much. We’re not asking that poets should be learned, or that divines should be saints, or courtiers heroes, or that statesmen should bring in a heaven on earth. Our fathers tried that, and look what came of it. We ask only for rationality. A good many who tried to go beyond it never got as far. They became Enthusiasts. We are more modest. We ask for plain sense, but that we do insist on.’ The implication that if we really aim at this plain sense most of us will find that we have quite enough to do—for le sens commun (whoever said it first) n’est pas si commun—is never far below the surface. The demands of Augustanism (in reality, pretty exacting) are made to seem more obligatory by their apparent modesty. The less grandiose the name you give to your favourite virtue, the more you disgrace those who fail to practise it; they can’t do ‘even that’.
There is possibly a parallel to this in the (now perhaps obsolescent) use of decent and decency with reference to conduct which the speaker believed to be, and which perhaps was, altruistic, generous, or even heroic. Was there a double implication? (a) The standards in our class and nation are so high that what would elsewhere be praised as splendid ranks among us as ‘merely’ decent, or ‘common’ decency. (b) This behaviour is so completely obligatory that if you fail in it we must class you with people who spit in the dining-room.
4. What are we to make of Roscommon’s statement (he is advising us not to use ‘immodest words’) that ‘want of Decency is want of Sense’? A great many immodest words have plenty of sense (meaning) and most of them refer us to objects of sense (aesthesis). Some fairly vague idea of sense as judgement was probably in his mind. But I suspect that we here see the injuries the word has undergone by becoming the popular vogue-word; and that Roscommon, wishing strongly to censure obscenity, calls it ‘lack of sense’ chiefly because sense is the favourite term of eulogy and ‘lack’ of it therefore the strongest accusation. His usage is in fact mainly tactical. Just so one can imagine one of the ‘weaker brethren’ today saying that a man or a book lacked ‘percipience’ or ‘integration’, not because at that moment (or ever) he had a very clear notion what he meant by the words, but because, from going to many sherry parties and reading many reviews, he had discovered they meant something everybody ought to have.
XII. ‘SENSIBLE’ AND ‘SENSIBILITY’
As with the verb amare we have the adjective amabilis (lovable, capable of being loved), so of course with sentire we have sensibilis. Perhaps its most usual meaning is ‘apprehensible by the senses’; thus in Seneca ‘Those who give pleasure the highest place regard the good as something apprehensible by the senses (sensibile); we, on the other hand, as something apprehensible by the intellect (intelligible)’. This of course descends into English: ‘Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard, Bitter, Sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities’. That comes from what we have called in section IV the B-meaning of sentire. But English sensible sometimes derives from sentire (A). It then means ‘capable of being emotionally experienced’—usually strengthened by some word like very; as when Shakespeare’s Lucrece complains that her husband’s ‘passion’ makes her own woe ‘too sensible’.
But Latin adjectives of this type were subject to a peculiar semantic infirmity. One would expect penetrabilis to mean ‘penetrable, able to be pierced’. And so it does; Ovid can speak of a body penetrable by no dart, nullo penetrabile telo. But it can also mean ‘penetrating, able to pierce’; penetrabile frigus in Virgil means the piercing cold. Similarly one would expect comfortabilis and its derivatives to mean ‘capable of being strengthened’; but comfortable, when the Prayer Book speaks of ‘the most comfortable sacrament’ means ‘able to strengthen, strength-giving’. Conversely unexpressive in Lycidas (l. 176) means inexpressible. Sensibilis, by the same law, besides meaning ‘apprehensible’ (by the senses or otherwise) can mean ‘able to feel, able to be aware’. Thus in Lactantius’ Divine Institutions the creation of man is described in the words ‘Then God made for Himself a sentient (sensibile) and intelligent image’ (II, xi).
This is exactly the meaning of sensible when in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, hearing the wall cursed by Pyramus and Thisbe, Theseus says ‘The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again’ (V, i, 181); or when Hooker writes ‘Beasts are in sensible capacity as ripe even as men themselves’ (I, vi, 2), they see, smell and feel at least as well as we do.
