Writing in 1920, Whitehead stated that: ‘The history of the doctrine of matter has yet to be written. It is the history of the influence of Greek philosophy on science. That influence has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural entities’ (CN, 16). Previous chapters have examined some of the problems that have arisen with social theory's seeming inability to confront the status of the natural, and consequently the material, head-on. It has also been argued that one task facing social theory, and to which the work of Whitehead is especially fruitful in responding, is the development of more realistic accounts which encompass more of reality and which are not content with being limited to humanized accounts of social relations between human agents. One immediate problem which is encountered by these latter approaches is the very dominance in our contemporary culture of thought of the elision of nature with scientific conceptions thereof. This makes it hard to imagine or to conceptualize a return to questions of nature and of ontology which are not, in some way, philosophically, scientifically or biologically essentialist. Social theory's trepidation in the face of the natural and the ontological, especially with regard to the question of sexual difference, is well described by, amongst others, Fuss (1990) and Riley (1988). For example: