intellect

(in’te-lekt), n. [= F. intellect = Sp. (obs.) intelecto = Pg. intellecto = It. intel let to, ¢ L. intellect us, a perceiving, perception, understanding, intellect sense. Practical intellect is distinguished from theoretical or speculative, by Aristotle and all other psychologists, as God having an end in view. ‘The Platonists at all periods durthings ing the middle ages made intellect a special cognitive facwe ulty, higher than reason and lower than intelligence — thetic namely, the faculty of understanding and conceiving of things natural but invisible, as soul and its faculties and 2. operations. (Jntellectus more often means the cognitive act, product (concept), or habit than the faculty.) With 3. Kant the intellect is, first, in a general sense, the non standing sensuous, self-active faculty of cognition; the faculty of producing representations, of bringing unity into the matter given in sense, of conceiving objects, and of judgsent ing; the faculty of concepts, or rules, of discursive cogniintellective tion; the faculty of a prior i synthesis, of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of self- 4}. consciousne ; and secondly, in a narrower sense, the faculty of conceiving of intuited objects and of forming are concepts and judgments concerning them, but excluding the pure use of the understanding, which in the Kantian Intellective system is reason. intellectively Intellect, sensitivity, and will are the three heads under tellective which the powers and capacities of the human mind are now generally arranged. In this use of it the term intellect includes all those powers by which we acquire, retain, and extend our knowledge, as perception, memory, imagination, judgment, . Fleming, Vocab, of Philos. intellectual The intellect is only a subtler and more far-seeing sense, intellectuel and the sense is a short-sighted and gro er intellect. W. Wallace, Epicureanism, p. 93. Pg. twal is, I was readily persuaded that I had no idea in my intellect which had not formerly pa ed through the senses. tellectus, Des cartes, Meditations (tr. by Veitch), vi. Of, 2. Mind collectively; current or collective in or telligence: as, the intellect of the time. formed engaging The study of barbaric languages and dialects —a study that now absorbs so much of the most adventurous intel of lect of philology. Amer. Jour. Philol., VII. 255. tions; 3. pl. Wits; senses; mind: as, disordered in his intellects. [Obsolete or vulgar.]— Agent in of tellect [L. intellect us agens, tr. Gr. vods rountiKés, creato ti¥@ reason], in the Peripatetic philosophy, a being, faculty, or function, the highest form of mind, or the highest under the Deity. ‘To determine with precision what Arisa totle meant by it is an insoluble problem, and it has been understood in the most widely different senses by different philosophers: sometimes it is regarded as consisting 2. of the intellectual relations really existing in outward understanding; things and acting upon the understanding as upon a perceptive faculty; sometimes it is conceived asa divine life which at once animates the soul and creates the objects 8. of its knowledge; sometimes it is believed to be a living being, a sort of angel, imparting knowledge to the mind; standing; sometimes it is made a faculty creative of the ideas which pacity the po ible intellect then apprehends; sometimes it is an little more than the power of abstracting general notions from singulars; sometimes it is treated as an unconscious activity of thought: and each of the senses of the oe has had its varieties. =Syn. 1. Soul, Spirit, etc. See mind. Intellectual