Science has traditionally taught us that nature is inanimate and machine-like - a storehouse of resources to be exploited for human gain. Remarkably, it is through science that our entire attitude is being revolutionized. In this book, Rupert Sheldrake traces the mythological and historical roots of our present crisis, explaining how our ancestors took it for granted that the world was "alive" and how something of this attitude prevails today in the romantic desire to "return to nature" at weekends and on holidays. But it is the "mechanistic" view of nature which has dominated for the past few hundred years, bringing us to the brink of ecological disaster. Now, however, the new science has destroyed man's faith in the total predictability of "mechanical" nature, has led to the recognition of the chaos and spontaneity of nature, and to the growing realization that our Earth is a developing organism whose laws may not have been fixed when the universe was born, but may be more like habits, constantly changing, evolving and growing. In fact nature may have an inherent memory.