UNIVERSAL CONSENT. - It is the general agreement of human thought concerning truths of fact and first principles of immediate evidence, or even concerning certain derived truths, particularly of an ethical-religious order. That such a universal consent exists is itself an irrefutable fact: amid the continuous variation of human opinions, mentality, tastes and tendencies, and despite the profound historical upheavals in the values of thought and life, human reason in its original spontaneity always finds itself conformable to itself in the fundamental appraisals of the true and the good. The reason for this fact, placed by fideism (T. Reid and his school, E. F. Jacobi) in an obscure instinct of nature, must instead be sought, as St. Thomas puts it (Sum. Theol., 1st-2nd, q. 94, a. 2), in the fundamental inclination of the spiritual nature toward the good that is proper to it, namely truth, and therefore also in the natural capacity to attain it. The sensus naturae communis is nothing other than this natural inclination or tendency; and if one wishes to speak of instinct in the sense of a disposition inherent in nature, it is an instinct that is not lacking a certain self-awareness, in the light and certainty of intellectual knowledge: even if the objective reasons that determine it may remain shrouded in shadow. With universal consent thus understood, one must therefore not confuse the common persuasions of various kinds, often erroneous, that accompany, sometimes even for the duration of historical epochs, the consciousness of peoples and civilizations, and have their origin in particular circumstances of fact, tradition, and environment, certainly not in the pure and spontaneous exercise of reason.
Universal consent, already in ancient philosophy, is held to be an argument of certainty. Aristotle: « quod omnibus verum videtur, hoc dicimus esse » (Eth. Nicom., X, 2, 1173 a); Seneca: « multum dare solemus praesumptioni (προλήψει) omnium hominum; apud nos veritatis argumentum est aliquid omnibus videri » (Epist., 117); Cicero: « Omni autem in re consensio omnium gentium lex naturae putanda est » (Disp. tusc., I, 13); « De quo autem omnium natura consentit id verum esse necesse est » (De nat. deor., I, 17). In the last century F.-R. de Lamennais (v.) elevated universal consent, the "general reason," to the supreme criterion of certainty, to which every affirmation of individual reason should refer in order to escape the grip of doubt and rediscover truth: « Il senso comune è la regola di ogni ragione individuale »; « fuori di esso non vi ha né certezza né verità né ragione » (Défense de l'essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, Paris 1821, pp. 571, 625).
Against this excessive valuation by Lamennais, scholastic criteriology recognizes in universal consent, in relation to certainty, a positive but not primitive value. And first of all one must distinguish universal consent insofar as it bears on facts and principles of immediate evidence, or instead on complex and derived truths: in the first case it can claim an apodictic value not so much because it is a fact, even a universal one, but rather because of the theoretical presuppositions that the fact implies, and which are the very value of reason and the objectivity of its fundamental laws. But insofar as it concerns derived truths, for example, the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, the agreement of the majority of men has a simple value of confirmation and of more or less consistent probability, on which philosophy, which sustains and justifies itself solely through its own self-control, can in no way rely. In any case, universal consent absolutely cannot be taken as the primary foundation of certainty, which must be established not on authority but on the evidence critically won by thought in the reflective examination of itself and of the totality of human experience.
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Ugo Viglino