Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

6: The Chain of Being

Thrice Vishnu paced and set his step uplifted out of the primal dust; three steps he has paced, the Guardian, the Invincible, and from beyond he upholds their laws.

Rig Veda

Levels of Being

When did life originate on planet Earth? Traces of one-celled organisms have been dated at 3.5 billion years, and the current estimate of the origin of life is 3.85 billion years ago, which is early as the Earth is now thought to be 4.55 million years old.

How did life appear on planet Earth? This seems to be a quite different question, even of a different order. The simple answer is that science does not know. Klaus Dose writes: “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”¹ “Scientific explanations flounder and possibilities multiply when we ask how the first cell arose on earth. Competing theories abound – which seems always the case when we know very little about a subject. Some theories, of course, come labelled as The Answer. As such they are more properly classified as mythology than as science,” writes Robert Shapiro in his much-appreciated Origins.²

The origin of life is of course one of the most important problems – if not the most important one – in any theory of evolution. Charles Darwin, cautiously, left it untouched. But in the process of evolution there is also that other important problem: how can the mind act upon and through the matter of the brain? According to Larry Witham this is “the mind-boggling question that divides brain theorists and philosophers alike: how can the quality of ‘mind’ [whatever this may be] exist at all in matter?”³ “The enigmatic relation between conscious experience and the physical world, commonly known as the mind-body problem, has frustrated philosophers at least since Plato, and now stonewalls scientists in their attempt to construct a rigorous theory. … Evidence is mounting that the mind-body problem is surprisingly hard and requires revision of deeply held presuppositions … We have yet to see our first genuine scientific theory of the mind-body problem.” (Donald Hoffman⁴)

As to the second problem, materialistic science has cut this Gordian knot by proclaiming that, as everything is matter, the brain and all its functions, including the mind, are matter too. Nobody has yet explained, though, how matter can be conscious. René Descartes called the mind “an epiphenomenon” of the brain, which was activated by the mind through the pineal gland. He was certainly a first-rate figure in the history of philosophy and mathematics, and as he is the intellectual patron saint of France, one better thinks twice before poking fun at his pineal gland and his vortices. Since then, materialistic science has not found anything resembling a solution of the mind-body problem. This being the case, it is encouraging to read that “it is probably safe to say that by 2050 sufficient knowledge of biological phenomena will have wiped out the traditional dualistic separations of body/brain, body/mind and brain/mind.”⁵ Provided that in 2050 scientific materialism still rules.

First there was matter, then there was life, then there was mind. “I suppose a matter-of-fact observer, if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in the earth’s beginning, would have criticized any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a chimera; so too, afterwards he would have repeated this mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimera,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in a letter.⁶

The reader may remember Wallace’s crucial statement, the outcome of many years of experience and reflection: “There are three stages that cannot be accounted for by natural selection: 1. the change from inorganic to organic … [i.e. the origin of life]; 2. the introduction of sensation or consciousness [i.e. life and the first glimmer of mind]; 3. the existence in man of a number of his most characteristic and noblest faculties such as mathematical reasoning, aesthetic appreciation, and abstract thinking [i.e. the full-blown mind of Homo sapiens]: Wallace asserted his view of the levels of being explicitly: “The grand law of ‘continuity’, the last outcome of modern science, which seems absolute throughout the realm of matter, [life-]force and mind, so far as we can explore them, cannot surely fail to be true beyond the narrow sphere of our vision, and leave an absolute chasm between man and the Great Mind of the universe. Such a supposition seems to me in the highest degree improbable.”⁷

While Alfred Wallace, as a naturalist another Darwin but also a great human being, saw the different levels of reality as “the last outcome of modern science,” scientific materialism judged this conception of his to be a fatal mistake and condemned him to oblivion for it. In official science anything that is not matter is unworthy of consideration. And everything is matter because there cannot be anything but matter – which, of course, is a circular argument. Anything else is “the survival into our day of antediluvian mysticism and superstition.” (Carl Sagan) The annoying fact for the hard sciences, however, is that matter itself has become rather mysterious and is now the equivalent of energy (and vice versa), while the very material reality has escaped the physical sciences altogether since Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and their quantum mechanics.

These are fundamental problems for any person interested in his world, and in his own origin and destiny. Unfortunately, most often the polemics about them are fought out in the clouds, without much knowledge of their substance and history. This makes a short survey of the idea of the Great Chain of Being in the past useful.

