Common sense

Use in the book

The senses and their judge

Burton divides the apprehensive power of the sensitive soul into outward and inward senses. The familiar five belong to the first division; common sense, imagination and memory belong to the second. The inward senses can deal with things past, absent or expected because they work with forms previously received through sensation. This does not describe direct sensory access to future events or distant objects. Their representation is present to the mind even when the represented thing is not present to the eye or ear.

Common sense is the “Judge or Moderator” of the others. The eye provides sight and the ear sound, but neither alone supplies the awareness that one sees or hears or the comparison between different kinds of object. Burton gives common sense that coordinating and discriminating office. He personifies it as a judge whose officers bring “Species”, the sensory forms of things, “to be censured”. Censure here means assessment; it need not be a finding of fault. The claim that all the other senses’ objects and offices belong to this judge describes their convergence, not the anatomical disappearance of the separate organs.

The routes from organ to judge are made concrete. The eye, especially its pupil, conveys sight through the optic nerves to common sense. Sound arrives through the ear’s internal apparatus and the nerves assigned to hearing. The eye, the nerves and the sensory form have different roles: bodily organ, route of conveyance and material presented for judgment. Common sense does not replace all three with an undifferentiated act of “thinking.”

This faculty has a proposed bodily seat. The anatomy describes the ventricles as receptacles for spirits brought from the heart and refined in the brain. The right and left ventricles generate animal spirits; injury stops sensation and movement; these ventricles are also “held to be” the seat of common sense. The fuller psychological account assigns its organ or seat to the front of the brain. Those formulations belong to Burton’s historical account and retain his attribution to the writers he summarizes. They should not be converted into a modern neurological location.

Judgment, further elaboration and suspension

Imagination receives the forms communicated by common sense, examines them more fully, retains them longer, recalls them and invents others through comparison. The division of labour is therefore successive but not mechanically exclusive: both faculties deal with forms, while imagination prolongs and transforms their presence. A frightening object can reach imagination through common sense or through memory. The first route supplies forms through common sense; the second recalls material through memory. Neither route by itself establishes that the threatening object is correctly understood.

Sleep makes the distinction visible in another way. Following Scaliger, Burton calls it a rest or binding of the outward senses and common sense. When common sense rests, the outward senses rest too; imagination remains free to produce dreams. The sentence adds imagination’s commander, reason, after calling imagination “alone” free, an awkwardness preserved by the edition. The next passage explains the suspension through vapours that obstruct the passages of bodily spirits; waking follows when the obstruction clears. These are coordinated claims about faculties and their bodily instruments, rather than a claim that the soul ceases to exist in sleep.

Appetite is later assigned the same bodily organ as common sense. Its object is the good or evil pursued or avoided, and Burton divides its inclinations into desire and resistance. Sharing an organ does not make appetite identical with the faculty that assesses sensory forms; the passage connects their operations while retaining their different offices.

Ordinary judgment and satirical deprivation

Outside this anatomy, “common sense” can be an ordinary measure of competence. Burton says that an unlearned gentleman may perform local justice with the common sense available to any yeoman. His point is that social rank and elementary competence are insufficient substitutes for cultivated learning. The phrase is functioning as a practical ability, not as a name for a brain ventricle. The rich fool who scarcely has common sense but nevertheless receives office supplies the inverse example: birth and wealth secure honours without ensuring judgment.

A related Latin phrase has another local emphasis. In the marginal Juvenal quotation attached to the attack on idle gentlemen, “sensus communis” means fellow-feeling or a sense of common humanity, said to be rare in their elevated station. The supplied note deliberately distinguishes this social regard from merely practical judgment. The shared form must therefore remain connected to its own ethical and social context.

The phrase also contributes to Burton’s polemical descriptions of folly. In the address to the reader, he asks whether supposedly rational people have common sense at all; Chrysostom’s animal comparison then calls vicious people beasts deprived of it. Later, the common people’s supposed lack of common sense explains their sheep-like following of their ruler’s religion. In the immediately following discussion, Burton calls ignorance both cause and symptom of superstition. These are rhetorical and evaluative uses, not clinical findings that entire classes of people lack a perceptual organ. His hostile generalizations about African commoners and peasants likewise belong to the prejudices of his argument and its cited authorities.

