Emergentism is a philosophical position holding that complex systems possess properties, behaviors, or laws that arise from the interaction of their fundamental parts but are not reducible to or predictable from them. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism.
In British philosophy
In his 1843 book A System of Logic, John Stuart Mill stated that "all organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state", including all forms of life, but that the "phenomena of life" are quite different to those of non-living matter.