 Where the lower cognitive faculty handles the generation and (re)production of obscure and confused ideas, the higher cognitive faculty encompasses the capacities and operations through which we introduce clarity and distinctness into those ideas. Accordingly, Wolff first considers the faculties of attention, whereby we introduce more clarity into a part of a composite perception (EP: §237), and reflection, through which we successively direct attention to what we perceive (as well as, in a Lockian vein, to the soul and its operations—§261) and thereby make distinct perception possible (§266). The capacity for distinct representation in general is identified as the understanding, which can be pure or non-pure depending on whether it admits confused representations, though since these are unavoidable in the case of the human being, our understanding is never pure (EP: §§313–4; for general discussion see Chance 2018). With an eye to his discussion of logic, Wolff further distinguishes three operations of the intellect with respect to its cognitions: simple apprehension (through which notions or representations of what is common to multiple things are formed), judgment (through which agreement or disagreement between representations is asserted), and discursion or reasoning (where judgments are formed on the basis of previous judgments) (EP: §§325, 366–7; cf. Dyck 2016, Rumore 2018). This latter operation informs Wolff’s definition of the faculty of reason as the capacity to perceive the interconnection among universal truths (§483), though Wolff again emphasizes that our reason is never pure but is always to some extent reliant upon experience (§§495–7).