It is strange to note so little discussion of the exclusion principle in the philosophical literature. Philosophers, largely engrossed in their perennial problems, are hardly aware of the fact that, during the last two decades, there has been introduced into physical methodology a principle of utmost philosophical importance, easily rivaling that of relativity and, in some respects, indeed that of causality. Discovered by Pauli in 1925, it immediately elucidated a whole realm of physical facts and was accepted by physicists with wide acclaim. Called the exclusion principle—or Pauli principle, or principle of anti-symmetry—it was embodied in the axiomatics of quantum mechanics; its peculiar methodological significance passed out of view.

In a recent article P. Henle gave an analysis of the notion of emergence. His inquiry deals with what he calls, quite appropriately, the emergence of characteristics. Such emergence, that is, the emergence of qualities and relations is undoubtedly the primary connotation of the term, and I feel that Henle has been very successful in clarifying it. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss in some detail one special aspect of Henle's analysis. This is done because the precise formulation of this particular aspect sheds light on the notion of elementarism. And the opposite of this notion, holism or organicism, belongs undoubtedly to the variety of fused and confused meanings the idea of emergence has come to cover.

The most direct manner of formulating the objective of this paper is to consider some passages in which Whitehead states the conception of the “subject” espoused by the organic philosophy.

“The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects.” “The reformed subjectivist principle adopted by the philosophy of organism ...” is “... that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.”

Operationism may tentatively be defined as that scientific method which defines its concepts in terms of observable or communicable operations, however carried out. With few exceptions, it has been put forward as representing positivism in contemporary sociology. Sellars refers to it as a new and virulent form of positivism—logical positivism. In philosophy, logical positivism is the culmination of the sensationalism of Berkeley and Hume, the positivism of Mach and Avenarius and Comte, and the logistic of Russell and Wittgenstein. In sociology, the philosophic assumptions of this school have been stated in a naive form, in addition to presenting Kantian idealism contradicted by an assumption of philosophic realism.

When all sorts of material entities from atoms to people and from bacilli to stars are plotted on a scale of time and a scale of mass some very interesting alignments and symmetries emerge. It is observed that the data of the physical, biological, psychological, and social sciences form a neat isosceles triangle as shown in Figure 1 below. The facts are simple as graphed in Figure 1 on logarithmic scales; their explanation or interpretation is not apparent. Is Figure 1 merely an interesting diagram useful in teaching the masses and evolutionary ages of the phenomena of various classes of science, or has it some more fundamental scientific significance? The graph will be first described and then its uncertainties and possible implications will be discussed.