14 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
old sense does not apply. From this uncertain nebulous underworld there 
seems to crystallise out, or literally to materialise, the macroscopic world 
which is the proper sphere of sensuous observation and of natural laws. 
The pre-material entities or units condense and cohere into constellations, 
which increase in size and structure until they reach the macroscopic 
stage of observation. As the macroscopic entities emerge, their space- 
time field and appropriate natural laws (mostly of a statistical character) 
emerge part passu. We seem to pass from one level to another in the 
evolution of the universe, with different units, different behaviours, and 
calling for different concepts and laws. Similarly, we rise to new levels 
as later on we pass from the physical to the biological level, and again 
from the latter to the level of conscious mind. But—and this is the 
significant fact—all these levels are genetically related and form an 
evolutionary series; and underlying the differences of the successive 
levels, there remains a fundamental unity of plan or organisation which 
binds them together as members of a genetic series, as a growing, evolving, 
creative universe. 
In the second place let us see how commonsense deals with this 
macroscopic world. On this stage commonsense recognises three levels 
of matter, life and mind as together composing the world. But it places 
them so far apart and makes them so inherently different from each 
other, that relations between them appear unintelligible, if not impossible. 
The commonsense notions of matter, life and mind make any relations 
between them, as well as the world which they form, an insoluble puzzle. 
The older science therefore attempted to reduce life substantially to 
terms of matter, and to put a question mark behind mind ; and the result 
was a predominantly materialistic view of the world. The space-time 
relativity concept of the world has overcome the difficulty by destroying 
the old concept of matter, and reducing it from a self-subsistent entity 
to a configuration of space-time—in other words, to a special organisation 
of the basic world-structure. If matter is essentially immaterial structure 
or organisation, it cannot fundamentally be so different from organism 
or life, which is best envisaged as a principle of organisation ; nor from 
mind, which is an active organiser. Matter, life, and mind thus translate 
roughly into organisation, organism, organiser. The all-or-none law of the 
quantum, which also applies to life and mind, is another indication that : 
matter, life, and mind may be but different stages or levels of the same 
activity in the world which I have associated with the pervading feature 
of whole-making. Materialism has thus gone by the board, and the 
