Consciousness - A Developing word

The word "conscious" is derived from Latin conscius meaning "1. having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of; 2. conscious to oneself; esp., conscious of guilt".(The Classsic Latin Dictionary, Follett Publishing Company, 1957).
It is related to the word conscientia which primarily refers to a moral conscience. literally conscientia means knowledge-with, or shared knowledge. in Latin juridic texts, writers such as Cicero use conscientia to refer to the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. In Christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas(1225 – 1275) describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions. René Descartes(1596-1650) sometimes used the word in the modern sense, however it was not until Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) use the modern meaning of consciousness. It remains closely intertwined with moral agency, but does not in itself signify conscience. The contemporary sense of the word consciousness (consciousness associated with the idea of personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself) was introduced by Cudworth. The word "conscience" was coined by John Lockes French translator, Pierre Costes, but in the English language the modern sense first appeared in Cudworth's works. It is true, however, that Locke much influenced the subsequent reception of consciousness: in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), Johnson gives a definition of "conscious" as "endowed with the power of knowing one's own thoughts and actions," and takes Locke's own definition of "consciousness" as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind."

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