Sometimes we may doubt whether sensible is intended to mean ‘able to feel’ or ‘able to be felt’. When Claudio in Measure for Measure (III, i, 120) speaks of ‘this sensible, warm motion’, does he mean that organic movement in him which can be felt, or that movement of nerves and brains whereby he is capable of feeling other things? When Milton’s Mammon hopefully suggests that habituation to the climate of Hell will in due course ‘remove the sensible of pain’, will it remove that within him and the other fiends which is capable of feeling pain or that in the pain which is perceptible? (In the facts, no doubt, there would be no difference between these two alternatives; linguistically, I think there is.)
From the meaning ‘able to feel’, sensible proceeds to that of ‘actually feeling’, as in Johnson’s ‘I am not wholly insensible of the provocations’. There is often an overcharge of meaning so that the word signifies ‘fully, or vividly, or excessively, aware of’. This may be present in the example I have just quoted. When Dalila exhorts Samson with the words ‘What remains past cure Bear not too sensibly’, she certainly means ‘Let your consciousness of it be as little acute, as unemphatic, as possible’. But the idea of a superfluity to be avoided is of course partly contributed by the too. In the following from Dryden, however, though too is present, it qualifies not sensible but the succeeding words: ‘The gloomy sire, too sensible of wrong to vent his rage in words’, so that sensible of must mean ‘deeply or violently responsive to’. So too in Tom Jones (V, vi) ‘His backwardness . . . and his silence . . . wrought violently on her sensible and tender heart’. A modern would have used ‘sensitive’.
The state of being (with whatever meaning) sensible is of course sensibility (with the corresponding meaning). Hence in scientific or philosophical texts sensibility is sentience; the opposite of that insensibility in which, say, a faint or an anaesthetic may plunge us. The popular and colloquial use is of more interest.
Sensibility, so used, always means a more than ordinary degree of responsiveness or reaction; whether this is regarded with approval (as a sort of fineness) or with disapproval (as excess). Addison approvingly defines modesty as a ‘quick and delicate feeling’ in the soul, ‘such an exquisite sensibility as warns her to shun the first appearance of anything which is hurtful’. Burke, while maintaining that ‘a rectitude of judgment in the arts does in a great measure depend upon sensibility’, warns us that ‘a good judgment does not necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure’. Johnson speaks of it a little contemptuously but shows in doing so that it began to be generally admired: ‘the ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence dispose the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time and communicate it at another’.
The more than normal responsiveness which sensibility connotes need not be responsiveness to beauty. Often it is tenderness towards the sufferings of others, so that it covers most of what would once have been described as pity or even charity. The important difference is that the idea of a merely temperamental vulnerability has replaced that of a habit in the will, achieved by practice and under Grace, as the thing admired in the merciful. ‘Dear Sensibility,’ exclaims Sterne, ‘Sensorium of the world’, and cites as an instance of it a peasant whose ‘gentle heart bleeds’ at the sight of an injured lamb. Cowper writes lines ‘Addressed to Miss—’ which combat Mrs Greville’s Prayer for Indifference. Heaven has decreed that all our ‘true delights’ should ‘flow from sympathy’. He prays to be granted, as long as he lives, ‘sweet sensibility’. I think vulnerability to pity is still the main idea. But in Mrs Radcliffe sensibility perhaps implies a more universal morbidezza, though pity still makes an important part of it. Her heroine had ‘uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace. As she advanced in youth this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposition’.
The admired quality could not be better described. Mrs Radcliffe still remembers that it can be regarded as an excess (are not the virtues of Fielding’s heroes ‘the vices of really good men’?) and mentions it with a pretty pretence of censure—‘too exquisite for lasting peace’. It is the very tone in which people ostensibly confess what they actually boast (‘I know it’s very silly of me but I can’t bear to see anything suffer’). Notice too that the pains inflicted on the young lady by her sensibility are amply recompensed by the fact that they make her ‘a very interesting object’. But not to everyone. Only to the only people she would want to attract, ‘persons of a congenial disposition’. For of course she would not have wished, any more than Marianne Dashwood, to interest a Colonel Brandon.
