Holism

"Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures."

"The state of the art in software design is the "enterprise architecture", where separate software components implement data processing (or other application specific-tasks), data storage, and user interface functionality. This approach enables, for example, the replacement of a database engine without changing the software components that process the data and those that support the interaction with the user."

"With increasing size and complexity of the implementations of information systems, it is necessary to use some logical construct (or architecture) for defining and controlling the interfaces and the integration of all of the components of the system."

"Architecture discussions frequently focus on technology issues. This paper takes a broader view, and describes the need for an "enterprise architecture" that includes an emphasis on business and information requirements. These higher level issues impact data and technology architectures and decisions... There is not a single correct way to develop an architecture or implement standards for every enterprise; they must be customized to the environment."

"Architecture is defined as a clear representation of a conceptual framework of components and their relationships at a point in time... a discussion of architecture must take into account different levels of architecture. These levels can be illustrated by a pyramid, with the business unit at the top and the delivery system at the base. An enterprise is composed of one or more Business Units that are responsible for a specific business area. The five levels of architecture are Business Unit, Information, Information System, Data and Delivery System. The levels are separate yet interrelated... The idea if an enterprise architecture reflects an awareness that the levels are logically connected and that a depiction at one level assumes or dictates that architectures at the higher level."

"DOD will create a Department-wide blueprint (enterprise architecture) that will prescribe how the Department's financial and non-financial feeder systems and business processes interact. This architecture will guide the development of enterprise-level processes and systems throughout DOD."

"Traditional manufactures tend to view human resources contained within highly segmented functions whereas integrated manufacturers view the entire organization as a series of resource centers. Integrated manufacturers allow and promote the sharing of critical skills on an as needed basis throughout the enterprise while Traditional manufacturers fall victim to resource hoarding. Given the breadth of change that new manufacturing technologies and operations philosophies will bring to many organizations, an assessment should be made as to how ready the organization and the various business functions are to accommodate these technology and non-technology changes. The recommended approach of course is to begin with corporate vision, objectives and strategies leading to a determination of the overall Enterprise Architecture in the areas of People, Management Practices, Support Structures and Corporate Cultures. This would ensure that all of the complementary shifts in the components of the Enterprise Architecture would be orchestrated under an overall plan of enterprise wide change."

"Automatic control in manufacturing requires a very rigourous and well defined model of the operation to be controlled. A model which on one hand reflects reality as closely as possible and on the other hand allows easy and fast modifications and updates to reflect the continuous changes in the real world. provides the modelling concepts to describe and maintain the complete manufacturing systems. In addition, CIM-OSA aims to provide at providing consistent engineering and operational environments to model for execution as well as for real time operation control. Keywords: CIM; CIM architecture; enterprise architecture; enterprise modelling; enterprise optimisation; enterprise control; real time control;"

"Enterprise architectures are required to support and maximize the efforts of virtual teams within decentralized organizations. Vendor products exist today to start evolving towards a standards-based multi-vendor architecture. The underlying networking technology, 802.3/Ethemet, is robust and will provide for a cost-effective investment that will last for many years to come. Complimentary LAN technologies are already available to ensure transparent growth of networked systems. Combining human resources with information technology will be the key differentiating factor for successful manufacturing enterprises in the 1990s."

"The Enterprise Architecture is a combination of the Business and Computing architectures. The Computing Architecture, at the least, identifies hardware, software and data communications."

"When one enterprise architecture dominates, Grumman plans to use it as a "manager of managers." This single, enterprise-wide network-management architecture will run over all other network-management systems being used: no existing scheme will be scrapped."

"For the IT department [the] change towards commodity products, open standards, end-user decision making and fundamental change in the Business platform, will imply substantial challenges. The role of the IS function will change. The formal IS budget in the US, according to Gartner Group Inc, is 2.4% of revenue in 1990, and will grow to 2.7% in 1995. End-user IT spending is estimated t0 2.4% in 1990, split 50/50 between budget and unseen expenses. This item is assumed to increase to 5.0% in 1995, bringing the total to 7.7% This total amount must be managed, and the rules must be set by the IS manager. Following the rule of "Least resistance", will lead to crisis and complete loss of control. IT resources must be managed. An Enterprise Architecture must be established and adhered to. Standards must be established, and partnerships between IT professionals and end-users formed."

"A key ingredient to an enterprise architecture is the ability to link multiple and disparate systems into a coherent whole. has been gradually putting together the technology that will enable it to offer enterprise LANs that are capable of supporting distributed applications running across a variety of computer Internetworking and multi- routing are essential building blocks."

"The creation and implementation of integrated information systems involves a variety of collaborators including people from specialist departments, informatics, external advisers and manufacturers. They need clear rules and limits within which they can process their individual sub-tasks, in order to ensure the logical consistency of the entire project. Therefore, an architecture needs to be established to determine the components that make up the information system and the methods to be used to describe it. The ARIS architecture developed in this book is described in concrete terms as an information model within the entity-relationship approach. This information model provides the basis for the systematic and rational application of methods in the development of information systems. It also serves as the basis for a repository in which the enterprise's application - specific data, organization and function models can be stored. The ARIS architecture constitutes a framework in which integrated applications systems can be developed, optimized and converted into EDP - technical implementations. At the same time, it demonstrates how business economics can examine and analyze information systems in order to translate their contents into EDP-suitable form."

"Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) results in a high-level blueprint of data, applications, and technology that is a cost-effective, long-term solution; not a quick fix. Management participation provides a business perspective, credibility, and de-mystifies the systems planning process. EAP can be labeled as business-driven or data -driven because"

"This is an intermediate work that describes PERA, which is a general enterprise reference architecture model that is suited for manufacturing enterprises. The book explains PERA as a layered architecture, and within the context of an architectural life cycle. PERA at the conceptual level is focused on the integration of physical plant, human resources, and information systems. This approach is clearly suited to manufacturing, and in fact, the model has been adopted and adapted by Fluor Daniel Corporation (among others) and has been proven in practice..."

"The integration technology and infrastructure elements available today, in 1993, would enable an enterprise to develop a significant integration infrastructure. However, integration projects are constrained by cultural inertia, financial and resource limitations, and, significantly, risk management Thus, projects and their supporting integration infrastructures tend to be deployed in an incremental and evolutionary manner. Since each enterprise chooses its integration path based on particular business needs, the corporations visited in this study each presented a different road map of integration efforts to date and a unique snapshot of current integration infrastructure.... DoD, in concert with leading companies, should formulate an R&D strategy to create a new generation of enterprise architectures, models, tools, and software systems, and to determine the potential for new business operations, engineering practices, and manufacturing concepts. To achieve potential functional and performance improvements, integrators should combine the leverage of several emerging threshold technologies, such as operational integration frameworks, object-based and knowledge-based product and process representations, application-oriented network services, near-term and mid-term solutions to database integration, and wide-area object brokerage and execution.-"

"A company's enterprise architecture is unique — neither good nor bad, but only appropriate or inappropriate in regard to management's vision of the future. The current enterprise architecture either supports the vision or it does not."

"An enterprise architecture can be thought of as a "blueprint" or "picture" which assists in the design of an enterprise. The enterprise architecture must define three things. First, what are the activities that an enterprise performs? Second, how should these activities be performed? And finally, how should the enterprise be constructed? Consequently, the architecture being developed will identify the essential processes performed by a virtual company, how the virtual company and the agile enterprises involved in the virtual company will perform these processes, and include a methodology for the rapid reconfiguration of the virtual enterprise."

"An enterprise architecture is an abstract summary of some organizational component's design. The organizational strategy is the basis for deciding where the organization wants to be in three to five years. When matched to the organizational strategy, the architectures provide the foundation for deciding priorities for implementing the strategy."

"It is within the purview of each context to define its own rules and techniques for deciding how the object-oriented mechanisms and principles are to be managed. And while the manager of a large information system might wish to impose some rules based on philosophical grounds, from the perspective of enterprise architecture, there is no reason to make decisions at this level. Each context should define its own objecttivity."

"Although the concept of an enterprise architecture (EA) has not been well defined and agreed upon, EAs are being developed to support information system development and enterprise reengineering. Most EAs differ in content and nature, and most are incomplete because they represent only data and process aspects of the enterprise. This paper defines an EA... An EA is a conceptual framework that describes how an enterprise is constructed by defining its primary components and the relationships among these components."

"Enterprise computing and open systems - what are the distinctions between the two. Open systems are oriented towards an environment where most or all of the computing technology that comprises that environment is based upon standards regardless of the scope of the environment - departmental or organization-wide. Enterprise computing, by contrast, encompasses not only open system concepts but, by virtue of existing environments that must be incorporated as well, a great deal of proprietary interfaces and interoperability mechanisms. In the early 1990s, as both movements were beginning to gain momentum, there was some degree of overlap between open systems and enterprise computing, the amount of which was hindered somewhat by the stage at which enterprise architectures and standards were. It was anticipated that over time, as the enterprise architectures, open standards, and products built on one or both evolved and matured, the gap between the two would narrow and a greater degree of overlap would occur. As it turns out, the two movements have converged..."

"The Enterprise Project is collaborative work between AIAI at the University of Edinburgh, IBM UK, Lloyd's Register of Shipping, Logica and Unilever. The project is establishing a generic framework within which enterprise tools can be used to assist users in their tasks. It is based on an Enterprise ontology which establishes shared terminology for communication between users and tools... The core of the tool set will support user tasks via a workflow engine which will assist the user in performing a task, allow access to appropriate tools and methods, and make available suitable information resources. An abstraction of this central work ow within the tool set is provided in this paper. This acts to provide a framework for describing the various components integrated within the tool set and allowing them to be provided in a modular fashion."

"An enterprise architecture is a snapshot of how an enterprise operates while performing its business processes. The recognition of the need for integration at all levels of an organisation points to a multi-dimensional framework that links both the business processes and the data requirements. Such a framework is provided by the Information Systems Architecture (ISA) developed by John Zachman."

"The presence of an enterprise reference architecture aids an enterprise in its ability to understand its structure and processes. Similar to a computer architecture, the enterprise architecture is comprised of several views. The enterprise architecture should provide activity, organizational, business rule (information), resource, and process views of an organization."

"There is no such thing as a standard enterprise architecture. Enterprise design is as unique as a human fingerprint, because enterprise differ in how they function. Adopting an enterprise architecture is therefore one of the most urgent tasks for top executive management. Fundamentally, and information framework is a political doctrine for specifying as to who will have what information to make timely decisions... Enterprise architecture [is] the Holy Grail of all systems people. Advanced systems textbooks tell you that every organization must have one. Several CIM program directors attempted to come up with this abstraction, only to fail. Only someone with a depth of understanding about how the Pentagon really works could come up with anything of use."

"Most enterprise architectures are obsolete," says Martin, and "most end-to-end processes are clumsy, slow, expensive, and even harmful; they need to be replaced with routines that are fast and focus on the needs of the customer."

"The is about those methods, models and tools which are needed to build the integrated enterprise. The architecture is generic because it applies to most, potentially all types of enterprise. The coverage of the framework spans Products, Enterprises, Enterprise Integration and Strategic Enterprise Management, with the emphasis being on the middle two. The proposal for the architecture follows the architecture itself improving the quality of the presentation and of the outcome. Definitions of Generic Enterprise Reference Architecture, Enterprise Engineering/ Integration Methodology, Enterprise Modelling Languages, Enterprise Models, and Enterprise Modules are given. It is proposed how the above could be developed on the basis of previously analysed architectures (and other results too), such as the , the GRAI Integrated Methodology, , and TOVIE."

"The term "information technology architecture," with respect to an executive agency, means an integrated framework for evolving or maintaining existing information technology and acquiring new information technology to achieve the agency’s strategic goals and information resources management goals."

"One could then consider the enterprise-reference architecture to be a meta model of the enterprise representation. The enterprise-architecture is a component of this meta model."

"In the early '80's, there was little interest in the idea of Enterprise Reengineering or Enterprise Modeling and the use of formalisms and models was generally limited to some aspects of application development within the Information Systems community. The subject of "architecture" was acknowledged at that time, however, there was little definition to support the concept. This lack of definition precipitated the initial investigation that ultimately resulted in the "Framework for Information Systems Architecture." Although from the outset, it was clear that it should have been referred to as a "Framework for Enterprise Architecture," that enlarged perspective could only now begin to be generally understood as a result of the relatively recent and increased, world-wide focus on Enterprise "engineering." The Framework as it applies to Enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of an Enterprise that are significant to the management of the Enterprise as well as to the development of the Enterprise’s systems. It was derived from analogous structures that are found in the older disciplines of Architecture/Construction and Engineering/Manufacturing that classify and organize the design artifacts created over the process of designing and producing complex physical products (e.g. buildings or airplanes.)"

"The Enterprise Architecture is the explicit description of the current and desired relationships among business and management process and information technology. It describes the "target" situation which the agency wishes to create and maintain by managing its IT portfolio. The documentation of the Enterprise Architecture should include a discussion of principles and goals. For example, the agency's overall management environment, including the balance between centralization and decentralization and the pace of change within the agency, should be clearly understood when developing the Enterprise Architecture. Within that environment, principles and goals set direction on such issues as the promotion of interoperability, open systems, public access, end-user satisfaction, and security."

"Architecture is that set of design artifacts, or descriptive representations, that are relevant for describing an object, such that it can be produced to requirements (quality) as well as maintained over the period of its useful life (change)."

"A conceptual framework that links the Departmental and Programmatic missions, goals, and objectives, and provides a mapping of the current and future DOE business information required to support them."

"Establishing an enterprise architecture is like reengineering an aircraft in flight."

"provides a Reference Architecture (known as the CIMOSA cube) from which particular enterprise architectures can be derived. This Reference Architecture and the associated enterprise modelling framework are based on a set of modelling constructs, or generic building blocks, which altogether form the CIMOSA modelling languages."

"GERAM (The Generalized Enterprise Reference Architecture Methodology) is a class of enterprise architectures and their associated methodologies as developed by the IFAC/IFIP Task Force on Architectures for in their work during the period 1990-1996"

"Generically, an architecture is the description of the set of components and the relationships between them. Simple enough. The trouble starts when you tack on an adjective: There are software architectures, hardware architectures, network architectures, system architectures, and enterprise architectures. People have their own preconceived notions and experiences about “architecture.” A software architecture describes the layout of the software modules and the connections and relationships among them. A hardware architecture can describe how the hardware components are organized. However, both these definitions can apply to a single computer, a single information system, or a family of information systems. Thus “architecture” can have a range of meanings, goals, and abstraction levels, depending on who’s speaking. An information system architecture typically encompasses an overview of the entire information system—including the software, hardware, and information architectures (the structure of the data that systems will use). In this sense, the information system architecture is a meta-architecture. An enterprise architecture is also a meta-architecture in that it comprises many information systems and their relationships (technical infrastructure). However, because it can also contain other views of an enterprise—including work, function, and information—it is at the highest level in the architecture pyramid. It is important to begin any architecture development effort with a clear definition of what you mean by “architecture.”"

"This book... provides a formal notational system for drawing and maintaining IT architectures, which I call the Enterprise Information Technology Architecture Blueprinting (EAB for short). This methodology adresses the features required of any formal notational system... In short, EAB defines a communications system that allows a community of IT professionals to visualize architectures in a standard manner."

