This is my shot at our most general theory of the world, that is, metaphysics. Unlike Newton, I cannot claim to have discovered any certainty for the view I advance, but even the incomparable Newton overestimated the epistemic status of his own achievements. Rather, I follow George Santayana's more humble and pragmatic view when he said: ‘Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him …’ (1955: v). The immensity of the metaphysical project has often been condemned by many philosophers and scientists as beyond human intelligence, yet with full knowledge of the difficulty, the impulse toward theoretical understanding continues from one generation to the next. Santayana smiles, Hume laughs and still there is the hope that the collective contributions of human genius amount to real progress.

For most of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the dominant tradition in Anglo-American philosophy has been conceptual analysis. This approach has resulted in a view of philosophy as an increasingly specialised and purely a priori activity that is to be contrasted with the empirical researches of science. Physicists, biologists and chemists take on problems about the real world. What remains for philosophers is a sort of self-contained, puzzle-solving activity that is immune from any scientific influence or refutation. This has left philosophy in an impoverished state. It is no wonder that scientists often complain about the irrelevance of philosophy to the progress of scientific knowledge (Weinberg 1994: 166, Hawking 1993: 41). There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Whitehead, Russell and Quine produced systems of philosophy that addressed fundamental questions about the physical world. They were mathematicians who kept abreast of physics and viewed philosophy as integral to the overall task of understanding the nature of reality. The theory advanced in the present work follows their lead in exploring problems on the border between science and metaphysics. The primary goal is a metaphysical theory that accommodates modern physics.