That there is something unsatisfying about the scientific concept of nature has for long been recognized, and not least by scientists themselves. Of course there have been some remarkable changes in the foundations of science during the present century, and these have lessened the previously ‘mechanistic’ character of scientific theory; but it still remains true that physical science finds no place in its scheme of things for life and consciousness. “The ancients,” wrote Paul Valéry, “set their philosophy to peopling the (...) universe as ardently as we, in our time, have set ours to emptying it of all life.” And similarly A.N. Whitehead has spoken of the opening up, since Descartes, of a deep division between two distinct and incompatible attitudes of mind; we seek to believe simultaneously in the mechanical theory of nature and in the self-determining or creative character of living things. Hence there is a radical inconsistency, he says, at the basis of modern thought. (shrink)