"Similar to a computer architecture, the enterprise architecture is comprised of several views, including activity view, organizational view, business rule (information) view, resource view, and process view. These views should be cross-referenced with each other to provide an integrated picture of the enterprise."

"Enterprise architecture is a family of related architecture components. This include information architecture, organization and business process architecture, and information technology architecture. Each consists of architectural representations, definitions of architecture entities, their relationships, and specification of function and purpose. Enterprise architecture guides the construction and development of business organizations and business processes, and the construction and development of supporting information systems. Enterprise architecture is a holistic representation of all the components of the enterprise and the use of graphics and schemes are used to emphasize all parts of the enterprise, and how they are interrelated... Enterprise architectures are used to deal with intra-organizational processes, interorganizational cooperation and coordination, and their shared use of information and information technologies. Business developments, such as outsourcing, partnership, alliances and Electronic Data Interchange, extend the need for architecture across company boundaries."

"Architecture : The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution."

"The use of Enterprise Architectures is becoming increasingly widespread in the private sector. Borrowing insights from enterprise reference architectures developed during the last decade, IT vendors and companies belonging to specific industries are establishing reference data and process models advancing the standardisation of their businesses and creating a more integrated environment for their activities. Although public administrations share the same problem of non-standardisation, which is being magnified rapidly in a changing and demanding environment, little has been done so far in the direction of integration..."

"The concept of EAs dates back to the mid-1980s. At that time, John Zachman, widely recognized as a leader in the field, identified the need to use a logical construction blueprint (i.e., an architecture) for defining and controlling the integration of systems and their components. Accordingly, Zachman developed a “framework” or structure for logically defining and capturing an architecture. Drawing parallels to the field of classical architecture, and, later, to the aircraft manufacturing industry, in which different work products (e.g., architect plans, contractor plans, shop plans, bills of lading) represent different views of the planned building or aircraft, respectively, Zachman’s framework identified the kind of work products needed to understand and thus build a given system or entity. In short, this framework provides six perspectives or windows from which to view how a given entity operates. The perspectives are those of the (1) strategic planner, (2) system user, (3) system designer, (4) system developer, (5) subcontractor, and (6) system itself. Associated with each of these perspectives, Zachman also proposed six abstractions of the entity, or models covering (1) how the entity operates, (2) what the entity uses to operate, (3) where the entity operates, (4) who operates the entity, (5) when entity operations occur, and (6) why the entity operates. Zachman’s framework provides a way to identify and describe an entity’s existing and planned component parts and the parts’ relationships before the costly and time-consuming efforts associated with developing or transforming the entity begin."

"Since the late 1980s, architecture frameworks have emerged within the federal government, beginning with the publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology framework in 1989. Subsequently, we issued EA guidance, and our research of successful public and private sector organizations’ IT management practices identified the use of EAs as a factor critical to these organizations’ success. Since that time, other federal entities have issued EA frameworks, including the Department of Defense, Department of the Treasury, and the federal CIO Council. Although the various frameworks use different terminology and somewhat different structures, they are fundamentally consistent in purpose and content, and they are being used today to varying degrees by many federal agencies. The emergence of federal frameworks and guidance over the last 5 years owes largely to the Congress’s passage of the in 1996. This act, among other things, requires the CIOs for major departments and agencies to develop, maintain, and facilitate the implementation of information technology architectures as a means of integrating business processes and agency goals with IT. In response to the act, OMB, in collaboration with us, issued guidance on the development and implementation of EAs..."

"An architecture framework is a tool which can be used for developing a broad range of different architectures [architecture descriptions]. It should describe a method for designing an information system in terms of a set of building blocks, and for showing how the building blocks fit together. It should contain a set of tools and provide a common vocabulary. It should also include a list of recommended standards and compliant products that can be used to implement the building blocks."

"Principal among the Strategic Systems Architectures is the so-called ‘Enterprise Architecture’. This is usually regarded as an ‘umbrella’ architecture that covers business, application, information and technical architectures too. This Best Practice Guide concentrates on the structure, construction and use of an Enterprise Architecture. An Enterprise Architecture is a dynamic and powerful tool that helps organisations understand their own structure and the way they work. It provides a ‘map’ of the enterprise and a ‘route planner’ for business and technology change. A well-constructed Enterprise Architecture provides a foundation for the ‘Agile’ business. Normally an EA takes the form of a comprehensive set of cohesive models that describe the structure and functions of an enterprise. An important use is in systematic IT planning and architecting, and in enhanced decision-making. The EA can be regarded as the ‘master architecture’ that contains all the subarchitectures for an enterprise. The individual models in an EA are arranged in a logical manner that provides an ever-increasing level of detail about the enterprise: its objectives and goals; its processes and organisation; its systems and data; the technology used and any other relevant spheres of interest."

"A well-defined enterprise architecture (EA) is a blueprint for institutional modernization and evolution that consists of models describing how an entity operates today and how it intends to operate in the future, along with a plan for how it intends to transition to this future state. Such architectures are essential tools whose effective development and use are recognized hallmarks of successful organizations."

"Enterprise Architecture is a complete expression of the enterprise; a master plan which "acts as a collaboration force" between aspects of business planning such as goals, visions, strategies and governance principles; aspects of business operations such as business terms, organization structures, processes and data; aspects of automation such as information systems and databases; and the enabling technological infrastructure of the business, such as computers, operating systems and networks"

"Enterprise Architecture is the discipline whose purpose is to align more effectively the strategies of enterprises together with their processes and their resources (business and IT). Enterprise architecture is complex because it involves different types of practitioners with different goals and practices. Enterprise Architecture can be seen as an art; it is largely based on experience but does not have strong theoretical foundations. As a consequence, it is difficult to teach, to apply, and to support with computer-aided tools."

"[T]he average company’s enterprise system - i.e. the overall system of IT related entities - is today highly complex. Technically, large organizations possess hundreds or thousands of extensively interconnected and heterogeneous single IT systems performing tasks that varies from enterprise resource planning to real-time control and monitoring of industrial processes. Moreover are these systems storing a wide variety of sometimes redundant data, and typically they are deployed on several different platforms... Organizationally, the enterprise system embraces business processes and business units using as well as maintaining and acquiring the IT systems. The interplay between the organization and the IT systems are further determined by for instance business goals, ownership and governance structures, strategies, individual system users, documentation, and cost. Lately, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has evolved with the mission to take a holistic approach to managing the above depicted enterprise system. The discipline’s presumption is that architectural models are the key to succeed in understanding and administrating enterprise systems. Compared to many other engineering disciplines, EA is quite immature in many respects. This thesis identifies.. firstly, the lack of explicit purpose for architectural models... [A] company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) should guide the rationale behind the development of EA models. In particular, distribution of IT related information and knowledge throughout the organization is emphasized as an important concern uncared for. Secondly, the lack of architectural theory is recognized..."

"An enterprise architecture framework"

"The software architecture of a system or a family of systems has one of the most significant impacts on the quality of an organization's enterprise architecture. While the design of software systems concentrates on satisfying the functional requirements for a system, the design of the software architecture for systems concentrates on the nonfunctional or quality requirements for systems. These quality requirements are concerns at the enterprise level. The better an organization specifies and characterizes the software architecture for its systems, the better it can characterize and manage its enterprise architecture. By explicitly defining the systems software architectures, an organization will be better able to reflect the priorities and trade-offs that are important to the organization in the software that it builds."

"The concept of enterprise architecture emerged in the mid-1980s as a means for optimizing integration and interoperability across organizations. In the early 1990s, GAO research of successful public and private sector organizations led it to identify enterprise architecture as a critical success factor for agencies that are attempting to modernize their information technology (IT) environments. Since then, GAO has repeatedly identified the lack of an enterprise architecture as a key management weakness in major modernization programs at a number of federal agencies. It has also collaborated with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council to develop architecture guidance. In 2002, OMB began developing the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), an initiative intended to guide and constrain federal agencies’ enterprise architectures and IT investments."

"During the mid-1980s, John Zachman... identified the need to use a logical construction blueprint (i.e., an architecture) for defining and controlling the integration of systems and their components... Since Zachman introduced his framework, a number of frameworks have emerged within the federal government, beginning with the publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework in 1989. Since that time, other federal entities have issued enterprise architecture frameworks, including the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of the Treasury. In September 1999, the federal CIO Council published the , which was intended to provide federal agencies with a common construct for their architectures, thereby facilitating the coordination of common business processes, technology insertion, information flows, and system investments among federal agencies. The Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework describes an approach, including models and definitions, for developing and documenting architecture descriptions for multi-organizational functional segments of the federal government."

"Since the late 1980s, EA Management Frameworks have emerged within the federal government, beginning with the publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology framework in 1989. In 1992, the GAO issued EA guidance entitled Strategic Information Planning: Framework for Designing and Developing System Architecture. This EA Management Framework was intended to:"

"In the 1970s and 1980s, business processes were redesigned on average once every seven years. This rate of change was easy for the IT department to follow. The time needed to alter the information systems that supported new or changed business processes stayed within acceptable limits. In the 1990s, the rate of change began to increase and information systems began to lag behind. In 2000, a manager succinctly remarked: “We can completely redesign our business processes every three months and subsequently our IT department needs a year to catch up with the supporting information systems.”"

"Enterprise ontology is a novel subject, and writing a book on this novel subject puts the author under the obligation to provide at least two kinds of explanation. One explanation regards the justification of presenting yet another point of view on enterprises. Why and how would enterprise ontology assist in coping with the current and future problems related to enterprises? The other explanation concerns the particular approach towards enterprise ontology that the author takes. Why would this approach be more appropriate and more effective than some other one? These are serious questions indeed, and anyone who takes the pain to study this book deserves satisfying answers. You will get the answers; however, not straight away. A first attempt is in this introductory chapter. Definite and fully satisfying answers can only emerge from a dedicated and thorough study of the book. The lasting reward of such a study is a novel and powerful insight into the essence of the operation of enterprises; by this we mean insight that is fully independent of the (current) realization and implementation."

"[T]his article presents the results of a survey in which Swedish CIOs have prioritized their most important concerns. The three most pertinent concerns are to decrease the cost related to the business organization, improve the quality of the interplay between the IT organization and the business organization, and provide new computer-aided support to the business organization. The survey also shows that CIOs in large companies have a more business-oriented focus than those in small companies... [and that] the foci of Enterprise Architecture frameworks should be aligned with the concerns of the CIO."

"Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a company's operation model... The key to effective enterprise architecture is to identify the processes, data, technology, and customer interfaces that take the operating model from vision to reality."

"Architecture has two meanings depending upon its contextual usage:"

": (1) A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation;"

": (2) The structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time."

"Most business-folk have probably never heard of enterprise architecture. Which is not surprising, because most of the literature in the field suggests it’s about IT, and only about IT. There might be a few throwaway references somewhere to some blurry notion of ‘business architecture’, but that’s about it. Hence of no relevance to everyday business, really. Which is a problem, because real enterprise-architecture isn’t much about IT at all. Or rather, although IT is significant, it’s only one small part. Turns out instead that that blurry ‘business architecture’ isn’t something that can be skipped in a headlong rush down to the technical minutiae: it’s actually the core of enterprise-architecture. Enterprise-architecture is about the architecture – the structure – of the whole of the enterprise:"

"Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company's operating model. The operating model is the desired state of business process integration and business process standardization for delivering goods and services to customers."

"Enterprise architecture is a management practice to maximize the contribution of an agency’s resources, IT investments, and system development activities to achieve its performance goals. Architecture describes clear relationships from strategic goals and objectives through investments to measurable performance improvements for the entire enterprise or a portion (or segment) of the enterprise"

"In the case of Enterprise Architecture, the most widely read book ever published with this kind of subject or field of study is entitled Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. By reading this book, you will learn that every company has its own architecture, but unfortunately, some just do not have the right one."

"Enterprise Architecture is conceptually defined as the normative restriction of design freedom. Practically, it is a coherent and consistent set of principles that guide the design, engineering, and implementation of an enterprise. Any strategic initiative of an enterprise can only be made operational through transforming it into principles that guide the design, engineering, and implementation of the new enterprise. Only by applying this notion of Enterprise Architecture can consistency be achieved between the high-level policies (mission, strategies) and the operational business rules of an enterprise."

"Since the 1970's, organizations are spending more and more money building new information systems. The fast growing number of systems and in many cases the ad hoc manner in which the systems were integrated have exponentially increased the cost and complexity of information systems. At the same time organizations are finding it more and more difficult to keep these information systems in alignment with business need. Furthermore, the role of information systems has changed during the last two decades, from automation of routine administrative tasks to a strategic and competitive weapon. In light of this development, a new field of research and practice was born that soon came to be known as Enterprise Architecture."

"Enterprise architecture is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution. The scope of the enterprise architecture includes the people, processes, information and technology of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment. Enterprise architects compose holistic solutions that address the business challenges of the enterprise and support the governance needed to implement them."

"The goal of enterprise architecture is to create a unified IT environment (standardized hardware and software systems) across the firm or all of the firm's business units, with tight symbiotic links to the business side of the organization (which typically is 90% of the firm... at least by way of budget). More specifically, the goals are to promote alignment, standardization, reuse of existing IT assets, and the sharing of common methods for project management and software development across the organization."

"Enterprise Architecture (EA) is becoming an increasingly mature field of work, but many large organizations still struggle with implementing an integral and truly effective EA function. The literature provides a fragmented picture of the EA function, describing the various separate elements that make up the total package of activities, resources, skills, and competences of the EA delivery function. In our view, the EA function reaches beyond EA delivery and also includes the stakeholders, structures and processes involved with EA decision making and EA conformance. A holistic and integral view on the EA function is essential in order to properly assess an EA function on its performance, and to allow identifying the key points of improvement..."

"The dream of every CEO is to have one standardized, integrated, flexible and manageable landscape of aligned business and IT processes, systems and procedures. Having complete control over all projects implementing changes in that landscape so that they deliver solutions that perfectly fit the corporate and IT change strategies, makes this dream complete. The reality for many large organizations is quite the opposite. Many large organizations struggle to keep their operational and change costs in control. Key reasons are the inflexibility and enormous complexity of their business and IT structures, processes, systems, and procedures, often distributed across lines of business (LoB) and business divisions (BD) spread out over various regions, countries or even continents.., Over the last decade, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been one of many instruments used by organizations in their attempt to get grip on the current operational environment and the implementation of changes. EA provides standardization, and sets a clear direction for the future to guide changes."

"Enterprise Architecture is the description and visualization of the structure of a given area of contemplation, its elements and their collaborations and interrelations links vision, strategy and feasibility, focusing on usability durability and effectiveness. Architecture enables construction, defining principles, rules, standards and guidelines, expressing and communicating a vision."

"When software applications became larger and larger, people such as Shaw and Garlan coined the term software architecture. This notion of architecture deals with the key design principles underlying software artefacts. In the 1980s and 1990s, people became aware that the development of information technology (IT) should be done in conjunction with the development of the context in which it was used. This led to the identification of the so-called business/IT alignment problem. Solving the business/IT alignment problem requires enterprises to align human, organizational, informational, and technological aspects of systems. Quite early on, the term architecture was also introduced as a means to further alignment, and thus analyzes and solves business?IT alignment problems, Recently, the awareness emerged that alignment between business an IT is not enough, there are many more aspects in the enterprise in need of alignment. This has led to the use of the term architecture at the enterprise level: enterprise architecture."

