481. In principle this "mesocosmic matter" does not differ from the realities we are wont to call "matter". In making an analysis of "mesocosmic matter" we have also arrived at the analysis of all the other forms of "matter" in the Universe. Actually, they all have exactly the same analysis. They are categories of the associations of living beings, based on common wishes and desires.
      If terrestrial people are not accustomed to understand known substances or matter in this way, it is due – as mentioned above – to the question of "cosmic perspective". They have those substances at such a "cosmic distance" away that they do not perceive the local details and consequently neither the manifestations of living beings within and throughout that substance. These substances, or that matter, appears therefore to those beings as "lacking individualization" and is thus regarded by them as "dead matter". And it has been investigated as "dead matter" for hundreds of years by those representing the beginnings of science. Still, it is through that science that we have indeed advanced towards an ability to establish the presence of life and living beings behind the existence of plant and animal matter – although in a somewhat vague and highly imperfect form. On the other hand we have not yet progressed far enough to establish the presence of "living beings" in, or underlying, the existence of mineral matter. To the materialistic researchers of today this immense ocean of matter is, as yet, a "dead" world. There is, however, an incontestable regularity about the latter, expressing just as many variations in logical means of reaction as does plant and animal matter, and the researchers themselves have discovered in this same matter a wealth of specialized individual power centres they describe as atoms, electrons and so forth and yet this has not yet enabled the researchers to recognize the following: that all existing matter, regardless of the form and volume in which it appears, cannot possibly exist without being synonymous with the reaction of living beings' manifestations; that it is the result of previous conscious thought and that its ways of movement, or its effects, are consequently a function of consciousness and that all substance or matter – from water, snow and ice at the north and south poles to gold, silver or copper in the depths of the Earth – is the creation of living beings.
      Sand, stone or grit in the desert are thus just as synonymous with thought-climates or the manifestations of living beings, as are houses, furniture and machines in daily life. But the life underlying desert sand, polar ice or metals deep in the Earth is so immeasurably far back in the long line of evolution and so distant on terrestrial man's cosmic horizon, that its manifestations fade out of sight as a far-off indistinct nebulous mass on the outer periphery of that horizon. On the other hand, the life underlying houses and furniture and so forth, is so near that each detail of its manifestations dominates everything on this same cosmic horizon and appears gigantic in relation to that horizon's distant objects and therefore these details are easily seen as unmistakable signs of life.
      As life's manifestations in the said horizon's distant periphery thus seem diminutive compared with the details close to the viewer, and so, to the senses of terrestrial man, appear as "matter", then this "matter" will be referred to in "Livets Bog" as "microcosmic matter".