The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world...