The question raised by the concept of a hierarchical series of wholes is, can one conceive of an end to the series? Is there a greatest whole of which there would be no greater? Similarly, is there an ultimately "smallest" whole? For Rudhyar, this is only an intellectual and abstract problem, because living experience presents to human beings only levels of wholeness — spheres and conditions of being which are to some degree higher (more inclusive) or lower (less inclusive) than the ones in which human beings function. Only the intellectual mind ever deals with the abstract possibility of "greatest" or "smallest," neither of which has realistic meaning. For Rudhyar, reality is where one stands, and it is inevitably conditioned and limited by the level at which one operates. Nevertheless, the wholeness in any whole can "resonate" to the wholeness in any other whole (although the resonating whole's experience of the wholeness of the greater whole is still conditioned by its own level of wholeness).
      Thus, for Rudhyar, the challenge facing human beings is to experience the plenitude or fulness of wholeness of being at the human level, to try to understand the meaning of the human condition in relation to the greater wholes human beings can experience, and to take the next step in human evolution that is possible at the time one lives — not to chase after intellectual phantoms seeming to promise escape from the fact of being a finite whole operating at the human level.