"Enterprise Architecture is the organizing logic for key business processes and IT capabilities reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model."

"Enterprise architecture {is] a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realisation of an enterprise's organisational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure... The most important characteristic of an enterprise architecture is that it provides a holistic view of the enterprise... To achieve this quality in enterprise architecture, bringing together information from formerly unrelated domains necessitates an approach that is understood by all those involved from those different domains."

"Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns"

"Since 2003, more and more authors using the term EA explicitly in their publications, Most of the newer contributions are coming from an academic background. Especially after 2005, a lot of consultancies and IT-companies are adopting their products and strategies to an extended architectural understanding hence Enterprise Architecture... After 2004-2005 a lot of companies started to use the term EA and since then have connected it somehow to their products and strategies a huge amount of superficial marketing material has been distributed. Consider the maturity and the focus of the contributions there is no topic or even a theory in the discipline of EA. Almost half of the approaches discussed in the papers are still coming from low maturity level (Concept Phase) in the context of readiness to be used in an organization. Only a third of the authors are delivering some kind of best practice (Implementation/Adoption). Differentiating the focus of EA-authors there are two specific topics only (EA-Frameworks and Enterprise Modeling) the majority is dealing with rather general aspects."

"has been an area of significant research in the information systems discipline throughout the last decade. Mainly developed by IT-practitioners, enterprise architectures (EA) became a promising and comprehensive approach to model either the current or desired state of enterprises. Existing approaches are, however, often criticized for paying too little attention to the business side of enterprises. In this paper, we interpret an enterprise as socio-technical system and analyze from a systems theory perspective which features are necessary for a comprehensive model. From there, we deduce if, why and how additional aspects of enterprises should be included into EA. Amongst others, it becomes obvious that especially human actors, as most flexible and agile elements of enterprises, are not adequately included in current architectures."

"In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) management has emerged to one of the major challenges for enterprises. When looking for guidance in this field companies can choose from a variety of EA management approaches, which have been developed by scientists, practitioners, and governmental organizations. However, these approaches differ significantly in a number of characteristics and especially when it comes to methods for the EA management function. There is neither a common understanding of the scope and content of the main activities an EA management function consists of nor has a commonly accepted reference method been developed."

"Enterprise Architecture is the continuous practice of describing the essential elements of a sociotechnical organization, their relationships to each other and to the environment, in order to understand complexity and manage change."

"A literary review by Schöenherr (2009) clearly shows that the level of interest in Enterprise Architecture is indeed increasing. Although the term architecture was limited to information systems when originally adopted by John Zachman (1987), the concept has since then been expanded to encompass the entire enterprise and interpreted by academia as well as the private and public sectors. The different views on how to approach Enterprise Architecture are often documented and compiled into “guides” or “frameworks” which are intended to instruct practitioners in how to apply this concept to their organization. However, the numerous approaches all present disparate views on what exactly Enterprise Architecture entails and how it is best administered (Rood, 1994; Whitman, Ramachandran & Ketkar, 2001; Sessions, 2007; Schöenherr, 2009). This essentially leaves the practitioner in the dark as the approaches offer virtually no common ground, no common language and no common orientation on which to base a comparison."

"EA originated from and is influenced by a number of business areas: The manufacturing industry, with Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and later Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II). These approaches developed into the so-called supply chain or value chain (Porter, et al). Not only the incoming logistics and internal operations were considered, but also the flow of material to customers and back. The second origin of EA growth was from Process Modelling and Design approaches, e.g. Business Process Re-engineering (Hammer, et al). These approaches seek to depict the enterprise in terms of business processes, leading to process improvements and “end-to-end” process integration. Corporate and process governance, organisational adaptability and IM/IT system integration were typical considerations. Organisations were consequently often restructured, to become “flatter” (less management layers) and coined process-centred or process-oriented organisations. A third development is a type of backward integration where software developers trie to better understand and serve the business world with “functioning and value-adding” software solutions (business applications). It is a well-known fact that enterprise integration software (ERP, etc.), according to business users and owners, are often considered to be failures."

"Enterprise architecture (EA) is the definition and representation of a high-level view of an enterprise‘s business processes and IT systems, their interrelationships, and the extent to which these processes and systems are shared by different parts of the enterprise. EA aims to define a suitable operating platform to support an organisation‘s future goals and the roadmap for moving towards this vision. Despite significant practitioner interest in the domain, understanding the value of EA remains a challenge. Although many studies make EA benefit claims, the explanations of why and how EA leads to these benefits are fragmented, incomplete, and not grounded in theory. This article aims to address this knowledge gap by focusing on the question: How does EA lead to organisational benefits? Through a careful review of EA literature, the paper consolidates the fragmented knowledge on EA benefits and presents the EA Benefits Model (EABM). The EABM proposes that EA leads to organisational benefits through its impact on four benefit enablers: Organisational Alignment, Information Availability, Resource Portfolio Optimisation, and Resource Complementarity."

"What I wanted to do when I came in... was help the community turn a corner and become relevant in the key initiatives that we need in the federal government... make sure architecture was relevant, it became more agile, it continued to move to have a more business and more strategy focus."

"The historical roots of enterprise architecture are well recorded and span a period that starts with the Zachman framework and continues to the present day. During these twenty years of productive activity many well-known frameworks and government level initiatives have seen the light. The aim of this section is to examine the history of enterprise architecture in an attempt to discover the tradition within which it stands. This tradition is explored in terms of diversity of definitions, the components of enterprise architecture, and enterprise architecture frameworks and methods:"

"The history of enterprise architecture as a management discipline has been marked by failure to live up to the promise it showed as a concept. The idea of an enterprise architecture and the explicit understanding of the relationships between the most critical forces, resources, and processes involved in the execution of an organization’s business is powerful. People can grasp on an intuitive level how powerful the reality of that concept would be if it could be put into practice and harnessed on behalf of the enterprise. Unfortunately, the conceptual enterprise architecture that enables the agile enterprise and informs executives in the midst of critical portfolio and execution decisions has given way to a morass of additional bureaucracy and expensive efforts to create enterprise models that are more often significant as records of organizational history than as blueprints for the future. The problems lie in three areas. The first of which is a lack of clear performance objectives for the EA effort... The second major failure stems from the belief that EA is somehow all about the process for developing content... Finally, there is far too little attention paid to helping the consumers of EA information..."

"Many companies are not driving significant business value from the digitized platforms they build as part of their enterprise architecture initiatives. Our 2011 survey of 146 senior IT leaders found that the companies that benefit from their platforms' efforts are consistently relying on four architecture-related practices that encourage organizational learning about the value of enterprise architecture: 1) making IT costs transparent, 2) debating architectural exceptions, 3) performing post-implementation reviews, and 4) making IT investments with enterprise architecture in mind."

"Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes. EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions. EA is used to steer decision making toward the evolution of the future state architecture."

"Enterprise Architecture is not a method, principle or doctrine – It is a way of thinking enabled by patterns, frameworks, standards etc. essentially seeking to align both the technology ecosystem and landscape with the business trajectory driven by both the internal and external forces. Daljit R Banger"

"There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being."

"What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world’s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man’s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness — the old hen pan, “the all is one”—either a single source or a single ruler."

"The nature of the All moved to make the universe."

"Ananke must above all be regarded as cosmic force, that is as the ruling law in the universe; thus … the super-personal, cosmic significance of "the All" ruled by Ananke as well, can be accepted as certain. It represents in the universe the inviolability of cause and effect and does so as dual essence, as a mythical personage belonging to the oldest theogony or as the earliest philosophical concept of the mechanics of natural events."

"The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter."

"The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God."

"All things are in all."

"Before anything else the One must exist eternally; from his power derives everything that always is or will ever be. He is the Eternal and embraces all times. He knows profoundly all events and He himself is everything. He creates everything beyond any beginning of time and beyond any limit of place and space. He is not subject to any numerical law, or to any law of measure or order. He himself is law, number, measure, limit without limit, end without end, act without form."

"Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all."

"The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do."

"Tat Tvam Asi (Sanskrit: तत् त्वम् असि or तत्त्वमसि)"

"Hen to pan"

"The Many is as adorable to the One as the One is to the Many. This is the Love of These; creation-parturition is the Bliss of the One; coition-dissolution is the Bliss of the Many. The All, thus interwoven of These, is Bliss. Naught is beyond Bliss."

"The All which is beyond comprehension — the All which is perpetually discovered, yet undiscovered: sexual, sweet, Alive!"

"As far as I'm concerned we are all God That's the difference If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up Funny about that."

"These [Elements] never cease changing place continually, now being all united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife, until they are brought together in the unity of the all, and become subject to it."

"The alchemical ideogram of "One the All," is O, the circle: a line or movement that encloses within itself and contains in itself both its end and beginning. In hermetism this symbol expresses the universe and, at the same time, the Great Work. In the Chrysopoeia it takes the form of a serpent-Ouroboros-biting its own tail, containing within the space of the circle that it creates, the ἕν τὸ πᾶν. In the same palimpsest is found another pentacle formed by two rings, the inner bearing this inscription: "One is the serpent, which contains the poison, according to the double sign" while in the outer circle it says: "One is the all, the source of all and the culmination of all: if the all did not contain the all, it would be nothing.""

"There are many stories in Twin Peaks — some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery — the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks. To introduce this story, let me just say it encompasses the All — it is beyond the "Fire", though few would know that meaning. It is a story of many, but begins with one — and I knew her. The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one."

"To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference."

"Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

"He who knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything."

"It is I who am the light which is above them All. It is I who am the All. From me did the All come forth, and unto me did the All extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

"It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness..."

"We are all by nature so closely dependent on the heavens and the gods that are visible therein, that even if any man conceives of another god besides these, he in every case assigns to him the heavens as his dwelling-place; not that he thereby separates him from the earth, but he so to speak establishes the King of the All in the heavens as in the most honourable place of all, and conceives of him as overseeing from there the affairs of this world."

"He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."

"I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God."

"While All is in THE ALL, it is equally true that THE ALL is in All. To him who truly understands this truth hath come great knowledge."

"Compare not thyself with others, but with Me. If thou dost not find Me in those with whom thou comparest thyself, thou comparest thyself to one who is abominable. If thou findest Me in them, compare thyself to Me. But whom wilt thou compare? Thyself, or Me in thee? If it is thyself, it is one who is abominable. If it is I, thou comparest Me to Myself. Now I am God in all."

"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the ; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the : But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will."

"We are nothing, let us be all."

"Inside most people there's a feeling of being separate — separated from everything. … And they're not. They're part of absolutely everyone, and everything."

"Inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours... is, in a certain sense, the whole."

"In Paradise they look no more awry; and though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure they still will make, not being dead, and poets shall have flames upon their head, and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall: there each shall choose for ever from the All."

"God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him. Or better yet: God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part. God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love. God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists... We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us. All conclusions and guidelines based on this consciousness should fully satisfy both our desire to know God as such as well as our desire to live a life based on this recognition."

"This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite — names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectability with the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience — the "unitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words."

"Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity — a total embrace of the entire Kosmos — a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?"

""Fire" does not matter, "earth" and "air" and "water" do not matter. "I" do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality — the Nameless."

"I charge you — forget the names you bear, forget the words I speak as soon as they are uttered. Look, rather, upon the Nameless within yourselves, which arises as I address it. It hearkens not to my words, but to the reality within me, of which it is part. This is the atman, which hears me rather than my words. All else is unreal. To define is to lose. The essence of all things is the Nameless. The Nameless is unknowable, mightier even than Brahma. Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream. Essence dreams it a dream of form. Forms pass, but the essence remains, dreaming new dreams. Man names these dreams and thinks to have captured the essence, not knowing that he invokes the unreal. These stones, these walls, these bodies you see seated about you are poppies and water and the sun. They are the dreams of the Nameless. They are fire, if you like."

"To struggle against the dreamers who dream ugliness, be they men or gods, cannot but be the will of the Nameless."

"[General System Theory]... is a logico-mathematical field, the subject matter of which is the formulation and derivation of those principles which hold for systems in general."

"General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge."

"The idea of a systems can be seen as a further generalized and extended thought of the following consideration. First, there is the rather sweeping claim, that "Every system has subsystems". Taking this together with "Every system has its environment", we are indeed confronted with limitless vistas of systems. One us unable to think of anything, or of any combination of things, which could not be regarded as a system. And, of course, a concept that applies to everything is logically empty. What characteristics are there which any object or group of objects could have, such that they would fail to form some kind of system? In my view, general systems theory not only does not, but further could not, answer this question. And it is partly for this reason that I believe that general systems theory is not in fact science at all, but rather naive and speculative philosophy."

"General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems."

"[The objective of the Society for General Systems Research]. To encourage the development of theoretical systems which are applicable to more than one of the traditional departments of knowledge. All sciences develop theoretical systems of concepts, relationships, and models. Many of these systems are isomorphic, but their similarity is undetected because of differences in terminology and if other barriers to communications among specialists. Furthermore, systems which have been well worked out can be of assistance in the development of others. The major functions or general systems research are therefore: 1) to investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws, and models in various fields, and to help in useful transfers from one field to another; 2) to encourage the development of adequate theoretical models in areas which lack them; 3) to eliminate the duplication of theoretical efforts in different fields; 4) to promote the unity of science through improving the communication among specialists."

"A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial. It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems... The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism... hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content..."

"System theory is basically concerned with problems of relationships, of structure, and of interdependence rather than with the constant attributes of objects. In general approach it resembles field theory except that its dynamics deal with temporal as well as spatial patterns. Older formulations of system constructs dealt with the closed systems of the physical sciences, in which relatively self-contained structures could be treated successfully as if they were independent of external forces. But living systems, whether biological organisms or social organizations, are acutely dependent on their external environment and so must be conceived of as open systems"

"There is a revolutionary scientific perspective (stemming) from the General Systems Research movement and (with a) wealth of principles, ideas and insights that have already brought higher degree of scientific order and understanding to many areas as of biology, psychology and some physical sciences... Modern systems research can provide the basic of a framework more capable of doing justice to the complexities and dynamic properties of the socio-cultural system."

"Systems theory provides:"

"# A common vocabulary unifying the several "behavioral" disciplines."

"# A technique for treating large, complex organizations;"

"# A synthetic approach where piecemeal analysis is not possible due to the intricate interrelationships of parts that cannot be treated out of context of the whole;"

"# A viewpoint that gets at the heart of sociology because it sees the sociocultural system in terms of information and communication nets;"

"# The study of relations rather than "entities" with an emphasis on process and transition probabilities as the basis of a flexible structure of many degrees of freedom."

"# "An operationally definable, objective, non-anthropomorphic study of purposiveness, goal-seeking system behavior, symbolic cognitive processes, consciousness and self-awareness, and sociocultural emergence and dynamics in general."

"Of the so-called global theories the one initially stated and defined by Bertalanffy in 1947 under the title of "general systems theory" has taken hold... Since then he has refined, modified and applied his concepts, established a society for general systems theory and published a General Systems Yearbook. Many social scientists but only a handful of psychiatrists studied, understood or applied systems theory. Suddenly, under the leadership of Dr. William Gray of Boston, a threshold was reached so that at the 122nd annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1966 two sessions were held at which this theory was discussed and regular meetings for psychiatrists were ensured for future participation in and development of this "Unified Theory of Human Behavior." If there be a third revolution (i.e. after the psychoanalytic and behavioristic), it is in the development of a general theory."

