Judgment of attainability

The intellect returns, and asks a harder question than the first one: not is this good? but is this good possible for me?

Aquinas is careful here. The will cannot intend what the intellect declares impossible; it can only wish for it. So this judgment is the hinge on which daydream and project divide. A good judged unattainable stays at stage two forever, drawing the affections and going nowhere. A good judged attainable can be intended, and everything after becomes available.

The judgment can err in both directions, and the two errors have different flavours. Judging attainable what is not produces the familiar wreckage of overreach. Judging unattainable what is not is quieter and probably more common: the whole class of things you never began because you had privately decided, without examining it, that people like you do not do them.

In Actus Humani

This is the stage the app makes you perform when you break an end into acts with time estimates. An end whose acts total four hundred hours, against a day budget of ninety minutes, has just been judged — arithmetically rather than vaguely. Either the end changes, or the estimate was wrong, or the budget must.