"Let there be three successive levels of natural events, A, B, and C. Let there be in B a kind of relation which is not present in A; and in C a kind of relation, not yet present in B or in A. If then one lived and gained experience on the B-level, one could not predict the emergent characters of the C-level, because the relations, of which they are the expression, are not yet in being. Nor if one lived on the A-level could one predict the emergent character of b-events, because ex hypothesi there are no such events as yet in existence. (What, it is claimed, one cannot predict, then, is the emergent expression of some new kind of relatedness among pre-existent events. One could not foretell the emergent character of vital events from the fullest possible knowledge of physico-chemical events only, if life be an emergent chord and not merely due to the summation, however complex, of constituent a-notes. Such is the hypothesis accepted under emergent evolution.)"
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Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution, pp. 5-6. (1927)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emergence
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Emergence
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