“The Serial Kingdoms of the Graded Law”

“Central to the perennial philosophy is the notion of the Great Chain of Being. The idea is fairly simple. Reality, according to the perennial philosophy, is not one-dimensional; it is not a flatland of uniform substance stretching monotonously before the eye. Rather, reality is composed of several different but continuous dimensions. Manifest reality, that is, consists of different grades or levels, reaching from the lowest and most dense and least conscious to the highest and most subtle and most conscious.” This is Ken Wilber’s definition of the chain of being in his Eye of Spirit. “The Absolute manifests itself in layers, dimensions, sheaths, levels, or grades – whatever term one prefers … In Vedanta these are the koshas, the sheaths or layers covering Brahman; in Buddhism these are the eight vijnanas, the eight levels of awareness, each of which is a stepped-down or more restricted version of its senior dimension; in Kabbalah these are the sefirot, and so on.”⁸

The first part of Sri Aurobindo’s major opus, The Life Divine – a source of Wilber’s original inspiration – describes extensively the same levels of being, which are the manifestation of what he terms “Omnipresent Reality.” He writes: “A solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes. And one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface; only then can one have knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem.”⁹

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual practice, his “spiritual realism,” has always taken the sciences as known to him fully into account, and weighed the contents of their worldview against the profoundest spirituality of the past and his personal experience. “As human thought is beginning to realize, the distinction made by the intellect and the classifications and practical experiments of Science, while perfectly valid in their own field and for their own purpose, do not represent the whole or the real truth of things, whether of things in the whole or of the thing by itself which we have classified and set artificially apart, isolated for separate analysis.”¹⁰ The truth of things is not the dogmatic, deterministic domain of matter alone, but “the hieratic message of the climbing planes”, “the stages of the spirit” which are the stages of consciousness, “the serial kingdoms of the graded Law,” “a golden ladder carrying the Soul,” “an organ scale of the Eternal’s acts,” “predestined stadia of the evolving Way”… – all expressions which we find in his epic poem Savitri, his ultimate statement.

He translated the rik about the original idea of the triple world in which we live, the three paces of Vishnu, from the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda as follows : “Thrice Vishnu paced and set his step uplifted out of the primal dust; three steps he has paced, the Guardian, the Invincible, and from beyond he upholds their laws. Scan the workings of Vishnu and see from when he has manifested their laws.”¹¹ “It is difficult to suppose,” he wrote, “that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers.” And he affirmed: “The old Vedic knowledge will be justified,”¹² not because it is old, but because it is the “perennial philosophy” formulating the truth of things – then, now, and forever – at the base of an endlessly evolving world.

The Ways of the West

The three grades or levels of being are deeply ingrained in the thought of the West. The very first time a graded world is mentioned seems to have been by Homer, who’s golden chain reaches from God’s throne down to the meanest worm. Plato, drawing his inspiration from Pythagoras, divided the human consciousness into three levels. The lowest was the desire soul, corresponding to the material and vegetative vital plane centered around the navel and below; higher up, purely vital and partially psychic, was the sensitive soul, centered in the heart; and the highest was the rational or actually immortal soul, centered in the heart and the head. Aristotle had a similar gradation.

It is from the ancient Greek philosophers onwards, and because of their all-permeating influence in medieval Western thought, that the real soul, the ‘psyche’ has been confused with the mind. The reason of this confusion seems to have been that the Greeks, despite their Mysteries, lacked the spiritual experience of the East. Descartes’ basic and very influential worldview was essentially that of his Catholic educators, the Jesuits. Their official teaching was a dualism of body and soul, the burdensome body being the container of the soul in a world corrupted because of Adam’s Original Sin, and the immortal soul destined for heaven or hell, depending on its behaviour while in the body.

Still, behind and in tandem with the Christian duality, the scale’s gradations, chiefly divided in the triad matter-life-mind, continued to determine the thinking. In science there were the material, vegetable and animal realms, the foundation of all natural classifications. Even materialistic Cartesians like La Mettrie wrote about a continuation in physical nature “from the human, down to the higher animals, down to the animals preceding these” (which shows that a descending evolution, from the most complex to the most elementary, was still a common belief among the intellectuals of the eighteenth century.) One could illustrate abundantly how the triad of the levels of being continued to shape the thinking even of a rationalist like Bertrand Russell (instinct, mind, spirit) or an out-and-out materialist like Jacques Monod (matter, emotions, thought).

