"There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity." (Michel de Montaigne, "Essais", 1595)
"By the very nature of poetry it is impossible for everyone to be at the same time a sublime poet and a sublime metaphysician, for metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars." (Giambattista Vico, "The New Science", 1725)
"But to form the idea of an object, and to form an idea simply is the same thing; the reference of the idea to an object being an extraneous denomination, of which in itself it bears no mark or character. Now as it is impossible to form an idea of an object, that is possessed of quantity and quality, and yet is possessed of no precise degree of either; it follows, that there is an equal impossibility of forming an idea, that is not limited and confined in both these particulars. Abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation. The image in the mind is only that of a particular object, though the application of it in our reasoning be the same, as if it were universal." (David Hume,"Treatise of Human Nature", 1738)
"Our mental vision or conception of ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker. When we voluntarily turn our thoughts to any object, and raise up its image in the fancy, it is not the will which creates that idea: It is the universal Creator, who discovers it to the mind, and renders it present to us." (David Hume,"An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature. (David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs. (Samuel Johnson, "The Idler", 1767)
"[...] if there were really such images in the mind, or in the brain, they could not be general, because every thing that really exists is an individual. Universals are neither acts of the mind, nor images in the mind." (Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", 1785)
"Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines." (Edmund Burke,"Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs", 1791)
"To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy." (Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation", 1819)
"In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission." (Samuel T Coleridge, "Aids to Reflection", 1825)
"Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings." (G W Friedrich Hegel, "Introduction to Aesthetics", 1842)
"One of the greatest obstacles to the free and universal movement of human knowledge is the tendency that leads different kinds of knowledge to separate into systems." (Claude Bernard,"An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine", 1865)
"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries - a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"While all that we have is a relation of phenomena, a mental image, as such, in juxtaposition with or soldered to a sensation, we can not as yet have assertion or denial, a truth or a falsehood. We have mere reality, which is, but does not stand for anything, and which exists, but by no possibility could be true. […] the image is not a symbol or idea. It is itself a fact, or else the facts eject it. The real, as it appears to us in perception, connects the ideal suggestion with itself, or simply expels it from the world of reality. […] you possess explicit symbols all of which are universal and on the other side you have a mind which consists of mere individual impressions and images, grouped by the laws of a mechanical attraction." (Francis H Bradley, "Principles of Logic", 1883)
"Theoretical philosophy aimed to discover the unity of experience, namely, in the form of some universal explanation. It strived to yield a world picture, one which is harmoniously integral and completely understandable." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)
"The word 'causality' has, unfortunately enough, no fewer than three principal meanings - a clear symptom of the long and twisted history of the causal problem. The single word 'causality' is in fact used to designate: {a) a category (corresponding to the causal bond); (b) a principle (the general law of causation), and (c) a doctrine, namely, that which holds the universal validity of the causal principle, to the exclusion of other principles of determination." (Mario Bunge, "Causality: The place of the casual principles in modern science", 1959)
"Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept." (Bertrand Russell, "Basic writings", 1961)
"A diagram thus enables us to discover the internal categorization which characterizes the information being processed in a much shorter time than does a map. […] A diagram permits the rapid and precise internal processing of information having three components, but it does not permit introducing the information into a universal system of visual memorization and geographic comparison. It is a closed graphic system, limited solely to the information being processed. […] In a diagram, one begins by attributing a meaning to the planar dimensions, then one plots the correspondences." (Jacques Bertin, "Semiology of graphics", 1967)
"Theories represent the phenomena just in case their models, in some sense, 'share the same structure' with those phenomena - that, in slogan form, is what is called the semantic view of theories. [...] Embedding, that means displaying an isomorphism to selected parts of those models. Here is the argument to present the first challenge. For a phenomenon to be embeddable in a model, that means that it is isomorphic to a part of that model. So the two, the phenomenon and the relevant model part must have the same structure. Therefore, the phenomenon must have a structure, and this shared structure is obviously not itself a physical, concrete individual - so what is implied here is something of the order of realism about universals." (Bas C van Fraassen, "Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective", 2008)
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