Yearning for Cosmic Connection (Part 1)

What are we yearning for in a disenchanted age? Connection might be one word for it.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his recent book Cosmic Connections, says that we might want to think about connection as "not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration." His hypothesis is that "the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history."

Prof. Taylor is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in political philosophy, social theory, and intellectual history. Over the years, he has received numerous prestigious honors, such as the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize. In 2007, together with Gérard Bouchard, he co-led the Bouchard–Taylor Commission, which examined how to accommodate cultural differences in Quebec. Taylor has authored or edited more than thirty books.

Charles has been one of my intellectual heroes for more than 20 years. His work, especially his Philosophical Papers, Sources of the Self, and The Malaise of Modernity were pivotal in my own formation, and much of my own work has been an attempt to empirically engage with and build on his ideas.

I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about his new book a few months ago, and we discussed the idea of organizing an event around the power of beauty. His concept of "cosmic connections" being very similar to the work I'm doing these days on "spiritual yearning" among scientists, we thought to convene a small event to discuss how our yearning for profound connection has been lived out through a variety of modalities– from Romantic poets in his case to the contemporary secular scientists I'm studying. The result was a somewhat impromptu convening with the help of Prof. Dan Cere at McGill University and funding from my John Templeton Foundation grant: an international symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age.

We brought together a group of scholars from different disciplines: philosopher Naomi Fisher from Loyola University Chicago; sociologist Galen Watts from the University of Waterloo; novelist, essayist, and theologian Tara Isabella Burton; ethicist Bill Barbieri from the Catholic University of America; and Oxford biophysicist Rob Gilbert. We also had several guests from McGill University in attendance.

At the heart of our discussions was a recognition of a growing crisis: disconnection, loneliness, and a loss of depth in our experience of the world. Modern life, with its focus on efficiency and instrumental thinking, often strips away the enchantment that gives life meaning. Yet, humans have always yearned for something greater—whether through awe in nature, beauty in art, or reverence for the divine. This longing remains a vital pathway to personal and societal renewal.

Our group explored how spiritual yearning can emerge in unexpected places, from the delight scientists find in their discoveries to the transformative power of art and language. We also grappled with the barriers that make such connections difficult today—cultural norms that prioritize productivity over reflection, and institutions that often fail to nurture deeper values. There are formidable structural and cultural challenges to pursuing spiritual yearning in our age. Despite these challenges, beauty emerged as a hopeful thread throughout the day–not just as an aesthetic experience but as a source of knowledge, connection, and moral renewal.

As Taylor reminded us, revisiting how humans across cultures have encountered awe and reverence can illuminate new ways forward. Our shared yearning for connection—to self, others, nature, and perhaps the divine—is not a symptom of lack but an invitation to transformation. This symposium affirmed that such longing, even in a secular age, holds immense potential for rediscovering meaning in our lives and our world.

In this first of two posts about our symposium, I'm sharing with you the first few presentations from our gathering. I'll share the audio and video for each of the presenters separately, and an unedited transcript of all talks at the end.

In this first part, I introduce the symposium; John Templeton Foundation program officer Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie introduces the broader Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative; Marie Trotter, a PhD Candidate in English at McGill shares a couple of her poems; and Charles discusses his motivations for writing Cosmic Connections. In doing so, he shares his own spiritual journey and the key influences that shaped him along the way. You can listen to the episode here or watch the video below.

In the second part, Dr. Naomi Fisher talks about the relationship between imagination and insight. Naomi Fisher is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. She earned her Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2016, and prior to that earned her M.S. in physics from UC Davis. Her research focuses on Kant and German Idealism and Romanticism, specifically the relationship between nature, freedom, and rationality in Kant and Schelling. In her talk, she discusses the disconnect between epiphanies and everyday thought; the function of imagination in philosophy; the philosophy of art according to Schelling and the other Romantics; manifesting the divine through the power of imagination; and how we can access transcendent reality. You can listen to her talk here or watch the video below.

The third speaker is Prof. Robert Gilbert, Professor of Biophysics in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Prof. Gilbert and his team work on molecular mechanisms underlying pathology in humans, specifically cancer and membrane pore formation and cell adhesion. Their work is funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust. Rob explains how science, for the scientist, is a source of enchantment. He talks about the mechanistic lens of science; how delight and play are crucial for scientists; the beauty of the form and fit; and the relevance of aesthetic delight for the scientific process. You can listen to his talk here or watch the video below.

Next week, I will share the remaining posts from our symposium. Unedited transcripts of the talks follow below.