"It is sheer nonsense to expect that any human being has yet been able to attain such insight into the problems of society that he can really identify the central problems and determine how they should be solved. The systems in which we live are far too complicated as yet for our intellectual powers and technology to understand."

"A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking."

"The basic managerial idea introduced by systems thinking, is that to manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately."

"General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties."

"There has been an increased but still rather limited response to general systems theory, as variously reflected in the work of Bateson, Vayda, Rappaport, Adams, and an interest in the use of computers, programming, matrices, etc. But the interaction between general systems theory (as represented, for example, by the theoretical work of Von Bertalanffy) has been compromised, partly by the state of field data, extraordinarily incomparable as it inevitably is, as well as historical anthropological methods of dealing with wholes. General systems theory has taken its impetus from the excitement of discovering larger and larger contexts, on the one hand, and a kind of microprobing into fine detail within a system, on the other. Both of these activities are intrinsic to anthropology to the extent that field work in living societies has been the basic disciplinary method. It is no revelation to any field-experienced anthropologist that everything is related to everything else, or that whether the entire sociocultural setting can be studied in detail or not, it has to be known in general outline."

"What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn’t really get to interesting results; let’s talk in terms of general systems theory … there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it’s impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless."

"General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e.g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments."

"The Society for General Systems Theory and its publication General Systems was a mixed bag. Few authors were actually doing research -they philosophized, and many prematurely resolved dilemmas by mathematical equations in a language poorly understood by the empirical investigator."

"Systems theory is an attempt to provide a general explanation for social behaviour (certain types of this theory are referred to as grand theory)."

"Project management utilises the systems approach to management by having functional personnel (the vertical hierarchy) assigned to a specific project (the horizontal hierarchy)."

"General systems theory is considered as a formal theory (Mesarovic, Wymore), a methodology (Ashby, Klir), a way of thinking (Bertalanffy, Churchman), a way of looking at the world (Weinberg), a search for an optimal simplification (Ashby, Weinberg), didactic method (Boulding, Klir, Weinberg), metalanguage (Logren), and profession (Klir)."

"For a long time, people have been trying to characterize or define the notion of system. After all, “systems” are supposed to be what System Theory is about. The results so far have been contradictory and unsatisfactory. This confusion at the foundations has led many to conclude that there is no such thing as a "system" and hence to deny that System Theory is about anything. Even those most sympathetic to the notion have difficulties at this level. The very founders of System Theory did not try to say what a system was; and as for System Theory, they characterized it only obliquely, by saying it comprised all studies of interest to more than one discipline. They thereby begged the entire question."

"(Systems science) does not aim to find the one true representation for a given type of systems (e.g. physical, chemical or biological systems), but to formulate general principles about how different representations of different systems can be constructed so as to be effective in problem-solving."

"Systems inquiry has demonstrated its capability in dealing effectively with highly complex and large-scale problem situations. It has orchestrated the efforts of various disciplines within the framework of systems thinking. It has introduced systems approaches and methods to the analysis, design, development, evaluation, and management of systems of all kinds... Systems theory pursues the scientific exploration and understanding of systems that exist in the various realms of experience, in order to arrive at a general theory of systems: an organized expressing of sets of interrelated concepts and principles that apply to all systems."

"Critical systems thinking is a robust recent trend in humanistically oriented systems work. Spearheaded by work of Ulrich (1983), Flood (1990), and Flood and Jackson (1991), this approach manages to accommodate the knowledge-constitutive interests of Jürgen Habermas (1971) and the interpretive analytical orientations of Michel Foucault (1972) through a meta-methodology involving constant critical reflection. The meta-methodology serves as the basis for the generation of a new methodology that critically applies various systems approaches to problem solving."

"Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems... the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it."

"Complexity theory is really a movement of the sciences. Standard sciences tend to see the world as mechanistic. That sort of science puts things under a finer and finer microscope. In biology the investigations go from classifying organisms to functions of organisms, then organs themselves, then cells, and then organelles, right down to protein and enzymes, metabolic pathways, and DNA. This is finer and finer reductionist thinking. The movement that started complexity looks in the other direction. It’s asking, how do things assemble themselves? How do patterns emerge from these interacting elements? Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It’s important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They’re open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn’t like perpetual novelty."

"What is systems science? This question, which I have been asked on countless occasions, can basically be answered either in terms of activities associated with systems science or in terms of the domain of its inquiry. The most natural answers to the question are, almost inevitably, the following definitions:"

"# Systems science is what systems scientists do when they claim they do science."

"# Systems science is that field of scientific inquiry whose objects of study are systems."

"Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences."

"System theories have been applied to a wide spectrum of empirical cases and policy issues. Parsons and his followers, in particular, applied their systems theory to diverse empirical phenomena in sociology as well as in other disciplines: modernization, economics, politics, social order, industrialization and development, Fascism and McCarthyism, international relations, social change and evolution, complex organizations, health care, universities, religion, professions, small groups, and family as well as abstract questions such as the place of norms in maintaining social order both historically and cross-nationally. Marxian theory and dynamic system theories have also been applied to a spectrum of diverse empirical and policy subjects."

"The overall field of systems science is still in formation."

"Systems theory is antireductionist; it asserts that no system can be adequately understood or totally explained once it has been broken down into its component parts"

"Systems theory is a science which has the comparative study of systems as its object."

"Complexity by itself is not the catalyst in which a system might crash. Rather, it is how the complexity emerges in a system that determines whether that system will do what it was intended to do or morph into an unworkable organization clogged by bottlenecks and blockages. Does the system emerge through a natural course of events vetted by trial and error, or does it emerge by artificial means that detach the system from its external, self-assembled process?"

"Systems inquiry has demonstrated its capability in dealing effectively with highly complex and large-scale problem situations. It has orchestrated the efforts of various disciplines within the framework of systems thinking. It has introduced systems approaches and methods to the analysis, design, development, evaluation, and management of systems of all kinds... Systems theory pursues the scientific exploration and understanding of systems that exist in the various realms of experience, in order to arrive at a general theory of systems: an organized expressing of sets of interrelated concepts and principles that apply to all systems."

"It was appropriate to say up front that systems thinking is the parent of design thinking and systems inquiry embeds design inquiry."

"Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter."

"There is a revolutionary scientific perspective (stemming) from the General Systems Research movement and (with a) wealth of principles, ideas and insights that have already brought higher degree of scientific order and understanding to many areas as of biology, psychology and some physical sciences... Modern systems research can provide the basic of a framework more capable of doing justice to the complexities and dynamic properties of the socio-cultural system."

"The modern systems view, which flowered during World War II (though building on principles in the wind much earlier), has already borne its first fruits and is in danger of a superficial acceptance into the corpus of sociology by way of the incorporation of some of its now common vocabulary."

"Critical systems thinkers like Midgley identify three waves of systems thinking over the last 50 years or so. Early systems theorists (e.g. Bertalanffy) described systems in physical terms, resorting to metaphors from electronic computation or biology. This 'hard systems' tradition still has its advocates and practitioners... Subsequently the limits of the physical metaphor... were reached, and the second wave of systems thinking developed. This 'soft systems thinking' employed social metaphors to develop appropriate systems approaches for human systems. The move to a more phenomenological, interpretative understanding of human systems, where meaning is central and is negotiated intersubjectively, parallels the new paradigm / crisis of social psychology of the 1970s. The Third wave, or critical systems school, in which Midgley locates himself, has drawn on the critical theory of Habermas, particularly in relation to theories of knowledge and of communicative rationality, and on the work of Foucault and followers on the nature of power."

"Systems thinking, as written about and practiced by Russell Ackoff, C. West Churchman, Peter Checkland and others, contained within it many of the impulses that motivate the application of design ideas to strategy, organization, society, and management. Ideas such as engaging a broad set of stakeholders, moving beyond simple metrics and calculations, considering idealized options and using scenarios to explore them, shifting boundaries to reframe problems, iteration, the liberal use of diagrams and rich pictures, and tirelessly searching for a better set of alternatives were all there. If the business and management community had bought it, we would not be having the many discussions about design, design thinking, and expanding management education to engage the intuitive, to embrace values, to look beyond available choices."

"Systems thinking means the ability to see the synergy of the whole rather than just the separate elements of a system and to learn to reinforce or change whole system patterns. Many people have been trained to solve problems by breaking a complex system, such as an organization, into discrete parts and working to make each part perform as well as possible. However, the success of each piece does not add up to the success of the whole. to the success of the whole. In fact, sometimes changing one part to make it better actually makes the whole system function less effectively."

"Systems thinking is a mental discipline and framework for seeing patterns and interrelationships. It is important to see organizational systems as a whole because of their complexity. Complexity can overwhelm managers, undermining confidence. When leaders can see the structures that underlie complex situations, they can facilitate improvement. But doing that requires a focus on the big picture."

"In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking."

"A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking."

"An example from soft systems thinking is Checkland's appreciation of soft systems methodology. He wants to introduce hard systems approaches to deal with hard problems only after and through a soft systems analysis."

"If Critical Systems Thinking is to contribute to enlightened societal practice, e.g., with respect to the pressing environmental and social issues of our time, it should be accessible not only to well-trained decision makers and academics but also to a majority of citizens."

"In a previous paper on progress in general systems research... I avoided the issue of defining a system. I noted that no definitions are satisfactory, and it seemed to me the essence of the subject area that none can be so. I went on to say that it is the systems approach—emphasizing lack of disciplinary boundaries, the freedom to apply knowledge, and techniques gathered in one field to problems in another, or to suggest that two distinct fields are in fact one, the disciplined freedom of the unconstrained intellect—that has been the source of dynamism and progress. I noted that perhaps the most telling progress of all is that we can so confidently speak of a common field of interest knowing that we could not, and would not wish to, agree on a definition of what a system is."

"An ecological approach to public administration builds, then, quite literally from the ground up; from the elements of a place — soils, climate, location, for example — to the people who live there — their numbers and ages and knowledge, and the ways of physical and social technology by which from the place and in relationships with one another, they get their living. It is within this setting that their instruments and practices of public housekeeping should be studied so that they may better understand what they are doing, and appraise reasonably how they are doing it. Such an approach is of particular interest to us as students seeking to co-operate in our studies; for it invites — indeed is dependent upon — careful observation by many people in different environments of the roots of government functions, civic attitudes, and operating problems."

"Systems thinking is a lost art with a very practical set of tools which our consultants and l use. lt assists us and our clients' thinking, diagnoses, and actions in whatever we do... and wherever we go in a much better, more holistic and practical way than traditional methods."

"Systems Thinking is based on 50+ years of scientific research by the Society for General Systems Research on the 12 Characteristics of life on earth, leading to the natural way the world works."

"Systems thinking is relatively recent, at least as an identifiable practice. There are books on the subject, but different authors view the subject differently, so it is an as-yet unconstrained discipline."

"Systems thinking is not new; it has been around for thousands of years in many different guises. Ancient creation myths were instances of systems thinking. Operations analysis, systems analysis, failure analysis, risk analysis, corporate benefit analysis, financial modeling, quantity surveying, investment appraisal, finite element analysis, civil engineering models, economic modeling, simulations, and many more are all modern ways of thinking about systems. Imaginative visualization should be on the list, too. What is new, perhaps, is the ready availability of powerful desktop tools that permit and enable us to think about the most complex and complicated issues and systems. Processors allow us to tackle problems of such complexity and magnitude that, without them, we would be obliged to guess. The same tools reveal unexpected complex behavior from simple systems."

"Practitioners and proponents embrace a holistic vision. They focus on the interconnections among subsystems and components, taking special note of the interfaces among various parts. What is significant is that system builders include heterogeneous components, such as mechanical, electrical, and organizational parts, in a single system. Organizational parts might be managerial structures, such as a military command, or political entities, such as a government bureau. Organizational components not only interact with technical ones but often reflect their characteristics. For instance, a management organization for presiding over the development of an intercontinental missile system might be divided into divisions that mirror the parts of the missile being designed."

"Hard systems thinking is also accused of conservatism. It privileges the values and interests of its clients and customers, and lends its apparent expertise to their realization. It thus gives the facade of objectivity to changes that help to secure the status quo. In general terms, despite its many strengths and achievements, hard systems thinking is today thought of as having a limited domain of application."

"Peter Senge (1990), Fritjof Capra (1996), Peter Checkland (1999), and other researchers have transferred systems thinking principles and theories into practice by applying them to real-world organizational- wide issues, thus encouraging the thus encouraging the creation and development of learning organizations."

"The assumptions which underpin hard systems thinking and distinguish it from soft systems thinking can now be clearly recognized. A basic assumption is that the world can be understood objectively and that knowledge about the world can be validated by empirical means. This assumption supports the role of models in the hard tradition, which are seen to be representations of and which can be treated as proxies for the world. Methodologies based in hard systems thinking will reflect this assumption by placing great emphasis upon the modeling and validation processes, for these are central to the ability of the approaches to reproduce behavior in the models they involve A second assumption of hard systems thinking is the ability to define objectives and then to identify the best way of proceeding in order to achieve them. The notions of goal seeking and rational decision making depend upon this assumption, for if objectives cannot be defined, then a process which sets out to find the best way of achieving them is of no value..."

"The notion of "system" has gained central importance in contemporary science, society and life. In many fields of endeavor, the necessity of a "systems approach" or "systems thinking" is emphasized, new professions called "systems engineering," "systems analysis" and the like have come into being, and there can be little doubt that this this concept marks a genuine, necessary, and consequential development in science and world-view."

"Critical systems thinking is a robust recent trend in humanistically oriented systems work. Spearheaded by work of Ulrich (1983), Flood (1990), and Flood and Jackson (1991), this approach manages to accommodate the knowledge-constitutive interests of Jürgen Habermas (1971) and the interpretive analytical orientations of Michel Foucault (1972) through a meta-methodology involving constant critical reflection. The meta-methodology serves as the basis for the generation of a new methodology that critically applies various systems approaches to problem solving."

"As our world continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems thinking will help us manage, adapt, and see the wide range of choices we have before us. It is a way of thinking that gives us the freedom to identify root causes of problems and see new opportunities."

"Systems thinking is only an epistemology, a particular way of describing the world. It does not tell us what the world is. Hence, strictly speaking, we should never say of something in the world: “It is a system,” only: “It may be described as a system.”"

"Systems thinking is a special form of holistic thinking - dealing with wholes rather than parts. One way of thinking about this is in terms of a hierarchy of levels of biological organization and of the different 'emergent' properties that are evident in say, the whole plant (e.g. wilting) that are not evident at the level of the cell (loss of turgor). It is also possible to bring different perspectives to bear on these different levels of organization. Holistic thinking starts by looking at the nature and behaviour of the whole system that those participating have agreed to be worthy of study. This involves: (i) taking multiple partial views of 'reality'... (ii) placing conceptual boundaries around the whole, or system of interest and (iii) devising ways of representing systems of interest."

"is the ordered arrangement of knowledge acquired from the study of systems in the observable world, together with the application of this knowledge to the design of man-made systems."

