Intellection
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The mental activity or process of grasping with the intellect; apprehension by the mind; understanding. uncountable
"These books will fill, and well fill, certain stretches of life […] But in old or nervous or solemnest or dying hours, when one needs the impalpably soothing and vitalizing influences of abysmic Nature, or its affinities in literature or human society, and the soul resents the keenest mere intellection, they will not be sought for."
- 2 the process of using your mind to consider something carefully wordnet
- 3 A particular act of grasping by means of the intellect. countable
"Our senses, our instincts, our intellections are all instruments of adaptation."
- 4 The mental content of an act of grasping by means of the intellect, as a thought, idea, or conception. countable
"When Banerjee talks about the artist's thinking about the music, she is not referring to an intellection about the mechanics of technique."
Example
More examples"The normal mind, when it experiences intellectual frustration, can seek recreation in companionship, or physical exercise, or art. But for the Fourth Men there was no such escape. These activities were impossible and meaningless to them. The Great Brains were whole-heartedly interested in the objective world, but solely as a vast stimulus to intellection, never for its own sake. They admired only the intellective process itself and the interpretative formulae and principles which it devised. They cared no more for men and women than for material in a test-tube, no more for one another than for mechanical calculators. Nay, of each one of them it might almost be said that he cared even for himself solely as an instrument of knowing. Many of the species had actually sacrificed their sanity, even in some cases their lives, to the obsessive lust of intellection."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin intellectiō, intellectiōnem.
More for "intellection"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.