Common sense is the least common of the senses

Xavi C wonders if the phrase is Jaume Balmes’s. Mark Twain is often blamed for the English version, but Allan Cunningham in Paul Jones (1826, via GBS) has a peasant observe that “common sense is the rarest sense of a’” and Descartes writes at the beginning of his Methóde that “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée” (GBS), which is fine by me, if not as pretty. Any lower bids?

[Balmes is best known now for the street named after him in Barcelona as a homage to his theological writings, which included a fine assault on Lutherans and other free-thinking bastards. The seminary of Our Lady of the Pointy Knockers, on Balmes on the right just before you reach town, contains a geological museum from which, in the heat of the social revolution, was removed its fine collection of fossils in order to pave the streets, inaugurating the anarchists' Thousand Year Reich. Seminarists nowadays tend to be winsome young men from intolerant third world countries who make the most of their free lodgings in the centre of Barcelona's Gayxample.]

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