Science and the Modern World.

Cambridge: At the University Press,, 1926. First edition, first impression, British issue, of the author's analysis of the development of scientific enquiry, arguably among his most accessible works and containing some of his earliest writing on God. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead examines the development of the scientific mentality from the ancient world to the present day, drawing out the intellectual conditions necessary for this development. His contemporaries particularly appreciated the work's integration of the perceptions of nature found in such poets as Wordsworth and Shelley within a broader scientific approach to nature and reality. Though unmarked as such, this copy comes from the collection of Thomas Graeme Nelson Haldane (1897-1981). Haldane, a Scottish engineer, worked on the development of the National Grid and later received the James Hawkesley Gold Medal for developing the geo-thermal energy infrastructure of New Zealand. While Haldane was pursuing his undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitehead was invited to deliver the 1919 Tarner lectures. His ownership of this work, published several years later, indicates the impact that Whitehead made on the young undergraduate. Science and the Modern World was first published in 1925 by Macmillan in New York; first edition sheets were issued in Britain by the Cambridge University Press the following year under its imprint. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered and with publisher's device in gilt, front cover panelled in blind. Unobtrusive pencil sidelining to contents. Light bumping and rubbing, faint sunning to spine, browning to endpapers, minor foxing to endpapers and edges, slight separation between several gatherings: a very good copy. Victor Lowe & Robert C. Baldwin, "Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred North Whitehead", in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1951, p. 763.