George Henry Lewes was one of the "British Emergentists," so-named by
Brian McLaughlin. Lewes was an English philosopher and literary critic who invented the term "
emergent."
Other emergentists included
John Stuart Mill,
C. Lloyd Morgan,
Samuel Alexander,
and
C. D. Broad.
Lewes used
John Stuart Mill's example from chemistry of the properties of water not being reducible to those of oxygen and hydrogen. If all effects are only the consequences of their components, everything would be completely
determined by mathematical laws, he said, and then coined the term "emergent":
Although each effect is the resultant of its components, the product of its factors, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor. In the latter case, I propose to call the effect an emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form which does not display the agents in action.
(Problems of Life and Mind (1875), vol. 2, p. 412)
Brian McLaughlin gives us a history of the
emergence of the term emergent
On the second page of Emergent Evolution, Lloyd Morgan says:
The concept of emergence was dealt with (to go no further back) by J. S. Mill
in his Logic (Bk. III. ch. vi 2) under the discussion of "heteropathic laws" in
causation. (1923, p. 2)
Mill did not, however, use the word 'emergent'. Morgan tells us that:
The word "emergent", as contrasted with "resultant", was suggested by G. H.
Lewes in his Problems of Life and Mind (Vol.II Prob. V. ch. iii, p. 412)
(pp. 2 - 3 ) .
And Alexander says:
I use the word 'emergent' after the example of Mr. Lloyd Morgan ... it contrasts
with ... 'resultant' ... The word ['emergent'] is used by G. H. Lewes ... as Mr.
Lloyd Morgan reminds me. (1920, p. 14)
("The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism," in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, de Gruyter, 1991, p.58)
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