What we spend our time doing testifies to how sapient we are because our actions reveal what we truly value. The intellectual values academics, the athlete values strength, the craftsman values skill and we can all tell because of how much time they have invested, for, schools of intellectuals have been schooled since kindergarden, teams of athletes play multiple sports year round, and shops of craftsmen have three worn-out bandsaws in their garage. Not all of these people have made the conscious choice to become who they are. For most of them, things just happened. Because some kid accidentally did good on a first grade test, he ended up bouncing around the ivy league, for example. The kid was sapient and he did meet with many decisions on his way to the top, but never did he evaluate what his optimum sapience could be. Our job is to find out what we could be, what kind of education it would take, and the lifestyle it would bring. We need to figure out how to be like God who is all-knowing and all-powerful. We need overcome any urge towards devolution and we need to overcome any bronze or silver natures. Therefore, we will find out what sapience is.
The word “sapient” is rarely used as anything more than another word to describe the art of being wise except for when it is used to scientifically describe the Human Race. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) earned his fame for organizing the “binomial nomenclature”, which is a system to name everything living and how they relate to each other.6 Using the academic tongue, Latin, Linnaeus had given man the name homo-diurnus, meaning modern man. He gave humanity this name after he compared the anatomy of apes to humans and determined that anatomically, we had a lot in common. While he never ventured to put forth any theory of evolution, Linnaeus suspected what Darwin would later canonize as a scientific principle. By the eleventh addition of his Systemae Naturae (the book in which Linnaeus published his findings) Linnaeus had honed his definition after receiving numerous criticisms both from theologians for debasing mankind, and from natural scientists for making concessions to the theologians; therefore, in the eleventh addition he went on to refine his definition of humanity that the one feature that divided man from his simians, was sapience.7 Notice that he did not say intelligence. He did not call man homo-intelligentia, he called him homo-sapien. The two words could almost be synonymous, but for a critical difference: intelligence is the capacity of one’s mental computer and sapience is a phenomena of one’s soul. Sapience is not made up of grey matter, glial cells, neurons and synapses; that is what intelligence is. Biologically, human brains are all relatively the same -- we are all using the same computer with fairly similar operating systems and while your internet browser might be Chrome and mine Safari, no significant difference exist between us but style and technique. The real difference is what we choose to do with our computers and that is the determinate of sapience: the same computer can run a massive online multiplayer fantasy epoch and take up more processing power than an investment analytics program. A pdf of Cicero is smaller than a downloaded HD movie.
“Sapience”, a synonym for wisdom, is of Latin extraction8, but it was never quite assimilated into the Briton’s dictionary while the Romans were in England. It wasn’t until the incursion of the renowned French-Norman, William the Conquerer that the many of similar Latin words melded themselves to the English tongue; you see, The Roman Empire had a longer and more pervasive power over the Franks than they ever did have over the Britons. Therefore, while “sapience” is a lexical creation of Latin, we only started to use it after William came and brought his Normans with him.
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience
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