Material

A material is a member of a class of physical things that share features in common. Materials exist, can be perceived, are composed of matter, and serve as the building blocks of higher units of matter organization.

There are no entities whose name is material. No physical object carries that word as its name. Material is the name of a group; its individual members are particular things (water in this glass, stone on this beach, air in this room), and what makes them members of the class is that they share a feature or characteristic in common. Class is how we organize what exists; what exists is the individual material.

Materials have features that we use to characterize them. Characterization is a series of man-made processes for the observation, identification, and description of the characteristics of a material. The output of these processes has the name property. We see a material; we identify it; we name and value its features. The same sequence runs from the world to the property for every material we encounter.

Materials are the building blocks of higher units of matter organization. They are not the smallest things, nor the largest. They sit at the level where chemistry finds its subject: large enough to be observed and handled, small enough to share recognizable features within a class. From materials the rest of chemistry follows: substances and mixtures, compositions and changes, the long catalog of how the stuff of the world behaves.