"With the increasing use of electronic devices for the navigation and control of aircraft, A.R. C. has long encouraged the “Systems Engineering” of these devices into the basic design of aircraft."

"Radio atmospherics is one of numerous projects underway at the US Navy Electronics Laboratory, which has its headquarters in San Diego... The laboratory is operated by the Bureau of Ships and is engaged not only in research but also in development and "systems engineering" by which new ideas are converted into practical pieces of equipment for use by the fleet."

"Today at Martin an entirely new concept, known as Martin Systems Engineering, is resulting in the production of new aircraft, guided missiles and electronics weapons designed not as yesterday's flying vehicles but as the coordinated and controlled spaceborne systems of tomorrow. The principle of Martin Systems Engineering now makes possible developments in airpower that may change the shape of things to come-our way."

"This man could almost reach the moon tonight... for he stands at the brink of a new age in the conquest of space... an entirely new development in aircraft industry now makes this possible. It is known as Systems Engineering... a science and a method of developing aircraft, guided missiles and electronic systems not as traditional flying vehicles but as fully coordinated solutions to operations problems..."

"The term "systems engineering" is a term with an air of romance and of mystery. The romance and the mystery come from its use in the field of guided missiles, rockets, artificial satellites, and space flight. Much of the work being done in these areas is classified and hence much of it is not known to the general public or to this writer. But one term that has defied classification limits is the term "systems engineering." One sees the term "systems engineering" in technical help-wanted advertisements in newspapers and magazines. For example, the New York Times advertisements have often mentioned it, and it is far from rare in the advertising carried by the magazine Scientific American. The term is also found among the course offerings of a few leading universities."

"From a business point of view, systems engineering is the creation of a deliberate combination of human services, material services, and machine service to accomplish an information processing job. But this is also very nearly a definition of business system analysis. The difference, from a business point of view, therefore, between business system analysis and systems engineering is only one of degree. In general, systems engineering is more total and more goal-oriented in its approach..."

"Systems engineering is more likely to be closely associated with top management of an enterprise than the engineering of the components of the system. If an engineering task is large and complex enough, the arrangement-making problem is especially difficult. Commonly, in a large job, the first and foremost problem for the systems engineers is to relate the objectives to the technical art."

"Systems engineering is a highly technical pursuit and if a nontechnical man attempts to direct the systems engineering as such, it must end up in a waste of technical talent below."

"By some definitions "systems engineering" is suggested to be a new discovery. Actually it is a common engineering approach which has taken on a new and important meaning because of the greater complexity and scope of problems to be solved in industry, business, and the military. Newly discovered scientific phenomena, new machines and equipment, greater speed of communications, increased production capacity, the demand for control over ever-extending areas under constantly changing conditions, and the resultant complex interactions, all have created a tremendously accelerating need for improved systems engineering. Systems engineering can be complex, but is simply defined as "logical engineering within physical, economic and technical limits" — bridging the gap from fundamental laws to a practical operating system."

"Systems engineering embraces every scientific and technical concept known, including economics, management, operations, maintenance, etc. It is the job of integrating an entire problem or problem to arrive at one overall answer, and the breaking down of this answer into defined units which are selected to function compatibly to achieve the specified objectives. The problem can be practically anything - designing a missile, building a plant, replanning an existing process, developing a new instrument, or establishing a maintenance procedure. Instrument and control engineering is but one aspect of systems engineering - a vitally important and highly publicized aspect, because the ability to create automatic controls within overall systems has made it possible to achieve objectives never before attainable, While automatic controls are vital to systems which are to be controlled, every aspect of a system is essential. Systems engineering is unbiased, it demands only what is logically required. Control engineers have been the leaders in pulling together a systems approach in the various technologies."

"A new concept and a new method were needed. The concept from the engineering standpoint is the evolution of the engineering scientist, i.e., the scientific generalist who maintains a broad outlook. The method is that of the team approach. On large-scale-system problems, teams of scientists and engineers, generalists as well as specialists, exert their joint efforts to find a solution and physically realize it. We are led to the concept of the system-design team, a small group of engineers or scientists, to lead a large project and organize the system effort. Such men have been variously called engineering scientists, system engineers, system analysts, or large-scale-system designers. The technique has been variously called the systems approach or the team development method. It is toward this man and his teammates that these discussions are directed. With the realization that not enough can be learned in all the required fields to make him a specialist, enough is introduced to make him aware of the language and problems of the specialist. This generalist is a new quantity in the engineering world, and his education must be begun."

"Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go — and he'll do plenty well when he gets there."

"There are two types of systems engineering - basis and applied. There is no need to attempt to define the term systems engineering in a manner acceptable to everybody, as Chalmer Jones brings out in his article herein. Systems engineering is, obviously, the engineering of a system. It usually, but not always, includes dynamic analysis, mathematical models, simulation, linear programming, data logging, computing, optimating, etc., etc. It connotes an optimum method, realized by modern engineering techniques. Basic systems engineering includes not only the control system but also all equipments within the system, including all host equipments for the control system. Applications engineering is — and always has been — all the engineering required to apply the hardware of a hardware manufacturer to the needs of the customer. Such applications engineering may include, and always has included where needed, dynamic analysis, mathematical models, simulation, linear programming, data logging, computing, and any technique needed to meet the end purpose - the fitting of an existing line of production hardware to a customer's needs. This is applied systems engineering."

"Systems engineering is the name given to engineering activity which considers the overall behavior of a system, or more generally which considers all factors bearing on a problem, and the systems approach to control engineering problems is correspondingly that approach which examines the total dynamic behavior of an integrated system. It is concerned more with quality of performance than with sizes, capacities, or efficiencies, although in the most general sense systems engineering is concerned with overall, comprehensive appraisal."

"SYSTEMS ENGINEERS are required for interesting work on the study of overall weapons systems (1) for simulator work associated with theoretical systems studies: (2) for work in a systems engineering laboratory containing a large Analogue Computer. Candidates for the first category should have a degree in Mathematics or Physics, and some years' experience on the simulation of guidance control systems. Candidates for the second category should have a minimum of H.N.C., and considerable experience of some of the following subjects is essential : Electro mechanical devices, D.C. amplifiers, pulse and video circuitry, general electronic techniques, precision electrical measuring techniques and relay circuitry."

"Systems engineering is a realistic way of doing engineering. It is not a mythical, blue-sky concept. It is now being used with benefits and influences that can be seen. It offers management a means to potential profit that cannot be ignored."

"The Systems Engineering method recognizes each system is an integrated whole even though composed of devices, specialized structures and sub-functions. It is further recognized that any system has a number of objectives and that the balance between them may differ widely from system to system. The methods seek to optimize the overall system function according to the weighted objectives and to achieve maximum capability of its parts."

"It may be said that systems engineering is directed at the design and operating problems of production processes and units, while operations research is applied to problems in other areas of management such as sales, marketing, and external finance."

"Some engineering artifacts are most easily analysed, described, or designed as an assembly of simpler parts. Artifacts of this kind are called systems. Some systems have the property that flowing through them are streams of some 'working fluid' (which may be matter, energy, or information), in such a way that the 'working fluid' passes in turn through many parts of the system, which is in consequence termed a sequential (or flow) system. Examples are a chemical plant, an electrical power distribution network, a digital computer, a sewer system. Systems which do not have this property are termed associative systems of which examples are a motor car, an aircraft, or a bridge - - it is with (sequential) systems that the theory of has primarily been developed."

"There is a general feeling at the present time that a worth-while new subject must lie behind the structure and functioning of a large class of complex devices and organism, typified by animal nervous systems and computers... [The 1962 book The Design of Engineering Systems by William Gosling] is part of a search for such subject. [It] tries to establish a strictly practical subject, to guide engineers in designing complicated systems... Gosling touches upon many aspects of the design processes that are common to a range of engineering projects, and so produces a useful reference book for the engineer who wishes to acquaint himself with the methods used by some of his colleagues. One is left, however, with the impression that it is still a collection of logically unconnected techniques. Merely to impose a common terminology may be useful, but it does not raire "systems engineering" to the level of a new subject. Even the terminology is a little forced: we may accept "throughput" in cases where the meaning of "input" and "output" have become fused, but must we then refer to output as "ongoing throughput"?"

"It is hard to say whether increasing complexity is the cause or the effect of man's effort to cope with his expanding environment. In either case a central feature of the trend has been the development of large and very complex systems which tie together modern society. These systems include abstract or non-physical systems, such as government and the economic system. They also include large physical systems like pipe line and power distribution systems, transportation and electrical communication systems. The growth of these systems has increased the need not only for over-all planning, but also for long-range development of the systems. This need has induced increased interest in the methods by which efficient planning and design can be accomplished in complex situations where no one scientific discipline can account for all the factors. Two similar disciplines which emerged about the time of World War II to cope with these problems are called systems engineering and operations research."

"A system must be designed and tested as a complete entity. The word 'system' has come, through actual practice, to include: the prime mission equipment; its supporting command, control, training, checkout, test, and maintenance equipment; the facilities required to operate and maintain the system; the selection and training of personnel specialists; the operational and maintenance procedures; instrumentation and data reduction for test and evaluation; special aviation and acceptance programs and logistics support programs for spare and depot maintenance. All parts of a system must have a common unified purpose: to contribute to the production of a single set of optimum outputs from given inputs with respect to time, cost, and performance measures of effectiveness. The absolute necessity for coherence requires an organization of creative technology which lead to the successful design of the complex military system. This organized creative technology is called Systems Engineering."

"The systems engineering method recognizes each system is an integrated whole even though composed of diverse, specialized structures and sub-functions. It further recognizes that any system has a number of objectives and that the balance between them may differ widely from system to system. The methods seek to optimize the overall system functions according to the weighted objectives and to achieve maximum compatibility of its parts."

"In a world in which training and functions of individuals and groups are growing more and more specialized the number of ways to accomplish any particular result increasing. Different design, different facilities, different equipment, different methods, and different organizational means are available to meet the needs of man. It is highly desirable that we have trained persons look at these varied possibilities to compare their effectiveness, and to point the way to sound engineering decisions. Systems Engineering Methods is directed towards the development of a broad systems engineering approach to help such people improve their decision-making capability. Although the emphasis is on engineering, the systems approach can also has validity for many other areas in which emphasis may be social, economic, or political."

"Systems thinking plays a dominant role in a wide range of fields from industrial enterprise and armaments to esoteric topics of pure science. Innumerable publications, conferences, symposia and courses are devoted to it. Professions and jobs have appeared in recent years which, unknown a short while ago, go under names such as systems design, systems analysis, systems engineering and others."

"Systems Engineering is the science of designing complex systems in their totality to ensure that the component sub-systems making up the system are designed, fitted together, checked and operated in the most efficient way."

"My analysis of living systems uses concepts of thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, and systems engineering, as well as the classical concepts appropriate to each level. The purpose is to produce a description of living structure and process in terms of input and output, flows through systems, steady states, and feedbacks, which will clarify and unify the facts of life."

"Chestnut (1965) devotes one page of the more than 600 pages in his book to man as an operator or an element of man-machine systems. Hall (1962) devotes about a page and a half to human factors applications. Machol (1965) has a brief chapter of limited content on human factors, in which man is considered only as an information processor. Shearer et al. (1967) mention a driver and a steersman in their introductory chapter; thereafter, there is no of man, his characteristics, or his behavior. Wilson (1965) allocates three pages to human factors. For every book on systems engineering containing a mention of the human operator, there is another in which the words human, man, human factors, and psychology do not appear."

"The notion of "system" has gained central importance in contemporary science, society and life. In many fields of endeavor, the necessity of a "systems approach" or "systems thinking" is emphasized, new professions called "systems engineering," "systems analysis" and the like have come into being, and there can be little doubt that this this concept marks a genuine, necessary, and consequential development in science and world-view."

"Management of an industrial company must be giving targets to the engineers constantly; that may be the most important job management has in dealing with its engineers."

"Significant formal investigators of systems engineering have included Goode and Machol (1957), A.D. Hall (1962), Chestnut (1965, 1967), Sage (1977a,b), and Blanchard and Fabrycky (1981), whose descriptions span 24 years. Although each investigator has approached this subject with a slightly different orientation, all have dealt with defining the elements of systems engineering and various methods of approaching the implementation of these elements. In addition, the US government, through its development and acquisition of large-scale systems over the years, has addressed all aspects of systems engineering. These have been documented in government- sponsored texts (e.g.. System Engineering Management Guide 1986) as well as numerous related standards, directives and handbooks, especially those printed by the US Department of Defense."

"A.D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity."

"System engineering is the art and science of creating effective systems, using whole system, whole life principles."

"System engineering is a robust approach to the design, creation, and operation of systems. In simple terms, the approach consists of identification and quantification of system goals, creation of alternative system design concepts, performance of design trades, selection and implementation of the best design, verification that the design is properly built and integrated, and post-implementation assessment of how well the system meets (or met) the goals."

"Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement... With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics, the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on."

"Systems engineering is the key technology to manage this complexity"

"Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one. With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can’t."

"Among the first texts to use the term [Systems engineering] was ’s Radar System Engineering, published in 1947 as part of the Radiation Laboratory’s series of textbooks. The title refers to the physiological sense of system, that is “how to engineer a radar system,” – where an individual radar is a connected set of components like magnetrons, waveguides, power supplies, and display tubes. Title does not refer to the philosophical sense of system, as in “how to system engineer a radar,” but such ideas are nascent in the book: it covers not only wave propagation and noise models, but also the appropriate design of displays and the dissemination of information through a radar organization. Ridenour’s text includes no discussion of feedback or servomechanisms, or of the dynamic characteristics of radar systems. A McGraw Hill text, System Engineering [by , and Robert E. Machol, published ten years later, included probability, analog and digital computers for simulation, queuing theory, game theory, information theory, servomechanism theory, and sections on “human engineering,” management, and economics."

"Complex engineering projects should be managed as evolutionary processes that undergo continuous rapid improvement through iterative incremental changes performed in parallel and thus is linked to diverse small subsystems of various sizes and relationships. Constraints and dependencies increase complexity and should be imposed only when necessary. This context must establish necessary security for task performance and for the system that is performing the tasks. In the evolutionary context, people and technology are agents that are involved in design, implementation and function. Management’s basic oversight (meta) tasks are to create a context and design the process of innovation, and to shorten the natural feedback loops through extended measures of performance."

"The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U.S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering."

"[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems"

"System engineering is the art and science of creating optimal solution systems to complex issues and problems."

"Systems engineering as an approach and methodology grew in response to the increase size and complexity of systems and projects... This engineering approach to the management of complexity by modularization was re-deployed in the software engineering discipline in the 1960s and 1970s with a proliferation of structured methodologies that enabled the analysis, design and development of information systems by using techniques for modularized description, design and development of system components. Yourdon and DeMarco's Structured Analysis and Design, SSADM, James Martin's Information Engineering, and Jackson's Structured Design and Programming are examples from this era. They all exploited modularization to enable the parallel development of data, process, functionality and performance components of large software systems. The development of object orientation in the 1990s exploited modularization to develop reusable software. The idea was to develop modules that could be mixed and matched like Lego bricks to deliver to a variety of whole system specifications. The modularization and reusability principles have stood the test of time and are at the heart of modern software development."

"Systems engineering should be, first and foremost, a state of mind and an attitude taken when dealing with complexity."

