Findlay took a strong interest in the puzzles generated by so-called “intentional objects,” “objects” that appear before, are considered by, and “intended” by consciousness. He described the “central difficulty” associated with these objects as how it can be that:
"Without really including an object, and without merely blindly tending towards it and without being at all like it, but in fact differing from it in category, and without being close to it in space or in other respects, a state of mind can none the less so unambiguously and intimately ne of a certain object that it is impossible to describe it adequately without mentioning the object in question" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 244).
Findlay holds that intentional objects are ambiguous and even contradictory, as they are presumably located within the individual who intends or considers them and yet, in some sense, are identical with the “real” object that they intend (p. 243), objects that may be worlds away from the one intending them.
Findlay proposes that only a “unitive logic” can resolve the paradoxes involved in intentionality. He writes:
"Such unitive logic may be vaguely characterized as directing our thought to an horizon where opposites melt into coincidences, where identity prevails over difference, and where the ‘moment’ or aspect replaces the part or element" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 245).
For Findlay, “our endless philosophical puzzles (bear witness) …to our sense of the surrounding unity which our thought-procedures require although they often so desperately fight against it” (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 245). According to Findlay, the puzzles of intentionality (and other philosophical puzzles like those regarding our knowledge of other minds) are dissolved if we consider the possibility that all is essentially one, and our thoughts about an object and the object itself are each an aspect of a unified existence. For Findlay, it is mind that reintroduces the unity that had been sundered by nature. In Findlay’s unitive logic,
"It is not an empirical accident that minds arise in the world; minds represent, we may say, the world’s deep unity asserting itself over the world’s attempted dispersion, an attempted dispersion as essential to the deep unity as the latter is essential to the former" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 246).
While nature disperses the objects of the universe in space, time, and category, mind has the capacity to bring them into unity—considering in the same mental act the smallest quantum of energy in the scientist’s laboratory and the nuclaer furnace of a supernova in a remote galaxy.
For Findlay, the unitive logic that is an inevitable consequence of a deep consideration of mind, forces us to take seriously the claims not only of Hegel, but “of various mystical writers, Neoplatonic, Vedantic, Mahayanist, and Contemplative-Christian, that there is and must be a whole spectrum of spiritual states varying from those of our normal waking earth-life to a state in which sensuous individuality is attenuated to a vanishing point…” (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 247).
For Findlay these notions were most beautifully expressed in Plotinus’ Enneads, where we read “Each thing holds all within itself, and again sees all in each other thing, so that everything is everywhere and all is all, and each all, and the glory infinite” (Quoted in Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 247).