Intention

Here the wish becomes a goal. Intention is the will’s tending toward an end judged attainable — a stretching-out, which is what the Latin says: in-tendere.

Aquinas locates intention’s peculiar power in the fact that it reaches the end through the means. To intend is not merely to want the destination; it is to want it in a way that already orders everything between you and it. The traveller who intends Rome has, in intending it, given every fork in the road a criterion for decision. This is why intention is the stage that changes the texture of ordinary days — it makes otherwise indifferent choices answerable to something.

An intention can be lost without ever being renounced. Aquinas’s account suggests why: because intention orders the means, it decays whenever the means stop being referred back to it. Nobody decides to abandon the book they are writing. They simply stop asking, of each afternoon, whether it served the book.

In Actus Humani

An End in this application is an intention in this precise sense: a good that has been seen, wished for, judged attainable, and committed to. The criterion attached to it is what keeps the intention from decaying into wish — it fixes, in advance, what the end’s attainment will look like.