"At base, every story, every song, every ceremony tells the Indian that each creature is part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being. In American Indian thought, God is known as the All Spirit, and other beings are also spirit—more spirit than body, more spirit than intellect, more spirit than mind. The natural state of existence is whole. Thus healing chants and ceremonies emphasize restoration of wholeness, for disease is a condition of division and separation from the harmony of the whole. Beauty is wholeness. Health is wholeness. Goodness is wholeness. The refer to a witch—a person who uses the powers of the universe in a perverse or inharmonious way—as a two-hearts, one who is not whole but is split in two at the center of being. The circle of being is not physical, but it is dynamic and alive. It is what lives and moves and knows, and all the life forms we recognize—animals, plants, rocks, winds—partake of this greater life."

"This is how one puts an end to totality. If all information can be found in each of its parts, the whole loses its meaning. It is also the end of the body, of this singularity called body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an indivisible configuration, to which its sexuation is witness (paradox: cloning will fabricate sexed beings in perpetuity, since they are similar to their model, whereas thereby sex becomes useless—but precisely sex is not a function, it is what makes a body a body, it is what exceeds all the parts, all the diverse functions of this body). Sex (or death: in this sense it is the same thing) is what exceeds all information that can be collected on a body. Well, where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula. This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction, independent of sexuality and of death."

"The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. This means that the view of the world being analogous to a huge machine, the predominant view from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is now shown to be only approximately correct. The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical. This means that the term "quantum mechanics" is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called "quantum nonmechanics"."

"The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature."

"Holism traditionally says that a collection of beings may have a collective property that cannot be inferred from the properties of its members."

"Enterprise architecture is a holistic representation of all the components of the enterprise and the use of graphics and schemes are used to emphasize all parts of the enterprise, and how they are interrelated.""

"Teachers have three main tasks: first, to train both hemispheres — not only the verbal, symbolic, logical left hemisphere, which has always been trained in the traditional education, but also the relational, holistic right hemisphere, which is largely neglected in today's schools; second, to train students to use the cognitive style suited to the tasks at hand; and third, to train students to be able to bring both styles — both hemispheres — to bear on a problem in an integrated manner."

"Kratz's design is to show that certain New Age themes or mere buzz-words (e.g. "holism") were already used by fascist or otherwise rightist people, and then to deduce the grim warning that if we let New Age people continue to do their thing, we will all land up in Auschwitz... Thus, "holism" was a term launched by the Afrikaner politician Jan Christiaan Smuts in his book Holism and Evolution, 1925, a worthy precursor of the New Age recuperation of modern science by spirituality, e.g. Frithjof Capra: Tao of Physics, 1975. Smuts was a racist in the paternalistic sense (Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden"), like most non-Nazi Europeans then were, but not in the destructive Nazi sense. Contrary to Kratz's claim, Smuts was an opponent of the Afrikaner Nasionale Party which was to institute Apartheid after its election victory in 1948."

"Much of philosophy concerns man's search for holistic concepts which will help him see a meaningful pattern in the complexity with which his perceptual world confronts him. What is new is the rapidly growing intensity of the quest, and the modern context of the search. Plato's Republic is from a world quite different from that of Boguslaw's. The New Utopians."

"People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment."

"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."

"Waldorf education has been an important model of holistic education for almost a century. It is one of the very few forms of education that acknowledges the soul-life of children and nurtures that life. It is truly an education for the whole child and will continue to be an important model of education as we move into the 21st century."

"Finiteness is a holistic property. The sphere as a whole has a character different from that of a plane. A spherical surface made from rubber, such as a balloon, can be twisted so that its geometry changes. ...but it cannot be distorted in such a way as that it will cover a plane. All surfaces obtained by distortion of the rubber sphere possess the same holistic properties; they are closed and finite."

"In all the previous cases of wholes, we have nowhere been able to argue from the parts of the whole. Compared to its parts, the whole constituted by them is something quite different, something creatively new, as we have seen. Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts."

"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment."

"The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clear-cut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole."

"Because the Systems Age is teleologically oriented, it is preoccupied with systems that are goal-seeking or purposeful, that is, systems that can display choice of either means or ends, or both. It is interested in purely mechanical systems only."

"The synthesis of paleontology, taxonomy, and comparative anatomy that Cuvier achieved was based on a teleological approach to nature, one that gave primacy to functional purpose over structural affinity."

"A cause that operates intellectually not only confers on the effect, in the act of producing it, all that is required for the result intended, but also, when the product is finished, controls its use, which is the end of the object. Thus a smith, in addition to forging a knife, has the disposition of its cutting efficiency. Man is made by God somewhat as an article is made by an artificer. Something of this sort is said in Isaiah 64:8: "And now, Lord, You art our Father and we are clay, and You art our Maker." Accordingly, just as an earthen vessel, if it were endowed with sense, might hope to be put to good use by the potter, so man ought to cherish the hope of being rightly provided for by God. Thus we are told in Jeremiah 18:6: "As clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.""

"If teleological study of the world is philosophy, and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy."

"As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes."

"This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes."

"The natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me... in particularities of physical causes more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both those persons. Not because those final causes are not true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province; but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract."

"The simultaneity of the disappearance of literature (as aesthetic) and history (as development), which we can observe around us in the academy, points to a fundamental commonality; unraveling one implies unraveling the other, since both are grounded in the same goal-oriented structures that postmodern sensibility opposes. Both civilizational history and autonomous literature are constitutively teleological, dependent on notions of progress toward goals, and they both therefore face resistance from the antidevelopmentalism of contemporary intellectual life."

"What in the whole denotes a causal equilibrium process, appears for the part as a teleological event."

"Mechanism... provides us with no grasp of the specific characteristics of organisms, of the organization of organic processes among one another, of organic 'wholeness', of the problem of the origin of organic 'teleology', or of the historical character of organisms... We must therefore try to establish a new standpoint which — as opposed to mechanism — takes account of organic wholeness, but... treats it in a manner which admits of scientific investigation."

"Today our main problem is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation and the like are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioural and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization."

"A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems."… I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse. ...(vi) ...the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness..."

"For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him and his eternal destiny. Toward this conviction the two great movements which had become united in the medieval synthesis, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, had irresistibly led."

"Just when did teleological explanations, accounts in terms of use and the Good, become definitely abandoned in favour of the notion that true explanations, of man and his mind as well as of other things, must be in terms of their simplest parts?"

"The image of Gaia as a sentient being was the main implicit argument for the rejection of the Gaia hypothesis after its publication. Scientists expressed it by claiming that the hypothesis was unscientific because it was teleological..."

"By strenuously opposing vitalist and teleological arguments, the mechanists still struggle with the Newtonian metaphor of God as a clockmaker. The currently emerging theory of living systems has finally overcome the debate between mechanism and teleology. ...it views living nature as mindful and intelligent without the need to assume any overall design or purpose."

"The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress."

"A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play."

"The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological."

"[ Aristotle ] totally misrepresents Plato's doctrine of "Ideas." ...It is also pertinent to inquire, what is the difference between the "formal cause" of Aristotle and the archetypal ideas of Plato? … Yet Aristotle is forever congratulating himself that he alone has properly treated the "formal" and the "final cause"!"

"Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes."

"Saussure... winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part. The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology... One finds exactly the same gesture and the same concepts in Hegel."

"Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds, colors, ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely subjective — as mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was then treated as having only quantitative aspects — as so much mass in motion, its only differences being that at one point in space there was a larger aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there were greater rates of motion than at others. Lacking qualitative distinctions, nature lacked significant variety. Uniformities were emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be the discovery of a single mathematical formula applying to the whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety of phenomena could be derived. This is what a mechanical philosophy means."

"Not til the late nineteenth century was the doctrine of the subordination of time and change seriously challenged. Bergson and William James, animated by different motives and proceeding by different methods, then installed change at the very heart of things. Bergson took his stand on the primacy of life and consciousness, which are notoriously in a state of flux. He assimilated that which is completely real in the natural world to them, conceiving the static as that which life leaves behind as a deposit as it moves on. From this point of view he criticized mechanistic and teleological theories on the ground that both are guilty of the same error, although from opposite points. Fixed laws which govern change and fixed ends toward which changes tend are both the products of a backward look, one that ignores the forward movement of life. They apply only to that which life has produced and has then left behind in its ongoing vital creative course, a course whose behavior and outcome are unpredictable both mechanistically and from the standpoint of ends."

"Teleology is not the antithesis of causality, but subordinate to it. It is, of course, inadmissible to consider "final causes" as implying that an object or end is capable of having effect. No event that has not yet taken place can possibly act. But results are caused by the keeping of the end in view, and it is in this way that the final becomes an efficient cause. These final efficient causes are not in the slightest degree metaphysical, for they derive from organic matter."

"Science does not accept Aristotelian styles of explanation, that a stone falls because of its nature... it likes to be on Earth... Within science, all causes must be local and instrumental. Purpose is not acceptable as an explanation... Action at a distance, either in space or time, is forbidden. Especially, teleological influences of final goals upon phenomena are forbidden. ...The choice of laws of nature, and the choice of initial conditions for the universe, are questions belonging to meta-science and not to science. Science is restricted to the explanation of phenomena within the universe. Teleology is not forbidden when explanations go beyond ...into meta-science. The most familiar example of a meta-scientific explanation is the so-called Anthropic Principle. ...It accords with the spirit of modern science that we have two complementary styles of explanation, the teleological style allowing a role for purpose in the universe at large, and the non-teleological style excluding purpose..."

"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. ...Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being."

"Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear ...there is absolutely no doubt that every affect in the universe can be explained satisfactorily from final causes, by the aid of the method of maxima and minima, as it can be from the effective causes themselves … Of course, when the effective causes are too obscure, but the final causes are readily ascertained, the problem is commonly solved by the indirect method..."

"Christians believed in a teleological cosmos, one created by an omniscient God, a Grand Designer, for a specific purpose. This comforting view was threatened by the new statistical methods in physics, and also by Darwin's theory of evolution, which assumes that chance may intervene between generations to introduce new characteristics."

"The concept of teleological mechanisms, however it be expressed in many terms, may be viewed as an attempt to escape from these older mechanistic formulations that now appear inadequate, and to provide new and more fruitful conceptions and more effective methodologies for studying self-regulating processes, self-orienting systems and organisms, and self-directing personalities. Thus, the terms feedback, servomechanisms, circular systems, and circular processes may be viewed as different but equivalent expressions of much the same basic conception"

"The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. ...The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another."

"Knowledge of anything implies knowing it from these four points of view, or knowing its four causes. The End or final cause, however, as is natural, rises to an eminence beyond the other conceptions, and though it must always stand opposed to matter, it tends to merge the other two causes into itself. The end of anything, that for the sake of which anything exists, can hardly be separated from the perfection of that thing, from its idea and form; thus the formal cause or definition becomes absorbed into the final cause. (Eth. III. vii. 6)"

"The End mixes itself up with the efficient cause, the desire for the end gives the first impulse of motion, the final cause of anything becomes identical with the good of that thing, so that the end and the good become synonymous terms. And this is not only the case with regard to individual objects, but all nature and the whole world exist for the sake of, and in dependence on, their final cause, which is the Good. This, existing as an object of contemplation and desire, though itself immovable, moves all things. And so the world is rendered finite, for all nature desiring the Good and tending towards an end is harmonised and united."

"It is best... to exclude religious associations (as being un-Aristotelian) from our conception of the ethical τέλος, and then we may be free to acknowledge that it is evidently meant to have a definite relation to the nature and constitution of man. Thus Aristotle assumes that the desires of man are so framed as to imply the existence of this τέλος (Eth. I. ii. i.)"

"In the old philosophy, a curious conjunction of ethical and physical prejudices had led to the notion that there was something ethically bad and physically obstructive about matter. Aristotle attributes all irregularities and apparent dysteleologies in nature to the disobedience, or sluggish yielding, of matter to the shaping and guiding influence of those reasons and causes which were hypostatised in his ideal 'Forms.'"

"In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Treviranus, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the greatest naturalist of the age [Cuvier] with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution."

"The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: "harmony," issuing in the inaudible "music of the spheres," [as] the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically... Stoic philsophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate... as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity... as the price... for the harmony of the whole. The existence of the whole... is the ultimate and no further questionable, self-justifying end in this teleological scheme: for the sake of the cosmos its constituent parts exist... for the sake of the whole organism. Man... is by no means the highest mode of being, he is not the end of nature, and the cosmos is not for his sake."

"But let us now dismiss these poetical fictions; because with what is divine they have mingled much of human alloy; and let us now consider what the deity has declared concerning himself and the other gods. The region surrounding the Earth has its existence in virtue of birth. From whom then does it receive its eternity and imperishability, if not from him who holds all things together within defined limits, for it is impossible that the nature of bodies (material) should be without a limit, inasmuch as they cannot dispense with a Final Cause, nor exist through themselves."

"Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept."

"Teleology,... as science, belongs to no Doctrine, but only to Criticism; and to the criticism of a special cognitive faculty, viz. Judgement. But so far as it contains principles a priori, it can and must furnish the method by which nature must be judged according to the principle of final causes."

"The privilege of aiming at a merely mechanical method of explanation of all natural products is in itself quite unlimited; but the faculty of attaining thereto is by the constitution of our Understanding, so far as it has to do with things as natural purposes, not only very much limited but also clearly bounded. For, according to a principle of the Judgement, by this process alone nothing can be accomplished towards an explanation of these things; and consequently the judgement upon such products must always be at the same time subordinated by us to a teleological principle."

"In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive. For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?"

"As soon as I begin to want to make my thinking teleological in relation to something else, interest enters the game. As soon as it is there, the ethical is present..."

"[An] example of the hubris of contemporary science is the rigorous banishment of the word "purpose" from its vocabulary. This is probably an aftermath of the reaction against the animism of Aristotelian physics, where stones accelerated their fall because of their impatience to get home, and against a teleological world-view in which the purpose of the stars was to serve as chronometers for man's profit. From Galileo onward, "final causes" were relegated into the realm of superstition, mechanical causality reigned supreme. ...The mechanistic universe gradually disintegrated, but the mechanistic notion of causality survived until Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle proved its untenability."

"Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future—which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvature and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out—which, as Whittaker remarked, "is a statement so completely teleological that it certainly would have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen.""

"If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity."

"General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties."

"The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History."

"To his [ Plato's ] great disappointment, he found Anaxagoras adducing simple physical reasons, instead of the teleological reasons, which he had expected. Such a teacher could no longer allure him."

"Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is—both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology—of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy."

"Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in out writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. ...Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological."

"Western social Darwinists, who include modernisation and development theorists and their kindred spirits (UN agencies, human rights organisations and activists, NGOs, the IMF, the World Bank, the US State Department, etc) would see the possible "advance" of the Arab world (as well as the rest of the "underdeveloped" world) toward a western-defined and sponsored modernity as part of a historical teleology wherein non-Europeans who are still at the stage of European childhood will eventually replicate European "progress" toward modern forms of organisation, sociality, economics, politics and sexual desires. What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible."

