What Is Everything Made Of? Samuel Alexander's Strange Answer

Imagine you’re sitting in your room. There’s a chair, a desk, a lamp, you. Maybe a pet. These seem like very different kinds of things. The chair is wood, the lamp is metal and plastic, you’re… well, you’re alive. It’s natural to think these are fundamentally different sorts of stuff.

But what if they’re all made of the same thing? Not atoms, something stranger. What if the real stuff of the universe isn’t matter at all, but something you can’t even touch?

Samuel Alexander, a philosopher who lived from 1859 to 1938, thought he’d figured out what everything is made of. His answer was: space-time. But he didn’t mean the empty space between things. He meant something much weirder. For Alexander, space and time weren’t just a stage where things happen. They were the only thing there is, and everything else — matter, life, mind, even God — grows out of them like a plant growing from soil.

This is a strange idea. But the more you think about it, the more it forces you to ask questions you might never have considered: What does it mean for something to be “real”? How do new kinds of things come into existence? And if everything is connected at the deepest level, what does that mean for you?

The Great Puzzle

Here’s the puzzle that bothered Alexander and other philosophers of his time. You look at the world and see lots of different kinds of things: rocks, trees, animals, people. They seem to be made of different stuff. A rock doesn’t think. A tree is alive but doesn’t have feelings (as far as we know). You have thoughts and feelings. Where do these differences come from?

One answer: God made everything, and each kind of thing is just what God decided to create. But Alexander wasn’t satisfied with that. He was a scientist at heart, and he wanted an explanation that fit with what science was discovering.

Another answer: Everything is really just matter in motion. Your thoughts are somehow just brain activity. A tree is just complicated chemistry. This view is called materialism, and many scientists like it. But Alexander thought it missed something important. When you look at a sunset, you don’t just have brain activity — you have an experience. That experience is real. Materialism, he thought, couldn’t really explain why anything feels like anything.

Alexander wanted a third option. He wanted to say that everything is made of the same basic stuff, but that new and real things can emerge from that stuff — things that aren’t just the basic stuff in disguise.

The Weird Answer: Space-Time as the Only Thing

Alexander’s big idea was that the universe is made of one thing: space-time. Not space and time as separate things, but a single four-dimensional something he called “Motion” (with a capital M). This wasn’t just a philosophical thought. At the time Alexander was writing, physicists like Einstein and Minkowski were discovering that space and time aren’t separate either. They’re woven together into a four-dimensional fabric.

But Alexander went much further. He said that this space-time fabric isn’t just a container that things sit inside. It is the stuff that everything is made of. A chair is a particular pattern of motions within space-time. Your brain is a more complicated pattern. The difference between a rock and a person isn’t a difference in what they’re made of — it’s a difference in how complex the space-time motions are.

This is really hard to wrap your head around. Philosophers who read Alexander’s book Space, Time, and Deity (1920) complained that it was incredibly difficult. One critic, McTaggart, grumbled that “in every chapter we come across some view which no philosopher, except Professor Alexander, has ever maintained.” Alexander didn’t mind. He thought philosophy was like using a microscope — you’re not arguing someone into agreeing with you, you’re trying to help them see something they hadn’t noticed before.

So what was Alexander trying to help people see? He wanted you to notice that space and time aren’t just abstract ideas. When you think about it, everything that exists is somewhere (that’s space) and happens at some time (that’s time). You can’t imagine something that exists nowhere and nowhen. So space-time isn’t a property of things — it’s the very nature of being real.

How New Things Appear: Emergence

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. If everything is just space-time motions, how do you get things like life and mind? If you’re just a very complicated swirl of space-time, why does it feel like something to be you?

Alexander’s answer was: new kinds of things emerge when space-time gets complicated enough. He called this “emergent evolution.”

Think about water. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. But water isn’t “just” hydrogen and oxygen — it has properties that neither hydrogen nor oxygen have on their own, like wetness and the ability to dissolve things. Wetness emerges when hydrogen and oxygen combine in the right way.

Alexander thought the same thing happens throughout the universe. When space-time motions get complex enough in certain ways, matter emerges. When matter gets organized in certain ways (like in living cells), life emerges. When life gets complex enough (like in brains), mind emerges. Each new level is genuinely new — you can’t fully explain it just by looking at the lower levels. But it’s still made of the same basic stuff.