Related entries

Faculty; Animal faculties; Imagination; Species in perception; Memory and recollection; Spirits; Sensible

Places to read

1. A test of supposed sanitySatirical questions about judgment, followed by Chrysostom’s comparison of vicious conduct with beasts
2. The proposed bodily seatVentricles, animal spirits and the differentiated locations of common sense, imagination and memory
3. From external senses to an inward judgeClassification, routes of sight and sound, self-awareness and comparison, with the judge metaphor
4. Forms, recollection and sleepImagination’s further work, memory’s store, suspension of common sense and the vapour explanation
5. Shared organ, distinct officeAppetite’s organ is the same as common sense’s
6. Practical competence and social regardOrdinary judgment distinguished from learning, followed by the marginal sense of fellow-feeling
7. Undeserved officeCommon sense contrasted with inherited wealth and standing
8. Polemical social judgmentsPrejudicial assertions about commoners and peasants, to be read as assertions in the historical argument
9. Following the religious crowdThe flock metaphor, changing rulers and the connection with ignorance

In this edition

The marginal “sensus communis” is rendered “a sense of common humanity” in the editorial translation of the accompanying note. That English is separate from Burton’s original Latin and from the paired modern body.

The modern rendering retains “common sense” in both the anatomy and the social criticism; the context must therefore identify the sense. “Judge or Moderator” becomes “judge or governor,” while “to be censured” becomes “to be assessed.” These choices retain the tribunal metaphor without importing modern blame into the act of sensory discrimination. “Species” becomes “sensory forms.” In the sleep passage, “binding” is rendered “suspension,” and the addition of reason to imagination’s freedom remains visible.

The source wording “seat of the common sense” is preserved in the modern column. The accompanying Editor note explains the technical meaning there. That local note should not be enlarged into a claim that every occurrence throughout the work excludes practical judgment: the passage supplies a clear counterexample.

binding

Printed “binding” (English).

Suspension of the activity of external senses and common sense in sleep.

Context: Definition attributed to Scaliger; not cessation of the soul.

Source: original body

Source wording: Sleep is a rest or binding of the outward Senses, and of the common sense

censure

Printed “censured” (English).

To assess or judge; does not necessarily condemn.

Context: Passive construction: forms are assessed by common sense.

Source: original body

Source wording: the Species to be censured

common sense · Common sense

Printed “Common sense” (English).

Internal faculty coordinating and assessing the sensory forms brought by separate senses.

Context: Burton summarizes faculty psychology; common sense judges, organs convey.

Source: original body

Source wording: This Common sense is the Judge or Moderator of the rest

common sense · local use 1

Printed “common sense” (English).

Elementary practical judgment available without scholarly training; used in criticism of unlearned gentry.

Context: Burton contrasts ordinary competence with learned public service.

Source: original body

Source wording: to do country Justice, with common sense, which every Yeoman can likewise do

common sense · local use 2

Printed “common sense” (English).

Basic judgment whose supposed lack does not prevent a wealthy heir receiving office.

Context: Satirical conditional concession; wealth secures honour despite limited capacity.

Source: original body

Source wording: Though he be a silly soft fellow, and scarce have common sense

common sense · local use 3

Printed “common sense” (English).

Judgment denied to the crowd in Burton’s polemical account of religious conformity.

Context: Burton’s evaluative generalization about common people, qualified by many times.

Source: original body

Source wording: void many times of common sense

judge or moderator

Printed “Judge or Moderator” (English).

Judicial metaphor for common sense assessing and coordinating sensory evidence.

Context: Common sense is personified as judge; the separate senses are its officers.

Source: original body

Source wording: the Judge or Moderator of the rest

sensus communis

Printed “sensus communis” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: sensus communis

Fellow-feeling or common humanity, in a criticism of privileged gentlemen.

Context: Juvenal quoted in Burton’s margin; social regard rather than the technical inner sense.

Source: Burton original marginal quotation

Source wording, Original construction: Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa Fortuna.

Modern rendering, Modern wording: a sense of common humanity

Alignment convention

Qualification: Original Latin component and editorial English component are separately aligned; wider constructions are retained as context.

Modern construction: For a sense of common humanity is seldom found in that station.

Notes: The complete mixed note was consulted, but only its original Latin is used as lexical attestation.

Translation layer: Editorial translation within the supplied Burton-labelled note; not original marginal wording and not paired modern body

species

Printed “Species” (Latin loan in English).

Printed form, Original wording: Species

Sensory forms brought by the organs for assessment.

Context: Organs bring; common sense assesses.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: they are but the Organs to bring the Species to be censured

Modern rendering, Modern wording: sensory forms

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Modern construction: the organs that bring sensory forms to be assessed

to be censured

Printed “to be censured” (English).

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: to be censured

Passive infinitive: sensory forms are brought for assessment by common sense; this is appraisal, not necessarily condemnation.

Context: Passive construction: forms are assessed by common sense.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: to be assessed

Alignment convention

Qualification: Displayed phrase has its own explained lookup record, separate from the component record(s).