Goethe on complex systems

When we want to understand elements of the natural world, especially living things, and comprehend the relationship between their being and function, we generally believe the best way to come to this understanding is to separate their parts. Friends of science need few words to be reminded what chemistry and anatomy have contributed to a general view of nature, for example.

But these efforts to separate and isolate, carried on ever further, also have their disadvantages. Living things are indeed composed of parts or elements, but one cannot reconstitute them from these and give them life again. This even applies to many inorganic entities, to say nothing of organic ones.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bildung und Umbildung Organischer Naturen, 1807.