From "The Stone" (a philosophy series) in today's New York Times —
Louis Sullivan, in his Kindergarten Chats , on the pier and lintel as basic elements of architecture:
… [Sullivan says that the pier] embodies “the simplest physical beginnings"….
Add the lintel and “presto!” ….
But he has a question: what is this sudden coming-into-being of a way of being?
“We have no true name for it in the language. But if you fix the phenomenon well in your thought,
the absence of an exact word for it need not matter much.”
The source —
A related passage —
"Crucial here is the concept of emergence , the sudden coming into being of something that is greater than its component parts (like water is greater than its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen; therefore, water is an emergent property)."
— Article on Bakhtin in The Cervantes Encyclopedia , by Howard Mancing (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004)
See also "strong emergence" in this journal.