SENSUS COMMUNIS

[Michael Grove]

 In Leonardo's illustrations of his brain studies, his three dimensional cross

 section of a human skull indicates how all the sensory nerves 'pour into' a

 single point at the geometric centre which he referred to as the sensus

 communis, which is the latin, from which 'common sense' in English

 has derived. The roots of this idea, originally lie in Aristotle's own idea

 of a sensus communis, an inner sense common to the different senses.

 Aristotle believed the sensus communis to be situated in the heart and

 that it was responsible for self-awareness, imagery and dreaming. 

Leonardo was the first to describe it otherwise ...

BUT it has been recently proposed that both Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci

were correct in their assumptions as to where the components of our

species sensus communis, reside within our mind, spirit and body.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles defines

commonsense,  common-sense, common sense as follows ...

1. An internal sense formerly regarded as uniting the impressions of

the five senses in a common consciousness.

2. Ordinary or normal understanding, as possessed by all except the

insane and the mentally handicapped.

3. The collective sense or judgement of humankind or of a community.

4. The faculty by which certain beliefs are generally accepted  without

philosophical enquiry or influence from religious teaching etc.

NEVER FORGETTING that this gem was attributed Mark Twain...

'COMMON SENSE'...
there's not enough of [IT] about to [BE] common

As the QuickiWiki definition states ...  All these meanings of "common sense",

including the everyday one, are inter-connected in a complex history and

have evolved during important political and philosophical debates in modern 

western civilisation, notably concerning science, politics and economics. 

The interplay between the meanings has come to be particularly notable in

English, as opposed to other western European languages, and the English

term has become international.

Never forgetting of course that ... ALL SCIENCE AND ALL SCIENTISTS have

ultimately been proved to be wrong - MONEY ISN'T WEALTH - and that

the entirety of our POLITICS remain locked into an OLD ORDER MINDSET,

never forgetting however, from the the perspective of SENSUS COMMUNIS

that I have myself often been accused of pursuing and on occasion having...

an entrenched HOT-AIR BALLOON MINDSET

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