Constructed along the lines of a modernized Platonic dialogue, this short book is composed of a series of discussions of basic questions raised by the rapid and continuous advancement of science. Participating in these discussions are six men who represent an equal number of different fields -- a biologist, a classicist, an industrial magnate, a physicist, an anthropologist, and a geographer. The vigorous and many-sided dialogues open with a casual conversation about the what and why of knowledge, and proceed to divisions entitled The Criteria of Life, The Chain-of-Life Series, The Sensitivity Cluster, Life as Creative Power. Creation, nature, sex, mortality, and evolution constitute the principle topics, but the central question evolves as that of man's necessity to relate himself to a world drastically affected and altered by scientific progress, when he has lost the conception of himself as the focal point of the universe. Detailed and thorough, with vast wealths of knowledge and experience in support of their words, these thinkers express themselves in such a manner as to place their ideas at the receptive level of any reader who is genuinely interested in the thought-provoking and disturbing subjects under scrutiny, and who has wondered about them even sub-consciously at one time or another of his life-span.