Dictionary

sapience

Noun

sapience (uncountable)

The property of being sapient, the property of possessing or being able to possess wisdom.
- 1478, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, "The Wife of Bath's Tale" 1195-8, [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales/The_Wife_of_Bath's_Prologue_and_Tale]
  Povert is hateful good, and, as I gesse, / A ful greet bringer out of bisinesse; / A greet amender eek of sapience / To him that taketh it in pacience.
- 1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Chapter V,
  As much Experience, is Prudence; so, is much Science, Sapience.
- 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII, 192-6,
  Mean while the Son / On his great Expedition now appeer'd, / Girt with Omnipotence, with Radiance crown'd / Of Majestie Divine, Sapience and Love / Immense, and all his Father in him shon.
- 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co., Chapter 8,
  Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its kind, saw or thought it saw something which, in contrast with the war-ship's environment, looked oddly incongruous in the Handsome Sailor?
- 1926, Dorothy Parker, "Ballade at Thirty-Five" in The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker, New York: The Modern Library, 1936, p. 60,
  This, a solo of sapience, / This, a chantey of sophistry, / This, the sum of experiments— / I loved them until they loved me.
- 2009, Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas
  I then marked out three ways in which we can instead describe and demarcate ourselves in terms of the sapience that distinguishes us from the beasts of forest and field.

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