 The lowest stratum of material or physical reality includes, for example, the categories of corporeality, space, time, process, substance, causality, reciprocity, and dynamic structure and equilibrium (N1–44). Next, organic beings embody a peculiar organic structure defined in terms of adaptability, purposiveness, metabolism or self-regulation, self-restoration, reproductive fitness, and hereditary constancy and variation (N45–64). In agreement with Scheler and the work of many ethologists (Scheler 2009 [1928]), it is widely recognized that many types of animals possess a mental life. This psychological or mental stratum includes awareness, unconscious processes, pleasure and pain, conditioned learning, habit, associative memory, communication, emotional response, problem-solving intelligence, and the categories of rigid social relations (NW). The stratum of spiritual capacities includes the power of conceptual thought, knowledge acquisition, ideal relations, moral evaluation and values, symbolic communication, teleological reasoning, personality, and all of the categories of the complex and variable social relationships evinced by humanity. Historical reality and culture, or objective and objectivated spirit, form the immediate context for a characteristically human existence (NW; P). Human beings are the most vulnerable entities, the most conditioned and dependent; but they have knowledge, they can consciously adapt, and they can use other entities for their own purposes (A56b, d, 60a; ELO). The strata laws described above specify why none of these strata is explanatorily reducible to another.