Apprehension, n.
Etymology: [L. apprehensio: cf. F. appréhension. See Apprehend.]
1. The act of seizing or taking hold of; seizure; as, the hand is an organ of apprehension. Sir T. Browne.
2. The act of seizing or taking by legal process; arrest; as, the felon, after his apprehension, escaped.
3. The act of grasping with the intellect; the contemplation of things, without affirming, denying, or passing any judgment; intellection; perception. Simple apprehension denotes no more than the soul's naked intellection of an object. Glanvill.
4. Opinion; conception; sentiment; idea.
4 more senses
Note: In this sense, the word often denotes a belief, founded on sufficient evidence to give preponderation to the mind, but insufficient to induce certainty; as, in our apprehension, the facts prove the issue. To false, and to be thought false, is all one in respect of men, who act not according to truth, but apprehension. South.
5. The faculty by which ideas are conceived; understanding; as, a man of dull apprehension.
6. Anticipation, mostly of things unfavorable; distrust or fear at the prospect of future evil. After the death of his nephew Caligula, Claudius was in no small apprehension for his own life. Addison.
Syn. -- Apprehension, Alarm. Apprehension springs from a sense of danger when somewhat remote, but approaching; alarm arises from danger when announced as near at hand. Apprehension is calmer and more permanent; alarm is more agitating and transient.
Shades of meaning
Fernald has no entry of its own for apprehension; he lists it under alarm, anticipation, anxiety, fear, idea, knowledge.
Where he writes about it:
Apprehension, disquietude, dread, misgiving, and solicitude are in anticipation of danger; consternation, dismay, and terror are overwhelming fear, generally in the actual presence of that which is terrible, though these words also may have an anticipative force. — from alarm
Expectation may be either of good or evil; presentiment almost always, apprehension and foreboding always, of evil; anticipation and antepast, commonly of good. — from anticipation
Anxiety refers to some future event, always suggesting hopeful possibility, and thus differing from apprehension, fear, dread, foreboding, terror, all of which may be quite despairing. — from anxiety
The present popular use of idea makes it to signify any product of mental apprehension or activity, considered as an object of knowledge or thought; this coincides with the primitive sense at but a single point--that an idea is mental as opposed to anything substantial or physical; thus, almost any mental product, as a belief, conception, design, opinion, etc., may now be called an idea. — from idea
We speak of perception of external objects, apprehension of intellectual truth. — from knowledge