Arthur Lovejoy

The Great Chain of Being (1936), the classic essay by the historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy, is one of the books that do not age and continue influencing a culture even though being little known. “The phrase ‘the Great Chain of Being’ was long one of the most famous in the vocabulary of Occidental philosophy, science, and reflective poetry,” writes Lovejoy, “and the conception which in modern times came to be expressed by this or similar phrases has been one of the half-dozen most potent and persistent presuppositions in Western thought. It was, in fact, until not much more than a century ago, probably the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things, of the constitutive pattern of the universe; and as such it necessarily predetermined current ideas on many other matters.”¹³

Lovejoy posits two principles as supports of his assertion, both originating with Plato and Aristotle, who, after all, had been Plato’s disciple for twenty years. The first is the principle of plenitude. The Greek reason could not imagine a gap, empty space or break in the cosmos. For the cosmos was the creation of supernal powers, for whom “no genuine potentiality of being can remain unfulfilled.” – “Aristotle maintained that the bodies making up the cosmos were all contiguous with each other, thus composing a plenum [fullness]:”¹⁴ As Lovejoy puts it: “The perfection of the Absolute Being must be an intrinsic attribute, a property inherent in the Idea of it; and since the being and attributes of all other things are derivative of this perfection because they are logically implicit in it, there is no room for any contingency anywhere in the universe.”¹⁵ This explains the famous scholastic dictum “nature abhors a vacuum,” for ceasing to be full, the world would cease to be coherent.

The second principle is the principle of continuity. “From the Platonic principle of plenitude the principle of continuity could be directly deduced. If there is between two given natural species a theoretically possible intermediate type, that type must be realized, otherwise there would be gaps in the universe.”¹⁶ From the principle of continuity, still so called by Alfred Wallace, followed logically the notion of infinitesimal gradation “which was of the essence of the cosmological Chain of Being.”

“It was Aristotle,” during the Middle Ages held in such high esteem that he was referred to as The Philosopher (ille philosophus), “who chiefly suggested to naturalists and philosophers of later times the idea of arranging all animals in a single graded scala naturae according to their degree of perfection. … The result was the conception of the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men in science, and indeed most educated men were to accept without question – the conception of the universe as a Great Chain of Being.”

Vast chain of being! which from God began,

Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,

Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eyes can see,

No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,

From thee to nothing …

Thus wrote the popular poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in his Essay on Man. (The wonders revealed by the microscope – the “glass” – were thrilling the intelligentsia of those days.)

Wilber writes that evolution is fully compatible with the chain of being, which indeed it is, and which is the reason why the classification by Carolus Linnaeus is inspired by the chain of being. Seen in this way, the chain of being lies at the basis of modern taxonomy – and it continues to structure the human perceptions in daily life and even, as mentioned in passing, the thinking of some of the most materialistic and deterministic philosophers and scientists. This too may indicate that, as long as science limits itself to the level of ‘matter’, reality will remain inaccessible and the fundamental problems of science – among them the origin of life and the mind-body problem – unsolved.

“Man in the Middle”

“The human being is part of the immense chain of living beings,” in the view of Marcel Schutzenberger.¹⁷ This might seem a truism if one does not recall that the classification of the human with the animals has caused a revolution in the Western conceptions, and if one does not know that Schutzenberger is one of the great living mathematicians, which renders his mentioning of the chain of being rather exceptional. But not only is man part of the chain, he seems to be positioned somewhere in the middle on it, halfway up or halfway down, higher than the animals, lower than the angels. To quote Alexander Pope again:

Plac’d in this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err …

Created half to rise, and half to fall,
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

If, as Immanuel Kant also thought, “human nature occupies as it were the middle rung of the Scale of Being,” the scale must consist not only of matter, life-force and mind, but also of spiritual gradations above the mind (which was another reason why it was and remains discarded by scientific materialism). In sum, it encompasses all Reality, “from nothing to the deity.” The chain of being, writes Lovejoy, must be interpreted “so as to admit of progress in general, and of a progress of the individual not counterbalanced by deterioration elsewhere [in nature]: … Since the scale was still assumed to be minutely graduated, since nature makes no leaps, the future life must be conceived to be – at least for those who use their freedom rightly – a gradual ascent, stage after stage, through all the levels above that reached by man here; and since the number of these levels between man and the one Perfect Being must be infinite, that ascent can have no final term. The conception of the destiny of man as an unending progress thus emerges as a consequence of reflection upon the principles of plenitude and continuity.”¹⁸

This open-ended view, in academic literature seldom associated with former European thought, was worded by the philosopher Viscount Bolingbroke as follows: “Shall we not be persuaded rather that as there is a gradation of sense and intelligence here from animal beings imperceptible to us for their minuteness, without the aid of microscopes and even with them, up to man, in whom, though this be the highest stage, they remain very imperfect; so there is a gradation from man, through various forms of sense, intelligence, and reason, up to beings who cannot be known to us, because of their distance from us, and whose rank in the intellectual system is above even our conceptions? This system, as well as the corporeal, must have been present to the Divine mind before he made them to exist.”¹⁹

The supposition in the last sentence refers to another major problem: if there is a chain, or ladder, or scale of being going up, how did it come about and on what is it based? The womb of all existence is the Divine, who by his creative omnipotence established the order of the world. If life followed the gradations of an ascending ladder, it could only follow the pre-established rungs of a descending one. This conception squares with the Platonic and neo-Platonic view of the ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’, which are the moulds in the consciousness of the Divine of all things existing.

