intellect

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding.
2. n. The ability to think abstractly or profoundly. See Synonyms at mind.
3. n. A person of great intellectual ability.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The understanding; the sum of all the cognitive faculties except sense, or except sense and imagination. The Latin word intellectus was used to translate the Greek νου%21ς which in the theory of Aristotle is the faculty of the cognition of principles, and that which mainly distinguishes man from the beasts. Hence, the psychologists of the Scotch school use intellect as the synonym of common sense, or the faculty of apprehending a priori principles. The agent or active intellect, according to Aristotle, is the impersonal intellect that has created the world (see phrase below); the passive, patient, or possible intellect is that which belongs to the individual and perishes with him. But with St. Thomas Aquinas the distinction is quite different, the possible intellect being the faculty receptive of the intelligible species emitted by things, while the agent intellect is the power of operative thought. The term pure intellect, said to be used by St. Augustine, and certainly as early as Scotus Erigena, had always denoted the divine intellect, unmixed with matter, until Kant (adopting, as was his frequent practice, the terminology of Löscher) applied it to intellect as separated, in its use or application, from sense. Practical intellect is distinguished from theoretical or speculative, by Aristotle and all other psychologists, as having an end in view. The Platonists at all periods during the middle ages made intellect a special cognitive faculty, higher than reason and lower than intelligence—namely, the faculty of understanding and conceiving of things natural but invisible, as soul and its faculties and operations. (Intellectus more often means the cognitive act, product (concept), or habit than the faculty.) With Kant the intellect is, first, in a general sense, the nonsensuous, self-active faculty of cognition; the faculty of producing representations, of bringing unity into the matter given in sense, of conceiving objects, and of judging; the faculty of concepts, or rules, of discursive cognition; the faculty of a priori synthesis, of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of selfconsciousness; and secondly, in a narrower sense, the faculty of conceiving of intuited objects and of forming concepts and judgments concerning them, but excluding the pure use of the understanding, which in the Kantian system is reason.
2. n. Mind collectively; current or collective intelligence: as, the intellect of the time.
3. n. plural Wits; senses; mind: as, disordered in his intellects.

Wiktionary

1. n. the faculty of thinking, judging, abstract reasoning, and conceptual understanding (uncountable)
2. n. the capacity of that faculty (in a particular person) (uncountable)
3. n. a person who has that faculty to a great degree

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Metaph.) The part or faculty of the human mind by which it knows, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; the power to judge and comprehend; the thinking faculty; the understanding.
2. n. The capacity for higher forms of knowledge, as distinguished from the power to perceive objects in their relations; mental capacity.
3. n. A particular mind, especially a person of high intelligence.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. knowledge and intellectual ability
2. n. a person who uses the mind creatively
3. n. the capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination