"A set is formed by the grouping together of single objects into a whole. A set is a plurality thought of as a unit. If these or similar statements were set down as definitions, then it could be objected with good reason that they define idem per idemi or even obscurum per obscurius. However, we can consider them as expository, as references to a primitive concept, familiar to us all, whose resolution into more fundamental concepts would perhaps be neither competent nor necessary." (Felix Hausdorff, "Set Theory", 1962)
"We may state as characteristic of modern science that this scheme of isolable units acting in one-way causality has proven to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that, in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction […]." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)
"But the laws of addition and multiplication (the associative laws, for example) are not a human invention. They are unintended consequences of human invention, and they were discovered. And the existence of prime numbers - indivisible numbers that are the product only of themselves and unity - is also a discovery, no doubt quite a late one. The prime numbers were discovered in the series of natural numbers, not by everyone but by people who studied these numbers and their special peculiarities - by real mathematicians." (Karl R Popper, "Notes of a Realist on the Body-Mind Problem", [in "All Life is Problem Solving", 1999] 1972)
"Concepts are inventions of the human mind used to construct a model of the world. They package reality into discrete units for further processing, they support powerful mechanisms for doing logic, and they are indispensable for precise, extended chains of reasoning." (John Sown,"Conceptual Structures - Information Processing in Mind and Machine, 1984)
"In everyday language, the words 'pattern' and 'symmetry' are used almost interchangeably, to indicate a property possessed by a regular arrangement of more-or-less identical units […]" (Ian Stewart & Martin Golubitsky, "Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer?", 1992)
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