Which seems more likely—that the less derives from the more, or that the more derives from the less? Until recently, everybody opted for the first possibility, for how could something come from nothing, or a stream rise higher than its source? A shadow is diminished light, not diminished darkness.

The problem is that science seems to challenge our intuitions on this point, for it shows dead matter coming first, followed by plants, then animals, and finally rational intelligence. This disparity has created a deep fissure in our collective consciousness, for where we came from bears powerfully on our estimates of who we are. Fortunately, a way out of the impasse is beginning to emerge, and to my knowledge no other book points more clearly toward it than the one in hand.

Arthur Young endorses the sequence that science reports and proceeds from there to extend it backwards by documenting the steps that brought the corporeal world into being. Quantum physicists have been doing that too, of course, "Everything we know about Nature," the physicist Henry Stapp writes, "is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time." This makes that process metaphysical by including the physical while also being beyond and before it.

Young then proceeds to argue that this metaphysical process is profoundly reflexive. Initially it is in sole command, but in the course of time it gives rise to creatures with which it shares its control and its consciousness. (Faithful to our sense that the more cannot derive from the less, Young assumes with Alfred North Whitehead that the fundamental process of Nature is conscious.) As the terminus of this grand speculative scheme, Young envisions creatures that eventually evolve out of the constricting matrices of space, time, and coercive causation to identify with the untrammeled freedom and awareness with which the story begins.

One of the instructive features of the book for me is Young’s account of the steps by which the matrices of space-time proceed from Nature’s fundamental process—steps that begin with photons (that are not imprisoned in space and time) which give rise to nuclear particles (subject to time but not space), and then atoms (which are subject to the constraint of space but not of time, insofar as the timing with which atoms release particles is unpredictable in both theory and practice), and finally molecules which (because they cannot absorb and release energy as atoms can) have no freedom whatsoever. More important, however, is an accompanying contribution. By arguing that the corporeal world comes into existence through a succession of increasing strictures on freedom, the author—no mean scientist in his own right, having invented the Bell helicopter—resolves the conflict between science and our basic intuitions. For until they found themselves challenged by modern science’s early, crude reports, peoples everywhere expanded those intuitions into some version of the Great Chain of Being in which the finite world moves into place through the Infinite’s progressively veiling its infinity to allow finite things to exist. (Ex = out; stasis = stand; exist = to stand out, by implication from a background that is infinite.)

By expressing this veiling process in the language of physics, Young gives it current credence that sets the stage for subsequent unveilings in which freedom and consciousness rise like phoenixes from the ashes of physics in the biological succession of plants, animals and human beings. The diagram on page 9 schematizes the picture, and the inclusive metaphysical picture in which Young places it reads like this:

Things begin with wholeness and return reflexively to it. Wholeness enters our horizon, first as potential and then as its realizations. The journey from wholeness and back to wholeness, takes the shape of the physical-biological arc that has been mentioned. The molecular floor of that arc is the nadir of the reflexive odyssey, for at that level nature possesses neither freedom nor (as far as we can tell) consciousness at all. Still, this completely determined floor of the corporeal world is indispensable because in the way a ballerina needs a stable floor on which to dance, freedom requires a dependable environment on which to act. Thus understood, determinism is not the defeat of consciousness but instead its prerequisite.

Cautiously, admitting at every point the limits of what he can say, Young shows how this outline of science parallels the "arc" of myths and religion in their hero stories of gods who fall to rise again.

Because the book first appeared more than twenty years ago, it is important to ask if its overview withstands the revolutions that physics, biology, and consciousness studies have experienced in the interval. The answer is that it does. Subsequent discoveries show Young’s arguments to be incomplete at points, but nowhere do they refute them. Some of them even strengthen his arguments, my scientist friends tell me, adding that its basic insights could still suggest rethinking in certain fields of research whether one accepts Young’s encompassing thesis or not. It is interesting to speculate, they say, on how Young would have responded to such developments as non-locality in physics, chaos theory, Ilya Prigogene’s thesis about the arrow of time, and biological arguments regarding top-down causation.

Be those matters as they may, for its fresh perspective and innumerable creative insights, this book is as relevant today as when it was written. And apart from specifics which continually change, it remains a beautiful display of thinking that combines intuitive, metaphysical insights with rational, scientific thought in ways that are in many places breathtaking. Along the way, the author offers excellent overviews of many basic relations in the sciences which are seldom stated clearly in standard texts, so one can read the book just for the excitement of a critically fresh perspective against which to judge one’s own interpretations of science’s recent developments.

Arthur Young emphasizes throughout that his model is not science. But, we can add, it is a richly provocative cosmology, in which all of matter, our science, our awareness, our arts, and our religions are common expressions of who we are yet to become. I am indebted to my physicist friend, Nik Warren, for helping me position this book in the context of the natural sciences today.