Etymon #27
Court to conscience
The verb entered English in the early fifteenth century, formed from a noun that had arrived a generation earlier. Its earliest recorded use appears in a chronicle written around 1464 by John Capgrave, an Augustinian friar and historian, where it described a medieval legal prohibition on lending money. Behind it lay a Latin verb that meant something more physical than the word means today.
The noun arrived in English in the late fourteenth century by two routes: from Old French, where it named a formal legal prohibition, and directly from Latin, where it named the act of holding something back. The verb followed a generation later, built from the noun already in the language.
Behind this word lay a Latin verb built from two elements. The first was a prefix meaning 'into'. The second was a verb meaning 'to hold'. Put together, they named a single action, to hold something in, to keep it from moving forward.
The same Latin verb habēre, meaning 'to hold', produced two other familiar English words. HABIT came from Latin habitus, the condition of how one holds oneself. HABITAT came from Latin habitare, the place where something holds itself, where it dwells. Both words carry the same root sense of holding, of being held in place.
For its first four centuries in English the word belonged to lawyers and clergymen. By the 1870s it had moved into science. In 1876 the physiologist Michael Foster applied it to the restraint of spinal reflexes, and in the same year William James applied it to the mind. One thought, he argued, could hold another back. Sigmund Freud's later writing on the unconscious fixed the psychological sense for good.
