Welcome to Special Issue 72 of the SHAPE Journal. In this issue we try to establish a Modern Holist approach to Science, but in so doing, reveal some major underlying flaws in our methods of Understanding Reality.

The problem we’re faced with in developing a holistic approach to Science involves the unavoidable complexities and interactions of multiple simultaneous aspects of Reality-as-is. Indeed, they initially seemed to be so insurmountable, that Mankind came to believe that underlying all the evident and confusing complexity, there had to be an integrating simplicity at its heart. Otherwise, how could all the clearly evident regularity and even the exquisite beauty of the Natural World have arisen? Our forebears concluded that it might well be revealable, with the appropriate processing. For, if this could be achieved, the revealed Simple Laws of Nature (applied within those same ideal conditions) would allow them to be purposely used to Mankind’s own conceived of benefits.

In fact, a great variety of things coexist within all Natural Environments! For, as we are already beginning to understand today -

First: Single laws do not usually exist as such: they are invariably acting simultaneously. with many others.

Second: Thecontributionsofgivenfactors,inanatural collection of Laws, will never be fixed, they will all perhaps vary!

Third: Individual Laws will never stay exactly the same: they will be influenced and changed by other simultaneously-acting Laws.

Fourth: All Laws inevitably Act upon two different Levels of condition:- a) RANGE LIMIT: Outside of a given range the law vanishes, and other factors can change the Law’s Limits. Outer LAW Limits pertain b): RANGE: Inside its Range the Law acts, but is nonetheless affected by others Inner Law pertains.

And Mankind’s simplification of all these (and more) effects was to effectively, as far as is possible, “hold a situation-still”, in order to study it. And, of course, how they did that would depend upon circumstances, and what it was they were attempting to reveal. Indeed, they didn’t mind movement and quantitative changes: they could be achieved sufficiently easily. BUT genuinely Qualitative Changes - when things became something else - were always prohibited! And, all the Laws that were sought, were assumed to exist as such naturally, independantly of all others, when they did appear together, they were assumed to merely SUM.

Such a stance conformed exclusively to what we call the Principle of Plurality - the opposite of the Principle of Holism.