Sense

n. [Lat. sensus, from sentire, sensum, to perceive, to feel; It. senso, Fr. sens, Pr. sen, O. Sp. seso, N. Sp. sentido.]

1Sense 1. Perception by the bodily organs; sensation; feeling.

In a living creature, though never so great, the sense and the affects of any one part of the body instantly make a transfusion through the whole. Bacon.

2Sense 2. Perception through the intellect; apprehension; recognition; understanding; discernment; appreciation; feeling. “This Basilius, having the quick sense of a lover.” Sidney. “High disdain from sense of injured merit.” Milton.

3Sense 3. The faculty of sense; perception, or the capacity of gaining a knowledge of the exterior world by means of the bodily organs;—often used in the plural, and especially of the five senses of feeling, sight, hearing, smell, and taste.

Oppressed nature sleeps: This rest might yet have balmed thy broken senses. Shak. Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep. Shak. What surmounts the reach Of human sense? Milton.

4Sense 4. Sound perception and reasoning; correct reason; mental capacity; understanding.

He raves; his words are loose As heaps of sand, and scattering wide from sense. Dryden.

5Sense 5. That which is felt or is held as a sentiment, view, or opinion; judgment; notion; opinion.

I speak my private but impartial sense With freedom. Roscommon. The municipal council of the city had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Macaulay.

6Sense 6. Meaning; import; signification; as, the true sense of words or phrases.

I think ’twas in another sense. Shak.

7Sense 7. Moral perception.

Some are so hardened in wickedness as to have no sense of the most friendly offices. L’Estrange.

Common sense, according to Sir W. Hamilton, (a.) “The complement of those cognitions or convictions which we receive from nature, which all men possess in common, and by which they test the truth of knowledge and the morality of actions.” (b.) “The faculty of first principles.” These two are the philosophical significations. (c.) “Such ordinary complement of intelligence, that, if a person be deficient therein, he is accounted mad or foolish.” (d.) When the substantive is emphasized, “native practical intelligence, natural prudence, mother-wit, tact in behavior, acuteness in the observation of character, in contrast to habits of acquired learning or of speculation.”—Moral sense, “a natural and immediate determination to approve certain affections and actions consequent upon them, or a natural sense of immediate excellence in them, not referred to any other quality perceivable by our other senses or reasoning.” Hutcheson.—The inner or internal sense, capacity of the mind to be aware of its own states; consciousness; reflection. “This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself, and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.” Locke.

Syn.—Understanding; reason.—SENSE, UNDERSTANDING, REASON. Some philosophers have given a technical signification to these terms, which may here be stated. Sense is the mind’s acting in the direct cognition either of material objects or of its own mental states. In the first case it is called the outer, in the second the inner, sense. Understanding is the logical faculty, i. e., the power of apprehending under general conceptions, or the power of classifying, arranging, and making deductions. Reason is the power of apprehending those first or fundamental truths or principles which are the conditions of all real and scientific knowledge, and which control the mind in all its processes of investigation and deduction. These distinctions are given, not as established, but simply because they often occur in writers of the present day.