INTELLECT, the name for the thinking portion of our mental constitution. Mind contains three elementary constituents—emotion or feeling, volition or the will, and Intelligence or thought. See EMOTION, WILL. The intellectual powers are explained in part by their contrast with feeling and will. When we enjoy pleasure or suffer pain, we are said to feel; when we act to procure the one or avoid the other, we put forth voluntary energy; when we remember, compare, reason, our intelligence is exerted.
The powers of the intellect have been variously classified. Among the commonly recognized designations for them, we may mention memory, reason, and imagination, which imply three very distinct applications of our mental forces. Reid classified them as follows: Perception by the senses, memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning. Stewart added consciousness, to denote the power of recognizing our mental states, as sensation and perception make us cognizant of the outer world; likewise attention (a purely voluntary function, although exerted in the domain of intelligence), imagination, and the association of ideas.
It might he easily shown that in such a classification as the above there is no funda-, mental distinctness of function, although there may be some differences in the direction given to the powers. There is not a faculty of memory which is all memory, and
nothing but memory. Reason and imagination equally involve processes of recollec tion. And with regard to the association of ideas, it has been shown by Mr. Samuel Bailey (Letters on the Human Mind) that if this is to be introduced into the explanation of the intellect, it must supersede the other faculties entirely; in short, we must proceed either by faculties (as memory, reason, etc.), or by association, but not by both.
In endeavoring to arrive at a satisfactory account of the human intellect, we must make a deeper analysis than is implied in the foregoing designations. We find at least three facts, or properties, which appear in the present state of our knowledge to be fundamental and distinct, no one in any degree implying the rest, while taken together they are considered sufficient to explain all the operations of intelligence, strictly so called.