This part gets technical, but here’s what Alexander was trying to accomplish: He wanted to explain how the universe can be both unified (everything is space-time) and diverse (there are real differences between rocks, plants, animals, and people). He didn’t want to say that mind is “just” matter, but he also didn’t want to say mind is a completely different kind of stuff. Emergence was his way of having both.

What About God?

Now we come to the strangest part of Alexander’s system. Most people who believe in God think God created the universe. Alexander turned this around: he thought the universe is in the process of creating God.

Remember that Alexander thought new qualities emerge when space-time gets complex enough. Matter emerged. Life emerged. Mind emerged. So what’s next? What quality might emerge when the universe becomes complex enough in the future?

Alexander called this future quality “deity.” Not God as a person who already exists, but a quality that the universe might eventually develop, the way mind developed from life. He wrote that “there is a nisus in Space-Time which, as it has borne its creatures forward through matter and life to mind, will bear them forward to some higher level of existence.” “Nisus” is a fancy word for a push or striving — the universe, according to Alexander, is trying to produce something more.

This means God doesn’t exist yet, not fully. Part of God exists — the universe that’s currently here — but the full divine quality is still in the future. Alexander said that “God is the infinite world with its nisus towards deity.” God is the whole universe on its way to becoming something greater.

This is a deeply unusual view, and Alexander knew it. But he thought it solved a problem: if God creates the world and allows suffering, then God is responsible for all the bad things that happen. But if God is created by the world, then suffering is our responsibility, not God’s. We’re not puppets in a divine plan — we’re part of the process that might eventually produce something divine.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Alexander’s ideas never became mainstream. Most philosophers found his system too strange, and today you’ll hardly ever hear his name mentioned. But his questions are still alive.

The idea of emergence — that genuinely new things can appear from complex arrangements of simpler things — is still debated by philosophers and scientists. How does consciousness emerge from brain activity? Is it something new, or is it “just” neurons firing? Alexander’s answer doesn’t satisfy everyone, but he was one of the first to take the question seriously.

And his vision of the universe as something in progress, not yet finished, is genuinely beautiful. Alexander thought we’re not just living in a universe that was made long ago. We’re living in a universe that’s still making itself. Every act of creation — art, science, kindness — might be part of that process. He wrote about the “supreme values” — truth, beauty, goodness — as things humans invent, not things we discover. We’re not finding value in the world; we’re adding it.

Alexander died in 1938, worried about the suffering of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, trying to help as much as he could. He left behind a strange, difficult, optimistic philosophy: a vision of a universe where everything is connected, where new things can really appear, and where we might be part of something greater than ourselves — something that doesn’t exist yet, but might.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Space-time	The single basic stuff Alexander thought everything is made of — not empty space, but the fabric of reality itself
Emergence	The idea that new kinds of things (like life or mind) can appear from complex arrangements of simpler things, without being “just” those simpler things
Nisus	The push or striving Alexander thought the universe has toward producing higher levels of existence
Deity	The future quality Alexander thought might emerge from the universe, similar to how mind emerged from life
Emergent evolution	Alexander’s name for the process by which new qualities appear as the universe becomes more complex

Key People

Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) — Born in Australia, became a professor in England; a Jewish philosopher who loved Jane Austen and argued that everything is made of space-time.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) — A Dutch Jewish philosopher who was kicked out of his community at 23 for his radical ideas; Alexander believed his own system was a corrected version of Spinoza’s.
C. D. Broad — A philosopher who criticized Alexander’s arguments for space-time but took his ideas seriously enough to write detailed responses.

Things to Think About

If everything is made of the same basic stuff (space-time), what makes you you and not just a random swirl of motions? Where does identity come from?
Alexander said new qualities “emerge” when things get complex enough. But how do you know when something is genuinely new, versus just the old thing in a more complicated form? Is consciousness really new, or is it just brain activity?
If God doesn’t exist yet but might emerge from the universe in the future, what would that mean for how we should live? Does it matter whether we’re part of a process that might produce something divine?
Alexander thought the universe is progressing toward something better. But looking at the world, does it seem like things are getting better? Can you have emergence without it being progress?

Where This Shows Up

Science fiction: Stories about the universe evolving into a cosmic consciousness (like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End) directly build on ideas like Alexander’s.
Debates about consciousness: Scientists and philosophers still argue about whether the mind is “just” brain activity or something genuinely new — this is Alexander’s emergence question.
Process philosophy: A whole tradition of philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead, others) argues that the universe is made of processes and events, not static things — Alexander was an early voice for this.
Environmental ethics: If the universe is in process and we’re part of creating value, that changes how we think about our responsibility to the future.