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There is much to recommend in this erudite and very readable treatment by Gerald Edelman, presenting his thinking on the neural nature of consciousness and its implications for the integration of human knowledge and science. The title of the book reflects the massive scientific challenge of linking a picture of our own internal conscious nature to the larger Nature around us, with our internal nature reflecting, therefore, “a second nature.” The volume presents simple and easily digestible versions of important core concepts in Edelman's thinking about consciousness and the brain from many other publications and books, including neural Darwinism (natural ontogenetic selection of certain neurons and circuits over others during neural development, analogous to population selection in evolution), reentry (reciprocal connectivity of many widespread brain areas), degeneracy (that there are many circuits or neural systems potentially creating or contributing to the same behavior or function), and so forth. His discussions at the beginning of the book on the separation of the sciences and humanities, and on the separation even within the sciences between the sciences of complexity (such as psychology and neuroscience) versus the “hard sciences,” are elegantly argued and very much worth reading. He gives a very easily digested view of basic neuroanatomy and neural circuits and then launches into discussion of his core suppositions in terms of what neural processes in the brain support the creation of conscious states. Of course, such an understanding—a validated neuroscience of consciousness—would forge profound links between parts of the universe previously totally separated and would serve to heal ontological separations most famously (or infamously?) articulated by Descartes when he proposed that mind and matter were fundamentally separate things in the universe. In many ways Edelman's thinking about the brain and consciousness is a conceptual extension of his seminal an