consensus gentium

As Riehl remarks, Famille 15, the undeniable consensus gentium, that the costume of men should differ from that of women, is an equally undeniable protest against this species of emancipation.

The consensus gentium and especially hominum can probably amount only to an absurdity.

Stated without rhyme or metre and adapted to our case: the consensus sapientium is to the effect that the consensus gentium amounts to an absurdity.

If the deistic fear of "enthusiasm" in religion—the individual will prevailing against the consensus gentium—parallels, according to Professor Lovejoy, the neoclassic fear of feeling and the unrestrained play of imagination in art, then Newtonian science, as it reinforced deism, was no negligible factor in discrediting enthusiasm, and hence indirectly militating against originality, emotion, and the unchecked imagination.

To the extent, however, that the models were conceived of as approximating the consensus gentium, fragments illustrating universal reason, there may be little disparity between neoclassic imitation and Aristotle's use of the term in the sense of imitating a higher ethical reality.