Designing a window without the building, a light without the room, or a motor without the machine it drives works as badly as designing a pelican without the fish. Optimizing components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system – and hence the bottom line.

Room by room, Sarrasine advances to the cella of the hermaphrodite god, veiled like Spenser's Venus.

A similar and more influential use of the term can be found in William Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1847), where phenomenology occurs in the context of the palaetiological sciences (i.e., sciences which deal wih more ancient conditions of things), as that branch of these studies which is to be followed by aetiology and theory. Among such phenomenologies Whewell mentions particularly phenomenological uranology, phenomenological geography of plants and animals, and even a phenomenological glossology.

In all these negotiations, and caballings, and intriguings, the person most concerned, Frances Coke, the beauty and the heiress, was only the ball in the game.