Alexander, Samuel (1859-1938) Space, Time and Deity:
The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916-1918, Vol I.
Book II. The Categories.
Chapter III. Universal, Particular, and Individual
...Geometry is indeed an empirical and experimental science ; but its empirical subject-matter is not the things which fill Space, but their spaces. It observes the behaviour of Space, and the variety of its empirical material supplied by complexes within Space are the figures whose properties it discovers and connects into a system.
...For our hypothesis on which things are ultimately complexes of space-time, it seemed that thoughts, whose object is the plans of such configurations, never can be divorced from their particulars ; that Space and Time, so far from being the least self-subsistent of things, are in truth in their indissoluble union the ultimate reality in its simplest and barest terms ; that the plans which it admitted are therefore concrete. But they do not aspire to be concrete ' universals ' in distinction from the alleged abstract ones which do not and cannot exist. The so-called ' concrete universal ' is in fact not a universal but a universe. It is not a law but a system. The relation of the universal to its particulars ceases to be that of a plan to its participants, but becomes that of a society to its members or a world to its parts.
Book II. The Categories.
Chapter III. Universal, Particular, and Individual
...Geometry is indeed an empirical and experimental science ; but its empirical subject-matter is not the things which fill Space, but their spaces. It observes the behaviour of Space, and the variety of its empirical material supplied by complexes within Space are the figures whose properties it discovers and connects into a system.
...For our hypothesis on which things are ultimately complexes of space-time, it seemed that thoughts, whose object is the plans of such configurations, never can be divorced from their particulars ; that Space and Time, so far from being the least self-subsistent of things, are in truth in their indissoluble union the ultimate reality in its simplest and barest terms ; that the plans which it admitted are therefore concrete. But they do not aspire to be concrete ' universals ' in distinction from the alleged abstract ones which do not and cannot exist. The so-called ' concrete universal ' is in fact not a universal but a universe. It is not a law but a system. The relation of the universal to its particulars ceases to be that of a plan to its participants, but becomes that of a society to its members or a world to its parts.