Such a conception, however, might be understood as a model of a static universe, in which everything is forever established and no kind of organism, no species ever changes. It was indeed seen in this manner in Christian theology for many centuries. But “one of the principal happenings in eighteenth-century thought was the temporalizing of the Chain of Being,” writes Lovejoy. In other words, the climbing of the ladder was now conceived as a process of development in time, materialized in the gradually increasing complexity of the organisms on Earth. The intriguing fact is that this process was not supposed to stop with the human species as it is at present.

Considering all this, and with the hindsight we have, it comes no longer as a surprise that at that time the evolutionary view appeared as a logical consequence of the way of the world. It should once more be recalled that in those days the evolutionary view, called transformism or transmutationism, was dangerous and even blasphemous. Linnaeus was one of the first to have an intuition of the transmutation of the species. Change in and of the species had practically become obvious from his lifelong study of the classification of the living beings, but, like Buffon, he preferred to keep mum about it. Many of the poets and philosophers, as illustrated by a few passages quoted previously, wrote about it openly. One of the most read was Dennis Diderot, not only with his own books but with the illustrious Encyclopédie as his mouthpiece. During half a century there was the dance of hesitation between religiously dogmatic creationism and the scientific thesis of evolution; both standpoints, and several in between, were defended by estimable persons like Leibniz, Robinet, Erasmus Darwin and Cuvier. Till Lamarck published his theory of transformism (1800) and Darwin his theory of transmutationism (1859).

Man was no longer the lord of creation. He was now occupying the middle rung of the Scale of Being, “midway from nothing to the deity.” – “The definition of him as ‘the middle link’ especially emphasized the peculiar duality of his constitution and the tragi-comic inner discord in him which results from this. … The place assigned to man in the graded scale which constitutes the universe lent to this conception still greater sharpness and an air of metaphysical necessity. Somewhere in that scale there must exist a creature in which the merely animal series terminates and the ‘intellectual’ series has its dim and rudimentary beginning; and man is that creature.” (Lovejoy²⁰)

In Sri Aurobindo we read: “Man is the now apparent culmination but not the real ultimate summit; for he is himself a transient being and stands at the turning-point of the whole movement.”²¹ And: “A many-sided ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of the consciousness of man the mental being … Truth is relative to us because our knowledge is surrounded by ignorance … On the surface we are still an ego figuring self, an ignorance turning into knowledge, a will labouring towards true force, a desire seeking for the delight of existence. To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves … is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine Maya.”²²

And he writes in The Life Divine: “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. … The animal is man in the making; man himself is that animal and yet the something more of self-consciousness and dynamic power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is something more which is contained and repressed in his being as the potentiality of the divine: he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being.”²³

The Life Divine is based on the experiences of an advanced yogi and mystic, who had worked his way back to the root-knowledge of the Vedic seers. However, that this profoundest intuition and aspiration is to be found not only in the East can be exemplified, for instance, by the following lines from Edward Young (1683-1765):

[The Sovereign Spirit of the world,]
From the mute shell-fish gasping on the shore,
To men, to angels, to celestial minds,
Forever leads the generations on
To higher scenes of being …

… In their stations all may persevere
To climb the ascent of being, and approach
For ever nearer to the life divine.

An Idea Lives On

The economist E.F. Schumacher became world-famous because of his book Small is Beautiful, which propagated the important role small-scale enterprises might play in the world economy. After his death, in 1977, another essay of his was published: A Guide for the Perplexed. It borrowed its title from a seminal medieval treatise by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. A Guide expounds the reflections of a thinker who, as in his other work, does not hesitate to disclose his original perceptions of the world.

