In the Preface to Science and the Modern World Whitehead says that the "mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question."¹ He goes on to assert that the cosmology which has been in the ascendancy in the western world for the past three centuries is that derived from science. The repercussions of this ,"scientific cosmology,' heavily influenced as it was by the metaphysical theory of atomism and dominated by the fundamental assumption of matter with the property of ,"simple location', reverberated throughout the European intellectual world. One important consequence of this new way of understanding nature was that it opened up novel ways of understanding human nature and society as well (e.g. the mechanistic materialism of Thomas Hobbes).