Alexander, Samuel (1859-1938) Space, Time and Deity:
The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916-1918, Vol II.
Book III. The Order and Problems of Empirical Existence
Chapter V. Mind and its Acts
...From the beginning of psychical life the universal and particular are united ; and this is a recognised commonplace of the subject, and is illustrated at any length in the charming transference which children make of words learned in connection with some particular object to any object which is reasonably like it in kind. In other words, though sensing is not thinking there is no sensation without its universal or thought. What thinking does is merely, as in conceiving, to contemplate the universal in the object, by itself, and detach it from its particular surroundings as a separate object of attention. Thinking is the corresponding mental act which apprehends the universal as such, and we have already verified the existence in consciousness of the distinct awareness in enjoyment of the plan of any complex. When we think a colour, e.g. blue, we in like manner enjoy the pattern of blue, which is intrinsically a spatio-temporal complex, however simple. Thus thinking is only one of the formal varieties of mental process, it adds no question in respect of the material side of the mental action, except the question whether thinking possesses also intensity, which is another material feature of sensing.
...Intensity belongs to the thinking in so far as it is clothed in particular circumstance, and it never can dispense therewith in fact. But this intensity is not intensity of the custom. There is a custom which allows for intensity in its elements, but no intensity of the custom.
Book III. The Order and Problems of Empirical Existence
Chapter V. Mind and its Acts
...From the beginning of psychical life the universal and particular are united ; and this is a recognised commonplace of the subject, and is illustrated at any length in the charming transference which children make of words learned in connection with some particular object to any object which is reasonably like it in kind. In other words, though sensing is not thinking there is no sensation without its universal or thought. What thinking does is merely, as in conceiving, to contemplate the universal in the object, by itself, and detach it from its particular surroundings as a separate object of attention. Thinking is the corresponding mental act which apprehends the universal as such, and we have already verified the existence in consciousness of the distinct awareness in enjoyment of the plan of any complex. When we think a colour, e.g. blue, we in like manner enjoy the pattern of blue, which is intrinsically a spatio-temporal complex, however simple. Thus thinking is only one of the formal varieties of mental process, it adds no question in respect of the material side of the mental action, except the question whether thinking possesses also intensity, which is another material feature of sensing.
...Intensity belongs to the thinking in so far as it is clothed in particular circumstance, and it never can dispense therewith in fact. But this intensity is not intensity of the custom. There is a custom which allows for intensity in its elements, but no intensity of the custom.