“Our task is to look at the world and see it whole,” he writes. “We see what our ancestors have always seen: a great ‘Chain of Being’ which seems to divide naturally in four sections – four ‘kingdoms’ as they used to be called – mineral, plant, animal and human. … The Chain of Being can be seen as extending downwards from the highest to the lowest, or it can be seen upwards from the lowest to the highest. The ancient view begins with the Divine and sees the downward Chain of Being as an increasing distance from the centre and a progressive loss of qualities. The modern view, largely influenced by the theory of evolution, tends to start from inanimate matter and consider man the last link of the chain, having evolved the widest range of useful qualities.”²⁴

To gather his material for Uncommon Wisdom, Fritjof Capra also interviewed Schumacher. He reports how Schumacher explained the evolutionary stratification. “Schumacher expressed his belief in a fundamental hierarchical order consisting of four characteristic elements – mineral, plant, animal, and human – with four others – matter, life, consciousness, and self-awareness – which are manifest in such a way that each level possesses not only its own characteristic element but also those of all other levels. This, of course, was the ancient idea of the Great Chain of Being, which Schumacher presented in modern language and with considerable subtlety. However, he maintained that the four elements are irreducible mysteries that cannot be explained, and that the differences between them represent fundamental jumps in the vertical dimension, ‘ontological discontinuities’ as he put it. ‘This is why physics cannot have any philosophical impact’, he repeated. ‘It cannot deal with the whole; it deals only with the lowest level’, the level of matter.”²⁵

If this is true, and it is a view supported by much philosophical, scientific and spiritual evidence, the pillars of scientific materialism rest on very insecure ground. Science is the expression of the search for Truth innate in humanity. Scientific materialism, limiting itself to the material level of existence, is a dogmatic theory which will have to be revised, perhaps very shortly. This does not efface the immense mass of research and discovery accomplished through centuries by sincerely and totally dedicated persons, many of whom have sacrificed their lives for it. It has greatly profited technology, the sister of theoretical science, to shape our world. And the limitation to the material level, to bodies that can be counted, measured and weighed, was inevitable because the human intellect cannot function otherwise. It cannot grasp the reality of the whole, it can only define and work with parts of whole.

Yet, reduction of the whole to its parts, when converted into dogmatism, must ultimately lead to distortion, confusion and stunting ignorance. (The unsolved and presently unsolvable problems of the origin of life and the mind/body relation should make this clear.) Ken Wilber, widely read, has many pages in his books trying to show that the material “flatland” of science is far from the whole of reality. Two major sources of his synthetic effort are Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). Sri Aurobindo, in The Life Divine, has provided Wilber with an extensive description of the levels of being and their interaction; Koestler has formulated the useful concept of the “holon.”

“A ‘part’, as we usually use the word,” writes Koestler, “means something fragmentary and incomplete which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a ‘whole’ is considered as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’ in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organizations. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: sub-wholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts.” Such entities – and anything concrete on any level of being is such an entity – Koestler calls “holons.” Holons “behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the way you look at them.”²⁶

Sri Aurobindo had already written: “As human thought is beginning to realize, the distinction made by the intellect and the classifications and practical experiments of Science, while perfectly valid in their own field and for their own purpose, do not represent the whole or the real truth of things, whether of things in the whole or of the thing by itself which we have classified and set artificially apart, isolated for separate analysis.”²⁷ With these words Sri Aurobindo defines exactly the same epistemological problem Koestler and Wilber have brought to the attention of their readers, and which is crucial for all disciplines of science. At stake is the definition of an entity, any entity, which by the fact of its existence belongs to a hierarchy, i.e. at the same time to a higher and a lower order, while still being itself – the individual and the mass, the particle and the atom, the cell and the blade of grass, the animal and its species.

As Sri Aurobindo points out, the isolation of the physical unit from the totality of its existence on all levels simultaneously, is “perfectly valid” as an approach or operation of science. The reason is, as already mentioned, that otherwise the human mind would not be able to practice science, because cutting entities out of ‘reality’ is the way it functions. But, again, science has made this delimiting act of the mind to ‘things’, observable by the physical senses, into an insuperable mental dogma. As such it restricts the field of its activities to what the general public still supposes to be the material world (but what has since about a century ago become an occult world of invisible forces and even invisible matter, and recently of an infinite number of universes). This doctrine will one day have to be overcome if the search for Truth is to continue.

Arthur Koestler was one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, a conscious witness of his times. A witness of his times on a more restricted level, that of science, is nowadays the physicist Paul Davies. The number of popularizing books he has written and the awards he has received for this work are remarkable, taking into account that as a professor of physics he has the keep up a certain standard. The following quotes from one of his books may therefore be worthy of consideration. “There is a growing appreciation among scientists of the importance of structural hierarchy in nature: that holistic concepts like life, organization and mind are indeed meaningful, and that they cannot be explained away as ‘nothing but’ atoms or quarks or unified forces, or whatever. … Life is a holistic concept, the reductionist perspective revealing only inanimate atoms within us. Similarly mind is a holistic concept, at the next level of description. We can no more understand mind by reference to brain cells than we can understand cells by reference to their atomic constituents.”²⁸