10. Multiplicity of the Operations of Reason. Their Fundamental Identity. -- AIl the operations of reason -- apprehension, judgment, and reasoning -- are at bottom identical; they consist in the intuition that something is (quod quid est), but they nevertheless present different accidental characters which it is of interest to determine.

I. Apprehension assumes many formalities.

(1) When the mind considers an object independently of its surroundings, the action is called attention.

(2) The attention is directed sometimes to a single note in the object, independently of those with which it is united, sometimes to the whole collection of notes which constitute the essence of the object, but apart from the notes which individualize it in reality: such acts of the mind are called abstraction.

(3) Abstraction is the basis of generalization.

(4) Abstraction effects in the mind analysis, i. e., de-composition of the notes of the object known.

(5) When the mind reunites notes previously separated, it makes a synthesis.

(6) When we represent to ourselves two objects in succession and perceive a relation between them, the apprehension -- or rather, the double apprehension -- is called comparison.

(7) The perception of an existing reality is an intuition. We call it perception as opposed to the conception of things said to be ideal, i. e., things considered apart from their existence.

(8) When the intelligence has for its object the acts of one's own soul, chiefly its spiritual acts, the apprehension takes the name of consciousness.

(9) Distinction is an act by which the mind represents one object to itself as not being the same as a second object. By object we are to understand anything that can be the term ot an act of thought (id quod ob-jicitur cognoscenti).^{1}

II. Judgment consists in attributing one object to another, in seeing that two objects, previously apprehended, have, or have not, anything in common. It is an act of apprehension of which the formal object is the identity between the terms of two antecedent apprehensions (apprehensio complexa, or complexorum -- complex apprehension, or apprehension of complex things -- as opposed to simple apprehension, apprehensio incomplexa, or incomplexorum).

III. Reasoning is a linking-together of judgments. The reasoning faculty compares with a middle term two extreme terms, the identity of which it does not immediately grasp, with the result of seeing, by the aid of this comparison, whether they are identical or not. This process is also termed ratiocination.

The acts of apprehension under their manifold forms, judgment and reasoning, fundamentally constitute one and the same act -- the apprehension or seeing that something is. They depend upon a single faculty indifferently called intelligence, understanding, or reason.

{1} On the various types of distinction (real, of pure reason, virtual) see General Metaphysics, no. 49.