"As an anthropologist, I have been interested in the effects that the theories of Cybernetics have within our society. I am not referring to computers or to the electronic revolution as a whole, or to the end of dependence on script for knowledge, or to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young. Let me repeat that, I am not referring to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young. I specifically want to consider the significance of the set of cross-disciplinary ideas which we first called “feed-back” and then called “teleological mechanisms” and then called it “cybernetics,” a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."

"Instead of accepting the Victorian myth of a struggle for existence in a blind and meaningless universe, one must, with Professor Lawrence Henderson, replace this with a picture of a partnership in mutual aid, in which the physical structure of matter itself, and the very distribution of the elements on the earth's crust, their quantity, their solubility, their specific gravity, their distribution and chemical combination, are life furthering and life-sustaining. Even the most rigorous scientific description of the physical basis of life indicates it to be internally teleological."

"I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil."

"Our culture is teleological—it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"Maupertuis' attempt to introduce teleology into mechanics was met with sharp rebuffs from several scientists... Mixed into the debate were issues of priority, questions of natural philosophy and physics to do with measurement of motion, and fundamental questions concerning the ideological world view. At the center of the discussion was the question of conditionality or causality of the phenomena of the material world, or their teleological predestination through the creator's wisdom. Euler entered the debate in support of Maupertuis. For example, in his "Dissertation on the principle of least action" (1753) Euler criticized the attacks of S. König and certain other scientists... He also wrote that he himself "had conceived of this remarkable property... Only after a great many trials did I arrive at the formula that in motions of that type assumes its least value." …Writing about Maupertuis' principle... Euler emphasized that "all of dynamics and hydrodynamics can with astonishing ease be developed by the single method of maxima and minima." He concludes... "Nature in all her manifestations strives to make something smallest, and this smallest thing... is indisputably grasped by the concept of action.""

"The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause."

"When we ask "why?" concerning an event, we may mean either of two things. We may mean: "What purpose did this event serve?" or we may mean: "What earlier circumstances caused this event?" The answer to the former question is a teleological explanation, or an explanation by final causes; the answer to the latter question is a mechanistic explanation. I do not see how it could have been known in advance which of these two questions science ought to ask, or whether it ought to ask both. But experience has shown that the mechanistic question leads to scientific knowledge, while the teleological question does not."

"The atomists asked the mechanistic question, and gave a mechanistic answer. Their successors, until the Renaissance, were more interested in the teleological question, and thus led science up a blind alley. In regard to both questions alike, there is a limitation which is often ignored, both in popular thought and in philosophy. Neither question can be asked intelligibly about reality, as a whole (including God), but only about parts of it. ...The conception of purpose, therefore, is only applicable within reality, not to reality as a whole."

"Bacon not only despised the syllogism, but undervalued mathematics, presumably as insufficiently experimental. He was virulently hostile to Aristotle, but he thought very highly of Democritus, Although he did not deny that the course of nature exemplifies a Divine purpose, he objected to any admixture of teleological explanation in the actual investigation of phenomena; everything, he held, should be explained as following necessarily from efficient causes."

"I am interested in a phase that I think we are entering. I call it "teleological evolution," evolution with a purpose. The idea of evolution by design, designing the future, anticipating the future. I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?"

"The first thing I would like to point out is that each of us have a different purpose that we have to serve in the evolutionary scheme of things. We are not all equally endowed to do everything. When I speak about teleological evolution, I speak about the idea of "telos," purpose."

"I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution, because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time."

"Evolution disposes of teleology."

"Clearly, teleology has much in common with the design hypothesis. Both Aristotle and William Paley would say that the gods knew that they wanted you to see, so they designed eyes."

"Teleology can, and has been, extended to suppose that man is designed not only so as to function biologically in a certain way but also to function ethically in a manner related to his biological nature. ...It is surprising how persistent this belief is."

"Men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek. Thus it comes to pass that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own."

"...nature has no particular goal in view, and final causes are mere human figments. ...everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection."

"From the point of view of scientific analysis, the term “finalism” should not be too surprising, if it does not refer to an intentional purpose, but only to an interpretative strategy. The action of finalistic principles, in fact, is not new to other fields of science. Mathematical physics knows the principle of least action, which indicates how a physical system always takes the most advantageous path. The principles of classical thermodynamics are essentially finalistic principles, and chemistry also uses them when explaining chemical bonds, starting from the principle that each atom tends to complete its eight fundamental electron orbitals."

"Time out of mind it has been by way of the "final cause," by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of "design," in one of its many forms (for its moods are many), that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world; and it will be so while men have eyes to see and ears to hear withal. With Galen, as with Aristotle, it was the physician's way; with John Ray, as with Aristotle, it was the naturalist's way; with Kant,as with Aristotle, it was the philosopher's way. It was the old Hebrew way, and has its splendid setting in the story that God made "every plant of the field before it grew." It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature in the hearts of men."

"Darwin discarded once and for all the last vestiges of Aristotelian thought concerning the evolution of living beings. A teleological explanation would no longer do. The evolution of life on Earth would no longer unfold according to a "grand design"; nor would it tend to a final cause. On the contrary, it developed at the whim of random mutations and was driven by natural selection."

"I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.""

"Man is an agent... a center of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity... seeking... some concrete, objective, impersonal end. ...he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship."

"The scientific world picture does not include … things that have not been constructed, that are not understood as artefacts … Instead of the final cause one starts to speak about purpose, which nature itself does not have. Only humans can set aims and achieve them by their activities if they know the laws of nature and set up various processes based on them and organise them purposively."

"Aristotle feels this so strongly with reference to Plato's external, as contrasted with his own immanent, teleology that, forgetting his own concession elsewhere, he once roundly asserts that the final cause is 'not touched by the Ideas'. Again, what is the relation of the Idea of the Good to other ends (Ideas) or to the special functions of things? Efficient causes Plato attributes at one time to Idea, at another to soul: which is his real doctrine? and what is the relation of Idea to soul? Aristotle, therefore, while willing to admit that Plato made 'stammering' efforts in the direction of efficient and final causes, was perfectly justified in thinking that he had not 'fully worked them out'."

"Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around. When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor."

"It is actually by experience of our teleology – our wish to exist further on as a subject, not our imputation of purposes on objects – that teleology becomes a real rather than an intellectual principle... before being scientists we are first living beings, and as such we have the evidence of intrinsic teleology in us. And, in observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence – starting from simple bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent – we can, by our own evidence, understand teleology as the governing force of the realm of the living. Theories about the living can only be conceived from the fragile and concerned perspective of the living itself."

"The famous palaeolithic paintings found in caves such as that at Lascaux in the Dordogne have been interpreted as evidence that, at least implicitly people were operating 20,000 or more years ago with teleological intent in terms of past, present, and future. It may well be that those responsible for the so-called 'Dancing Sorcerer' ...may have felt that the actual performance of the dance was insufficient, since they were concerned with the magical efficacy of the dance after it ended."

"A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet."

"If the body yields to the claims of the spirit as it should, it is instrumental in bringing down the kingdom of heaven on earth. It becomes a vehicle for the release of divine life, and when it subserves this purpose it might aptly be called the temple of God on earth."

"By finding the kingdom of God within himself, and by the study of the laws of his own being, the mystic becomes proficient in the laws which govern the universe, of which he is a part. The occultist recognises the kingdom of God in nature or the system, and regards himself as a small part of that greater whole, and therefore, governed by the same laws."

"Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning. And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!"

"If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it."

"The Kingdom of God comes by way of a listening heart."

"The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy."

"The Gospel is concerned with the kingdom of God and only with the kingdom of God. The kingdom cannot, therefore, be equated with any human archy, be that archy left wing or right wing, liberal or conservative, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. The Archy of God is intent on reconciling adversaries instead of creating them."

"Right now, especially in the Middle East, things are shaping up quite nicely to blow us all to kingdom come. Except that no kingdom is going to come because this is the kingdom, it has already come and we are already living the dream. Religion knows this but it doesn't want us to know it because then it would no longer have any reason to exist. So instead, it seeks to position itself between us and our experience; a self-appointed filter, a parasite."

"This is by the decree of watchers, and the request is by the word of the holy ones, so that people living may know that the Most High is Ruler in the kingdom of mankind and that he gives it to whomever he wants, and he sets up over it even the lowliest of men."

"And to him there were given rulership, honor, and a kingdom, that the peoples, nations, and language groups should all serve him. His rulership is an everlasting rulership that will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed."

"The salvific action of Jesus Christ, with and through his Spirit, extends beyond the visible boundaries of the Church to all humanity. [...] To state the inseparable relationship between Christ and the kingdom is not to overlook the fact that the kingdom of God - even if considered in its historical phase - is not identified with the Church in her visible and social reality. In fact, “the action of Christ and the Spirit outside the Church's visible boundaries”‌ must not be excluded."

"If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they are spared the guilt and anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in persons or things as in life itself. As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom."

"To find the kingdom is the easiest thing in the world but also the most difficult. Easy because it is all around you and within you, and all you have to do is reach out and take possession of it. Difficult because if you wish to possess the kingdom you may possess nothing else."

"To pass through the door that leads to God's kingdom, we must go down on our knees."

"One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people."

"The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure."

"The human heart desires joy. We all desire joy, every family, every people aspires to happiness. But what is the joy that the Christian is called to live out and bear witness to? It is the joy that comes from the closeness of God, from his presence in our life. From the moment Jesus entered into history, with his birth in Bethlehem, humanity received the seed of the Kingdom of God, like the soil receives the seed, the promise of a future harvest."

"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds."

"I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong — we never left the Garden. Look about you. This is paradise. It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot. We are all fools."

"What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest."

"The kingdom of God must be built upon the foundation, not of institutions, but of individuals in whom God dwells and who are glad to live for their fellow men."

"The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite."

"Imagine a Kingdom of God where peace reigns, criminals are punished only by love, and everyone speaks Polish—not Hebrew, not Latin, but Polish. This is no utopia conjured by a novelist, but the real-world vision of the Mariavites, a Catholic splinter group that has persisted for over a century in Poland and abroad, and keeps some 20,000 devotees today."

"If those who lead you say, "See, the Kingdom is in the sky," then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, "It is in the sea," then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

"Keep on, then, seeking first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Each day has enough of its own troubles."

"It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God."

"Have no fear, little flock, for your Father has approved of giving you the Kingdom."

"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

"We must enter into the Kingdom of God through many tribulations."

"The kingdom of the father is like a certain woman. She took a little leaven, concealed it in some dough, and made it into large loaves. Let him who has ears hear."

"Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

"When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."

"This is why I say to you, the Kingdom of God will be taken from you and be given to a nation producing its fruits."

"And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever."

"And war broke out in heaven: Mi′cha·el and his angels battled with the dragon, and the dragon and its angels battled but it did not prevail, neither was a place found for them any longer in heaven. So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven say:"

"You can never enter the kingdom of God with hardness against any one, for God is love, and if you love God you will love one another."

"It is the duty of the Christian to submit to the human government in its office and work and to seek its destruction only by spreading the religion of Christ and so converting men from service to the earthly government to service to the heavenly one, and so, too, by removing the necessity for its existence and work. No violence, no sword, no bitterness or wrath can he use. The spread of the peaceful principles of the Savior, will draw men out of the kingdoms of earth into the kingdom of God."

"The Church, or, in other words, the kingdom of Christ now present in mystery, grows visibly through the power of God in the world."

"From this source the Church, equipped with the gifts of its Founder and faithfully guarding His precepts of charity, humility and self-sacrifice, receives the mission to proclaim and to spread among all peoples the Kingdom of Christ and of God and to be, on earth, the initial budding forth of that kingdom. While it slowly grows, the Church strains toward the completed Kingdom and, with all its strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with its King."

"The "Kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart — not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death"."

"The "kingdom of God" is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come "in a thousand years" — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere..."

"Christ is called the righteous & by his righteousness we are saved & except our righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees we shall not enter into the kingdome of heaven. Righteousness is the religion of the kingdom of heaven & even the property of God himself towards man. Righteousness & Love are inseparable for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law."

"Many Christians have been misled for centuries about the nature of God’s kingdom by the well-known mistranslation of Luke 17:21: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Today all serious scholars and translators would agree that the test should read: “The kingdom of God is among you or in your midst.” The Greek word entos can means “within” or “among.”"

"The kingdom of God, like any other kingdom, cannot be within a man; it is something within which a man can live."

"The much quoted text, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) does not mean that the kingdom is not, or will not be, in this world or on this earth. ... When Jesus and his disciples are said to be in the world but not of the world, the meaning is clear enough. Although they live in the world they are not worldly, they do not subscribe to the present values and standards of the world. ... The values of the kingdom [of God] are different from, and opposed to, the values of this world. There is no reason for thinking that it means the kingdom will float in the air somewhere above the earth or that it will be an abstract entity without any tangible social and political structure."

"Jesus … is the final priest who makes all priesthood obsolete – not merely the performance of ritual sacrifice, but the office, pomp and circumstance of priestly authority and hierarchy itself. Instead of deferring to any caste of religious hierarchs, followers of the Way are thus now summoned to collectively be a "royal priesthood," a "chosen race" or "holy nation" built not upon offices of any kind but upon transferred allegiance to God's in-breaking "kingdom.""

"To Allah belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth; He creates what he wills. He gives to whom He wills female (children), and He gives to whom He wills males. Or He makes them (both) males and females, and He renders whom He wills barren. Indeed, He is Knowing and Competent."

"The essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God."

"Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff."

"I never wish to be more charitable than Christ. I find it written: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.""

"Therefore, seeing that we are to receive a Kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us continue to receive undeserved kindness, through which we may acceptably offer God sacred service with godly fear and awe."

"His disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?""

"The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us."

"The man who persisted in calling himself the "son of God" — he later acknowledged that he had many brothers — was demanding nothing less than that the military ruler of all England should forthwith disavow all violence and all coercion, make Christ's law of love the supreme law of the land, and substitute the mild dictates of the Sermon on the Mount for the Instrument of Government by which he ruled. In a word, Fox would have him make England a kind of pilot project for the Kingdom of Heaven. Fox was a revolutionary. He had no patience with the relativities and compromises of political life. His testimony was an uncompromising testimony for the radical Christian ethic of love and non-violence, and he would apply it in the arena of politics as in every other sphere of life. It is not recorded that Cromwell took his advice. Neither is it recorded that Fox ever receded an inch from his radical perfectionism."

"All that is real in me is God; all that is real in God is I. The gulf between God and me is thus bridged. Thus by knowing God, we find that the kingdom of heaven is within us."

"This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Christian creeds, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder if, the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions of mankind. It is small wonder if the hesitating convert and disciple presently went back to the old familiar ideas of temple and altar, of fierce deity and propitiatory observance, of consecrated priest and magic blessing, and these things being attended to reverted then to the dear old habitual life of hates and profits and competition and pride. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of our struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and within. To the gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon established ideas. The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world, was a righteous god, but they also thought of him as a trading god who had made a bargain with their Father Abraham about them, a very good bargain indeed for them, to bring them at last to predominance in the earth. With dismay and anger they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear securities. God, he taught, was no bargainer; there were no chosen people and no favourites in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as incapable of showing favour as the universal sun. And all men were brothers — sinners alike and beloved sons alike of this divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus cast scorn upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people and to minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the parable of the labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews to have a sort of first mortgage upon God. All whom God takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike; there is no distinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty. From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's mite enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no rebates, and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven."

