1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Recept

RECEPT (from Lat. recipere, to take back), a philosophical term, used by Romanes (Mental Evolution of Man, ii. 36, 37), on the analogy of “concept and percept,” for mental images assumed to be produced by the simple repetition of percepts. The process is supposed to be the gradual elimination of elements in which the percepts disagree, and the emphasizing of those in which they agree. Thus the final residuum is a unity in difference. Recepts are, in fact, “spontaneous associations, formed unintentionally as what may be termed unperceived abstractions,” i.e. what are generally known as “generic images.”