The Mystery of Matter attempts to lay down philosophical foundations for the universe as revealed by modern science. It offers a critique of both perennial philosophy's metaphysical dualism and modern positivism's mechanistic reductionism in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology and cosmology. It presents a systematic view that is called cosmo-ontology using a methodology akin to Dewey's instrumentalism. It focuses on the transcendent vitality of material energy and its communitarian character as the antithesis to both dualism and reductionism. It grounds ethics in the politics that derives from the communitarian nature of matter itself; and it speaks to the possibility of relationship to the matrix of all existence.