The Divine Lamp

Not only, therefore, do we form abstract and universal concepts or notions, by means of which we understand more or less fully what things are which come under the notice of our senses. We also interpret the individual object in the distance.  I proceed to think to myself about it thus: “That is something; it is a material thing or being of some sort; it is not a pillar, nor a tree; it is moving; it is an animal of some sort; it is a horse.”  All these mental affirmations and denials are thoughts of another sort, thoughts by which we compare objects we have already conceived, by which we apprehend a relation of agreement or disagreement between things already perceived and conceived, and thus get a fuller insight into what the things are about which we are thinking.  This act of comparison is called judgment.  By means of it we interpret the individual things revealed to our senses-by affirming or denying about these things the objects we have already conceived in the abstract when forming our universal ideas (thing or being, material moving, life, tree, animal, horse, ect).  The act of judgment is thus an act by which we apprehend the identity or non-identity of the objects of two previous apprehensions.  It is an apprehensio complexa or incomplexorum-by which we conceive  an object in the abstract without making any mental affirmation or denial about it.  But conecption and judgment are fundamentally the same sort of mental act, an intellectual intuition of what some thing is.

So too, is what logic calls the third act of the mind, the act of reasoning or inference.  This is the process by which our reason so compares with one another the ideas and judgments it has already formed that it thereby apprehends new relations between the latter, and thus reaches fresh judgments and additional knowledge or truths about things.  Here, too, no less than in judgment, the object apprehended by the intellect is a relation of identity or difference between previously conceived objects: and this new apprehension involves, of course, a fuller and better understanding of what something is-”quod quid est”.

Conception, judgment, and reasoning are, therefore, fundamentally one and the same type of mental process-the understanding of the nature of a thing.  They are all alike acts of the same faculty-the intellect or reason.