Originally published in 1920 and based on the Tarner Lectures in the philosophy of science, this early work by Alfred North Whitehead made an important contribution to the development of philosophic naturalism. It also featured his assessment of the impact of Einstein's theories and the new findings of modern physics on the concept of nature. Whitehead begins with a critique of generally accepted ideas about substance, space, and time, as inherited from ancient Greek philosophers, and as modified in the Enlightenment. To assume that matter is the basis of reality, he insists, is a longstanding error, whereby a metaphysical abstraction has been misinterpreted. . .