"It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus proclaimed; it is clear from a score of indications that his teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and not upon a throne; but it is equally clear that wherever and in what measure his kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in that measure revolutionized and made new. Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed in his utterances, it is plain that they did not miss his resolve to revolutionize the world."

"Dear God I've heard your name from teachers, family and friends, you made the universe and so will live on when it ends. Everyone I know admits they’ve never seen your face, they’re not sure where you live and have no map to the place."

"Systems art shares it roots with 'post-structuralism'; the critical discourse from the arts that can account for both 'open' system of structural relations and 'death of the author'; where the 'reader' is credited with an active part in emergent, multiple and evolving interpretations of a cultural artefact."

"Systems Art is systems thinking in art practices – an explicated dialogic approach to cultural systems that engages with the forms of popular culture."

"The neoconceptual formalism which, by way of systems art, has become the norm of as cultural practice is indicative of another condition specific to data visualization, which is that the proximity of the work to its critics has become unbridgeable, just as their distance was unbridgeable in modernism, even for artist-critics like Pound and Olson faced with the pag between poetry and criticism."

"A Systems Esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present."

"At a gut level Haacke is asking this question: is there really any difference between the power of money to control the direction of art and the power of money to keep rotten slums in existence? Haacke, being an artist, has not consciously set out to organize the relationships I have indicated. But it is obvious that his "Systems Art" has entered a new phase. In its semiotic structure it draws closer to the ritual drama (where the artist's premises are recapitulated in everyday life) and away from the plastic arts..."

"Hans Haacke's "Visitor's Profile" encouraged visitors to interact with a computer by inputting personal information, which was then tabulated to output statistical data on the exhibition's audience. Such demographic research - as art - opened up a critical discourse, following Foucault and others, on the exclusivity of cultural institutions and their patrons, revealing the myth of public service as a thin veneer justifying the hierarchical values that reify extant social relations. Similarly, "Interactive Paper Systems" by Sonia Sheridan, engaged museum-goers in a creative exchange with the artist and 3M's first commercially available color photocopying machine, dissolving conventional artist-viewer-object relations. In "The Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea)" Joseph Kosuth utilized multiple forms of mass media and distribution (a billboard, an newspaper advertisement, a banner, and a museum installation) to question the conceptual and contextual boundaries between art, philosophy, commerce, pictures, and texts."

"Systems art : Loosely describes a group of radical artists working in the late 1960s early 1970s who reacted against art’s traditional focus on the object with the aim of making their art more responsive to the world around them."

"Tom Phillips, a creature of habit working naturally within systems art, has used routine — the walk to his studio, for instance - to investigate the invisible 'usual', while also, in the wondrous Twenty Sites, n Years, an artwork consisting of an annual return to and photographing of sites marked on a circle centred on his studio, establishing a routine that will survive him."

"Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object... provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision."

"The cybernetic art team >bcd< believes that the cybernetic art environment, initially involved with pattern recognition and artificial intelligence research in art and science, can make an important contribution t intersubjective communication and to the sharing of insight between people. The cybernetic sculpture Instantaneous, which was presented for the first time during the Rome colloquium, illustrates the existence of instantaneous communication on a truly parallel architecture based on 16 Compaq Deskpro 386 computers. It also signifies a true parallel processing mode (as experienced in extrasensory perception) in which 'time sequence', 'before' or 'after' hardly have meaning. The cybernetic sculpture instantaneous is seen as a contribution to a new communication medium between artists working interactively within the same system. This is a step towards intersubjective communication, through the process of reflection between artists and a transcendental Galois field."

"Hungarian-born artist Nicolas Schöffer created his first cybernetic sculptures CYSP 0 and CYSP I (the titles of which combined the first two letters of “cybernetic” and “spatio-dynamique”) in 1956."

"Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is"

"Among other related major developments, world systems theory (Wallerstein 2004) should be mentioned. Inspired by Marxist theories, it addresses dependency among nations and imperialism, placing the evolution of capitalist systems in a global and comparative perspective. Another variant of Marxist system theory is that of Pierre Bourdieu (1977) which unifies the material and the symbolic, as well as agency and structure."

"In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been. It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit... Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.' The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century."

"[A world-system is] a system that is a world and which can be, most often has been, located in an area less than the entire globe. World-systems analysis argues that the units of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, are for the most part such world-systems (other than the now extinct, small mini-systems that once existed on the earth). World-system analysis argues that there have been thus far only two varieties of world-systems: world-economies and world empires. A world-empire (examples, the Roman Empire, Han China) are large bureaucratic structures with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures. A world-economy is a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures."

"Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute force, or a synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course of and by virtue of the process which draws it together, will, when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. ... The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe."

"Depending on the initial condition of the system (initial alphabet and number of elements) the co-evolution of nested local and global hierarchies continues until the system reaches a maximum value of complexity. At least for nuclear systems a quantitative variable called "complexity" can be defined, which increases in an irreversible manner during stellar evolution (Winiwarter, 1983). This variable C is composed of an informational measure I describing the variety of the computed formulas and an energetic measure R describing the relative binding energy or "synergy" permitting the coherence of the system. Once the maximum complexity of the system is reached, it breaks down. A catastrophic "implosion" destroys local and global hierarchical structures. In some cases—depending on the initial conditions—this "implosion" is accompanied by an "explosion" emitting computed local formulas into space. These emitted local formulas can be captured and re-entered into the initial conditions of a future gnostic cycle."

"SYN'ERGY, Synergi'a, Synenergi'a, (F.) Synergie; from συν, 'with,' and εργον, 'work.' A correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease."

"In the mystērion of the church, the participation of men in God is effected through their "cooperation" or "synergy"; to make this participation possible once more is the goal of the incarnation."

"Als Physiker, der sein ganzes Leben der nüchternen Wissenschaft, der Erforschung der Materie widmete, bin ich sicher von dem Verdacht frei, für einen Schwarmgeist gehalten zu werden. Und so sage ich nach meinen Erforschungen des Atoms dieses: Es gibt keine Materie an sich. Alle Materie entsteht und besteht nur durch eine Kraft, welche die Atomteilchen in Schwingung bringt und sie zum winzigsten Sonnensystem des Alls zusammenhält. Da es im ganzen Weltall aber weder eine intelligente Kraft noch eine ewige Kraft gibt—es ist der Menschheit nicht gelungen, das heißersehnte Perpetuum mobile zu erfinden—so müssen wir hinter dieser Kraft einen bewußten intelligenten Geist annehmen. Dieser Geist ist der Urgrund aller Materie. Translation: As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter."

"In short, synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system's components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates. An ordered library offers systemic possibilities, such as rapid search, selection, and aggregation, that cannot be explained by looking at the books themselves. These possibilities only exist because of the investment made in defining and creating interrelations between the books, their physical arrangement and the catalogues."

"Germain's theory of art converged with social psychology in his enthusiastic review of Henri Mazel's Synergie sociale of 1896. Germain found affinities in Mazel's theories of collective energies and cultural regeneration and attached his own notion of the individual's development through moral beauty to Mazel's "culture of will, of moral energy; through love". In La synergie sociale Mazel argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy", or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, for the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, could not distinguish between good and evil. Socialists and anarchists who preached mediocrity led the attack on exceptional individuals—saints, heroes, or artists."

"Synergy That there is a universal principle, operating in every department of nature and at every stage in evolution, which is conservative, creative, and constructive, has been evident to me for many years, but it required long meditation and extensive observation to discover its true nature. After having fairly grasped it I was still troubled to reduce it to its simplest form, and characterize it by an appropriate name. I have at last fixed upon the word synergy as the term best adapted to express its twofold character of energy and mutuality, or the systematic and organic working together of the antithetical forces of nature. The third and equally essential and invariable quality of creation or construction is still lacking in the name chosen, unless we assume, as I think we may do, that work implies some product, to distinguish it from simple activity."

"Synergy is a synthesis of work, or synthetic work, and this is what is everywhere taking place. It may be said to begin with the primary atomic collision in which mass, motion, time, and space are involved, and to find its simplest expression in the formula for force (\tfrac{ms}{t^2}), which implies a plurality of elements, and signifies an interaction of these elements. … It further seems probable that vortex motion is based on this principle, or is the same principle, and it is through this that some expect the problem of the nature of gravitation to find its solution."

"The true nature of the universal principle of synergy pervading all nature and creating all the different kinds of structure that we observe to exist, must now be made clearer. Primarily and essentially it is a process of equilibration, i.e., the several forces are first brought into a state of partial equilibrium. It begins in collision, conflict, antagonism, and opposition, and then we have the milder phases of antithesis, competition, and interaction, passing next into a modus vivendi, or compromise, and ending in collaboration and cooperation. … The entire drift is toward economy, conservatism, and the prevention of waste."

"I have characterized the social struggle as centrifugal and social solidarity as centripetal. Either alone is productive of evil consequences. Struggle is essentially destructive of the social order, while communism removes individual initiative. The one leads to disorder, the other to degeneracy. What is not seen—the truth that has no expounders—is that the wholesome, constructive movement consists in the properly ordered combination and interaction of both these principles. This is social synergy, which is a form of cosmic synergy, the universal constructive principle of nature."

"The mediating role of the brain can perhaps be best envisaged in terms of synergetic concepts: In thinking or making plans certain parts of the brain undergo coherent, collective activity states of possibly a great number of neurons, where concepts or ideas function as, or are represented by, order parameters of these collective activities. This would mean that in H. Haken's terminology of synergetics neurons or certain states of them (as parts of World 1) become enslaved by elements of World 2 (psychic events) and World 3 (mental entities)."

"As we have seen, Hermann Haken assumed neurons were sub-systems in the brain whereas "thoughts" (Gedanken) represent the order parameters. According to the concepts of synergetics both parts have to react on different timescales in order for the sub-systems to be "enslaved". That holds true for the brain: while the neurons fire on a timescale of milliseconds the perception of new content (Gedanken) varies by tenths of a second."

"I have to ask you, sir, are you familiar with the word “synergy”?...I have been a visitor at 320 universities and colleges around the world and always have asked those university audiences “How many of you are familiar with the word ‘synergy’?” I can say authoritatively that less than 10 percent of university audiences and less than 1 percent of non-university audiences are familiar with the word and meaning of synergy. Synergy is not a popular word."

"The word synergy is a companion to the word “energy.” Energy and synergy. The prefix “syn” of synthesis meaning “with, to integrate” and the “en” of energy means “separating out ” Man is very familiar with energy, he has learned to separate out, or isolate certain behaviors of total nature and thus has become familiar with many of the separate natural behaviors such as optics. But the only partially isolatable behavior is always modifyingly employed by the whole. If humans had to purchase their many separate organs, stomachs, livers, endocrine glands, tongues, eyeballs, and bowels and thereafter to assemble those parts into logical interfunctioning, they would never do so. All those parts had to be preassembled and unitarily skinned in and coordinately operated by multiquadrillions of atoms in the brain which after 16 years of practical spontaneous coordination becomes so aesthetically acceptable one to the other that as it sings, dances, and smiles one is inclined to procreate with the other."

"Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation"

"The word “synergy” means “Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the systems parts.” Nature is comprehensively synergetic. Since synergy is the only word having that meaning and we have proven experimentally that it is not used by the public, we may conclude that society does not understand nature"

"I find all of our world society is operating exclusively in parts. We know this because the word synergy is unknown popularly and it is the only word that means “behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts.” This proves that society does not even think that it has a need for such a word. This discloses that society does not think that there are behaviors of wholes unpredicted by the parts. It thinks statistics and probability are all that we need but if “probability” and “statistics” were of any power at all we could not have a stock market or gambling for we would know exactly how things are coming out and no one would bet against the probability."

"Because nature is entirely synergetic and because your problems of representing a society ignorant of such fundamentals are greatly increased you need to pay great attention to learning how to comprehend synergy and thereafter how to educate all of humanity in the shortest time how to comprehend and usefully cope with omni-synergetic universe"

"I will give you one very simple example of synergy. All our metallic alloys are synergetic. We will examine chrome-nickel steel. The outstanding characteristic of metallic strength is its ability to cohere in one piece. We test the metals tensile strength per square inch of cross section of the tested sample. The very high number of pounds-per-square-inch tensile strength of chrome-nickel steel has changed our whole economy because it retained its structural integrity at so high a temperature as to make possible the jet engine which has halved the time it takes to fly around the world."

"If we have two spherical bodies of equal mass at a given distance from each other and insert a third spherical body of the same mass half way between the two we do not double the mass attraction between any two of the three. We increase the attraction by 2 to the second power which is 4. Halving the distance fourfolds the inter-mass attraction. When we bring a galaxy of iron atoms together with the chromium atoms and a galaxy of nickel atoms they all fit neatly between one another and bring about the multifolding of their intercoherency. But there is nothing in one body by itself that says that it will have mass attraction. This can only be discovered by experimenting with two and more bodies. And even then there is no explanation of why there must be mass attraction and why it should increase as the second power of the relative increase of proximity. That is synergy."

"Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending coordination by putting the children in elementary schools—to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only. Thereafter we force them to choose some specialization, forcing them to forget the whole. ... We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization. We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest. They also simultaneously DIVIDED and CONQUERED any and all "bright ones" who might otherwise rise within their realms to threaten their supremacy. The warlord vitiated their threat by making them all specialists and reserving to himself exclusively the right to think about and act comprehensively. The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself."

"Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical — because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected—like it or not—"life is but a dream"."

"There is nothing that a single massive sphere will or can ever do by itself that says it will both exert and yield attractively with a neighboring massive sphere and that it yields progressively: every time the distance between the two is halved, the attraction will be fourfolded. This unpredicted, only mutual behavior is synergy."

"There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts."

"Such a system is “self-organizing” in the sense that it changes from “parts separated” to “parts joined.”"

"Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments."

"This is a general characteristic of self-organizing systems: they are robust or resilient. This means that they are relatively insensitive to perturbations or errors, and have a strong capacity to restore themselves, unlike most human designed systems."

"In that sense, a self-organizing system is intrinsically adaptive: it maintains its basic organization in spite of continuing changes in its environment. As noted, perturbations may even make the system more robust, by helping it to discover a more stable organization."

"Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism."

"We have seen that the formation and maintenance of self-organizing systems are compatible with the laws of physical chemistry.”"

"A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves."

"Falling between order and chaos, the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of behaviour."

"We have argued at some length in another place that the mechanical equilibrium model and the organismic homeostasis models of society that have underlain most modern sociological theory have outlived their usefulness"

"The homeostatic principle does not apply literally to the functioning of all complex living systems, in that in counteracting entropy they move toward growth and expansion."

"The well-known physiologist ... was a pioneer in the investigation of the relationship between emotions and physiological responses, and is perhaps best known for having coined the term homeostasis."

"Grossly oversimplifying, the following models of mind can be discerned in the welter of contemporary psychological theorizing. The first model of the mind is mind as an energy system. This is represented by early psychoanalytical theory, particularly by its dynamic and economic versions. It has also represented by ecologists (Tinbergen, 1951) and by drive reduction theorists. In this model, the stress is on the concept of motivation, conceived as drive. Common to the theories that regard mind as an energy system are the ideas of homeostasis and closed system. The metaphor of energy is often used by motivation theorists who view drives, instincts, and needs as types of forces."