Source: Starship Troopers
“And the whole [is] greater than the part.”
Καὶ τὸ ὅλον τοῦ μέρους μεῖζον
ἐστιν
Elements, Book I, Common Notion 8 (5 in certain editions)
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Η 1045a 8–10: "… the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts … [πάντων γὰρ ὅσα πλείω μέρη ἔχει καὶ μὴ ἔστιν οἷον σωρὸς τὸ πᾶν]"
Euclid’s Elements
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“A part is greater than the whole;
By hints are mysteries told.”
Poems (1869), A Strip of Blue (1870)
Context: A part is greater than the whole;
By hints are mysteries told.
The fringes of eternity, —
God's sweeping garment-fold,
In that bright shred of glittering sea,
I reach out for and hold.
Holism and Evolution (1926)
Source: The Alphabet of Grace
“Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.”
Source: The Cave (2000), p. 68 (Vintage 2003)
“Parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves.”
The Dialectical Biologist (1985), co-written with Richard Levins, Introduction, p. 3.
Context: Parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.
“The whole is simpler than its parts.”
Quoted by Irving Fisher in "The Applications of Mathematics to the Social Sciences," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 36, 225-243 (1930). Full article http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183493954
Attributed
Time and Individuality (1940)
