[f. as prec. + -NESS.]
† 1. Joint or mutual knowledge. Obs. rare.
1681. Whole Duty Nations, 49. Consciousness, or mutual knowledg of persons and their worship.
2. (Also in early use, consciousness to oneself.) Internal knowledge or conviction; knowledge as to which one has the testimony within oneself; esp. of one’s own innocence, guilt, deficiencies, etc. Cf. CONSCIOUS 3.
1632. Massinger, Maid of Hon., I. ii. The consciousness of mine own wants.
1690. Locke, Hum. Und., III. viii. § 2. Had not their consciousness to themselves of their ignorance of them, kept them from so idle an attempt.
1725. Pope, Lett. to Caryll, 25 Dec. An honest mind is not in the power of any dishonest one. To break its peace there must be some guilt or consciousness, which is inconsistent with its own principles.
1770. Junius Lett., xxxix. 198. There is … a palpable consciousness of guilt.
1860. Macaulay, Biog. (1867), 11. Bentley … was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable superiority.
1875. Jowett, Plato (ed. 2), III. 7. Happy in the consciousness of a well-spent life.
3. The state or fact of being mentally conscious or aware of anything. Cf. CONSCIOUS 6.
1746–7. Hervey, Medit. (1818), 215. Let it … become one with the very consciousness of my existence!
1776. Adam Smith, W. N., I. xi. (1869), I. 164. The anxiety of the proprietors seems … to indicate a consciousness … that this species of cultivation is … more profitable than any other.
1863. Fr. A. Kemble, Resid. in Georgia, 9. It is only to the consciousness of these evils that knowledge and reflection awaken him.
1864. Lewes, Hist. Philos., II. 142. The consciousness of my existence is to me the assurance of my existence.
1883. G. Lloyd, Ebb & Flow, II. 18 For a few moments he lost the consciousness of why he was miserable.
4. Philos. The state or faculty of being conscious, as a condition and concomitant of all thought, feeling, and volition; ‘the recognition by the thinking subject of its own acts or affections’ (Hamilton).
1678. Cudworth, Intell. Syst. (1837), I. 93. Neither can life and cogitation, sense and consciousness … ever result from magnitudes, figures, sites, and motions.
1690. Locke, Hum. Und., II. i. § 19. Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind.
1707. S. Clarke, 2nd Defense (1715), 5. Consciousness, in the most strict and exact Sense of the Word, signifies … the Reflex Act by which I know that I think, and that my Thoughts and Actions are my own and not Anothers.
1785. Reid, Int. Powers, I. i. Consciousness is a word used by Philosophers, to signify that immediate knowledge which we have of our present thoughts and purposes, and, in general, of all the present operations of our minds.
1842. Sir W. Hamilton, in Reid’s Wks., Note B (1872), 810/1. Consciousness is a knowledge solely of what is now and here present to the mind. It is therefore only intuitive, and its objects exclusively presentative. Ibid., 929.
1866. Huxley, Phys., viii. 210. We class sensations along with emotions, and volitions, and thoughts, under the common head of states of consciousness. But what consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or as any other ultimate fact of nature.
b. (with a and pl.) State of consciousness.
1805. Wordsw., Prelude, III. 126. From strict analogies by thought supplied Or consciousnesses not to be subdued.
1812. J. C. Hobhouse, Journey (1813), 627. A female … quite dumb, nearly deaf, and possessed of no one consciousness belonging to humanity.
a. 1853. Robertson, Serm., Ser. III. iv. 53. His [man’s] will is not his affections, neither are his affections his thoughts … They are separate consciousnesses, living consciousnesses.
1870. Huxley, Lay Serm. (1871), 327. Whatever our marble may be in itself, all that we can know of it is under the shape of a bundle of our own consciousnesses.
5. The totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person’s conscious being. In pl. = Conscious personalities.
1690. Locke, Hum. Und., II. xxvii. (1695), 183. If the same consciousness can be transferr’d from one thinking Substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking Substances may make but one Person.
1708. Brit. Apollo, No. 20. 2/1. Those many Consciousnesses must be as the Constituent Parts of that one Individual Consciousness.
1805. Wordsw., Prelude, II. 32. Musing on them, often do I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself, And of some other Being.
1877. E. R. Conder, Bas. Faith, ii. 91. From our innermost consciousness, a voice is heard, clothed with native authority … ‘I feel. I think, I will. I am.’
b. Limited by a qualifying epithet to a special field, as the moral or religious consciousness.
1863. Mary Howitt, trans. F. Bremer’s Greece, II. xvi. 157. The commencement of a moral consciousness.
1884. H. Spencer, in 19th Cent., XV. 1. Unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense.
c. Attributed as a collective faculty to an aggregate of men, a people, etc., so far as they think or feel in common.
1837. Ht. Martineau, Soc. Amer., III. 198. While few can be found to agree even upon matters of so-called universal consciousness.
a. 1871. Grote, Plato, Pref. (1875), 7. Such intellects broke loose from the common consciousness of the world around them.
1876. E. White, Life in Christ, I. viii. 88. The religious consciousness of the age.
6. The state of being conscious, regarded as the normal condition of healthy waking life.
1837. Dickens, Pickw., xxi. When the fever left him, and consciousness returned, he awoke to find himself rich and free.
1868. Bain, Ment. & Mor. Sc., App. 93. In one class of [popular] applications, consciousness is mental life, as opposed to torpor or insensibility; the loss of consciousness is mental extinction for the time. Ibid. (1875), Emotions & Will (ed. 3), 539. Consciousness is a term for the waking, living mind as distinguished from dreamless sleep, fainting, insensibility, stupor, anæsthesia, death.
1885. W. L. Davidson, Logic of Defin., 136. The mind’s wakeful activity is consciousness—consciousness as opposed to dormancy, dreamless sleep, swoon, insensibility.
7. Double consciousness: see quot.
1882. Syd. Soc. Lex., Double consciousness, a condition which has been described as a double personality, showing in some measure two separate and independent trains of thought and two independent mental capabilities in the same individual.
