Finally, from the ever-greater complexity and variety that raises sub­atomic particles through the course of evolution to those conscious, self­ reflexive life forms we call human beings, we cannot help but speculate about the existence of a broadly conceived telos and a latent subjectivity in substance itself that eventually yields mind and intellectuality. In the reactivity of substance, in the sensibility of the least-developed microor­ganisms, in the elaboration of nerves, ganglia, the spinal cord, and the layered development of the brain, one senses an evolution of mind so coherent and compelling that there is a strong temptation to describe it with Manfred Eigen's term, "inevitable." It is hard to believe that mere fortuity accounts for the capacity of life forms to respond neurologically to stimuli; to develop highly organized nervous systems; to be able to foresee, however dimly, the results of their behavior and later conceptu­alize this foresight clearly and symbolically. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.364

The prospect that life and all its attributes are latent in substance as such, that biological evolution is rooted deeply in symbiosis or mutu­alism, indicates how important it is to reconceptualize our notion of "matter" as active substance. As Manfred Eigen has put it, molecular self-organization suggests that evolution "appears to be an inevitable event, given the presence of certain matter with specified autocatalytic properties and under the maintenance of the finite (free) energy flow [that is, solar energy] necessary to compensate for the steady produc­tion of entropy." This much is clear: we can no longer be satisfied with a passive "dead" matter that fortuitously collects into living substance. The uni­verse bears witness to an ever-striving, developing-not merely a "moving"-substance, whose most dynamic and creative attribute is its ceaseless capacity for self-organization into increasingly complex forms. Natural fecundity originates primarily from growth, not from spatial "changes" of location. Nor can we remove form from its central place in this developmental and growth process, or function as an indispensable correlate of form. The orderly universe that makes science a possible project and its use of a highly concise logic - mathematics - meaningful presupposes the correlation of form with function. From this perspec­tive, mathematics serves not merely as the "language" of science but also as the logos of science. This scientific logos is above all a workable project because it grasps a logos that inheres in nature-the "object" of scientific investigation. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.359

My point here is that substance and its properties are not separable from life. Henri Bergson's conception of the biosphere as an "entropy­ reduction" factor, in a cosmos that is supposedly moving toward greater entropy or disorder, would seem to provide life with a cosmic rationale for existence. That life forms may have this function need not suggest that the universe has been exogenously "designed" by a supernatural demiurge. But it does suggest that "matter" or substance has inherent self-organizing properties, no less valid than the mass and motion at­tributed to it by Newtonian physics. Nor is there so great a lack of data, by comparison with the conven­tional attributes of "matter," as to render the new properties implausi­ble. At the very least, science must be what nature really is; and in na­ture, life is (to use Bergsonian terminology) a counteracting force to the second law of thermodynamics-or an "entropy-reduction" factor. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.357