XIII. ‘SENSIBLE (D.S.)’
When sense (gumption, reasonableness) becomes the quality universally demanded, the need for an adjective to describe those who have it will inevitably be felt. On etymological and logical grounds sensate had the strongest claims to this post. But the language rejected it. Perhaps it sounded too technical and scholastic. Sensible, despite the meanings it already had, was given this new one. Thus it acquires its dangerous sense: ‘having ordinary intelligence, the opposite of silly or foolish’. It is in some ways a strange usage. To call a man sensible because he has sense is at first sight as odd as to call him ‘memorable’ because he has memory or ‘regrettable’ because he feels regret. (A ‘barkable dog’, I am told, occurs in legal language.) Perhaps this is why Johnson, who seems freely to have used sensible (d.s.) in conversation, stigmatises it as ‘merely colloquial’ in the Dictionary.
How long before his time sensible (d.s.) had been in use is not easy to determine. Some think they find it when Falstaff says to the Chief Justice, ‘For the box of the ear that the prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord’. But there are surely great difficulties in taking sensible here to mean prudent or intelligent. For one thing, rudeness and good sense are a strange antithesis. For another, the Chief Justice (as Shakespeare well knew from Holinshed) had reacted to his box on the ear by sending the Prince to jail. And neither the Chief Justice himself nor anyone else thought this a prudent thing to do. Two other meanings for ‘sensible lord’ both seem to me to fit the context better. It might mean sensitive, thin-skinned, over-susceptible. Falstaff may, probably would, take the view that a mere Chief Justice, insulted by royalty, would have been wise to pocket the insult. He may be saying in effect ‘You made far too much fuss, stood excessively on your dignity’. This will give us a sort of antithesis to ‘rude’. What it was admittedly rowdy and ‘boisteous’ of the Prince to do, it was none the less over nice, over refined, of the Justice to resent. Alternatively, sensible could mean perceptible, noticeable, palpable. On that view ‘like a sensible lord’ would mean ‘very (excessively) perceptibly a lord’; that is, ‘making your status as a lord too noticeable’, ‘flinging your official weight about’. The Justice’s action had been, in Falstaff’s opinion, too (and too blatantly) lordly. A different Shakespearian passage is much stronger evidence for the existence of the dangerous sense in his time. When Ford calls Pistol ‘a good sensible fellow’ I think he means he is no fool.
XIV. TRIUMPH OF ‘SENSIBLE (D.S.)’
Whatever the early history may have been, sensible, by the time we reach the late eighteenth century, is overburdened with meanings. It can mean (1) perceptible to the senses, (2) sentient, not unconscious, (3) having such sensibility as Marianne Dashwood’s, or (4) having (good or common) sense, being no fool.
The first two of these, being scientific and philosophical, can live safely with each other and with the remaining two; with each other, because the sort of writers who use them will know precisely what they mean and make it clear to their readers, and with the other two because these seldom compete with them by entering the same contexts. But the third and fourth meanings have every chance of being used by the same speakers in the same conversation. Johnson in his Club and Mrs Thrale at her tea table will both want to talk about people who have sense and also about people who suffer from or enjoy ‘sweet sensibility’. But sensible is now the adjective for both. This is a semantic situation which is almost bound to end by destroying one or other of the two meanings.
Fortunately for the language the possible confusion was one that could not (as confusion between different senses of nature or simple can) long escape notice. It was revealed by the obvious fact that those who qualify for the adjective sensible in the one sense seldom do so in the other. It would be hard to maintain that Sophia, by being ‘sensible and tender’ where Tom Jones was concerned, showed her good sense. Indeed the two classes of ‘sensible’ people designated by the two meanings of the word hardly overlap at all. The paradox, unlike many similar semantic paradoxes, is felt because all three words (sense, sensible and sensibility) are fully alive. The awareness of it, embodied in the half-punning antithesis of sense and sensibility has been preserved in the title of Jane Austen’s novel.
The upshot of the whole affair was that, for nearly all purposes, the dangerous sense achieved undisputed possession of the word sensible. Once, Marianne Dashwood and her sister would have had equal, though quite different, claims to it; it now belongs solely to people like Elinor. The settlement was a good one. Sensible (d.s.) was needed, and we have replaced sensible in its other meaning. People of sensibility are now sensitive or percipient when we approve them, sentimental or gushing when we do not. All has been for the best.