 It is thus the particularization of a given ‘characteristic being’ which we are said to apprehend, but “neither as universal nor as particularized” (SI, 343). There is no suggestion in Cook Wilson’s writings of something akin to Husserl’s act of ‘categorial intuition’ or ‘ideational abstraction’, in virtue of which the universal would be “brought to consciousness and […] actual givenness” (Husserl 2001, 292). He believed instead that the ‘intrinsic character’ of any universal is inexplicable, because the relation between particular and universal, although fundamental and thus presupposed by any explanation (SI, 335 &amp; 345), is sui generis, therefore not explainable in terms of something else: