Reason & Intuition:

I asked my friend the Descartes expert (actually, he's an Early Modern expert, not particularly Descartes, as he was quick to point out), and he writes:

'In the third Rule of Reasoning, Descartes writes about intuition that it "is the conception formed by an attentive mind so clear and distinct that it admits of no doubt: or what amounts to the same thing, it is the clear conception of a sound and attentive mind, the product of unaided reason." So, I am not entirely sure it is right to say of intuition that it is a faculty. Rather, it seem for Descartes to be a type of (extremely trustworthy) output of (the faculty) of reason. (It may often seem like a [distinct] faculty because it is easy to talk that way.)'

By way of translation, a "faculty" is sort of a distinct operation or mental mode. Imagination is in this sense a faculty: literally the mode in which your mind creates images for itself. Reason is a faculty (and, as my friend writes, something between deductive logic and reckoning).

== pj karafiol