Transcript

Brandon: Let me just say, hello and welcome to everyone. My name is Brandon Vaidyanathan. I'm a sociologist at the Catholic University of America. It's a great honor and privilege to be here, to try to put this event together, which I couldn't have done without Dan Cere. I want to thank you, Dan, for helping make this possible and to Garth for hosting us here, for hosting us in religious studies. Sincere thanks to the John Templeton Foundation for founding this and to Charles for suggesting this idea to bring some people together to think through some of the themes that emerge out of Cosmic Connections and, as you'll see, have a lot of resonance with an initiative that we're working on through this project at JTF on spiritual yearning among the non-religious.

Let me say a word about what this event is about. Charles's new book Cosmic Connections, as he describes it, is about the human need for cosmic connection, which means not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world but one shot through with joy, significance, and inspiration. Taylor's hypothesis is that the desire for this connection, maybe a human constant, but one that takes on different forms and different times and different places. Cosmic Connections explores poetry, particularly in romantic poetry, is one pathway to this cosmic connection. But what might be some other pathways that people are pursuing now? And that kind of pursuit is very much related to this initiative at the John Templeton Foundation on spiritual yearning among the non-religious. I'm going to bother Sarah Lane Ritchie perhaps to say a word about the initiative, and I can say a little bit about the resonance between that project and Cosmic Connections.

Sarah: My name is Sarah Lane Ritchie. I'm the Program Officer for Philosophy and Theology at the John Templeton Foundation. Just a quick word about me. Templeton has me on board basically to do all the weird stuff, like the non-traditional philosophy and theology stuff. My own background is in science and religion. I did my doctoral work and my postdoctoral work in Edinburgh in science and religion, looking at versions of expansive naturalism that would make room and space for all the things that we desire from religion and spiritual pathways.

So when I came to Templeton, I immediately began developing this new initiative that would take seriously the spiritual needs, pursuits, yearnings of the spiritual but not religious crowd, the religious nones, the dones, basically people who were serious about spiritual pursuits. Meaning, making transcendence but didn't find a home for themselves in traditional religions. Out of that, well, basically out of my own 3 AM existential crisis, the Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative was born. It's been going on for a couple of years now. Brandon is one of our grantees in this initiative. We call it SYRI, not Siri. SYRI. The Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative is just a big theme for us right now. We are aiming to do both descriptive, empirical, and normative work. So we're trying to bring the best of philosophy and theology, really just study as an ethics in a conversation with psychology, sociology, and anthropology and, again, take seriously the needs of people who have authentic spiritual desires and pursuits but don't really know what to do, don't really know what their resources are. So there's a lot of history involved. Increasingly, we're trying to help people reclaim what is out there already and to not feel like they have to rely on Saturday morning yoga. We're also trying to challenge sort of the dominant cultural narratives that the spiritual but not religious crowd is on serious — that they are overly relativistic or into if it feels good, do it. So that's what we're doing.

My own work at the moment is really just continuing this initiative, developing it in new directions. I have to say Charles Taylor's work has been infused in almost all of the projects that we see coming through our door. And so when Brandon told me that this event was happening, I basically invited myself. I was like, "Please, can I come to your party?" Because it would be lovely to be in a room full of people who are devoted to discussing this topic and around a figure that has been so influential in my own work but also the initiative as a whole. And it's the most frequently cited person in all of the grants that we're running in this program. So thanks very much for having me. I'm also, I'm around all day. If you would like to talk about your own work on projects, grant ideas, that's my whole job. So feel feel free to catch me.

Brandon: Yeah, I'm really delighted you could join us, Sarah. So there's really just so much resonance, I think, between this initiative and the new book. And the other pretext for our getting together was another event we're planning, another grant we're applying for, on beauty in trying to think about the role of beauty and drawing on particularly the kind of aesthetic realism that you develop in Cosmic Connections. This is Tara Isabella Burton and I are working on this new initiative to do some large-scale surveys, as well as field work in different sites like the Venice Carnival and Burning Man-like places and sacred music choirs and a variety of sites to understand what happens with collective aesthetic experience. How are we moved by experiences of beauty together? Again, I think there are a lot of themes from Cosmic Connections that are very germane to that project, which we'd love to discuss later on in the day.

Maybe very briefly we'll go around and say who everyone is just so we know who each other is over here, and then we'll jump right into a couple of poems by Marie Trotter, who's a doctoral candidate here in the English department and a poet. Then, Charles, we'll invite you to share a little bit about the motivations for Cosmic Connections and then some of the themes that resonate with you as we're thinking about the conversation today. Then we'll have Naomi Fisher, who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Chicago, Robert Gilbert, Professor of Biophysics at Oxford, and then myself in the first session. We'll take a break around 10:45. There's a minute of silence for Remembrance Day at 11. Maybe some loud cannonballs around that time as well. Then the second session, we'll have Marie open us again with another one or two, and Tara Isabella Burton. She's a novelist and theologian, but also now we're honored to have her as a research fellow and lecturer at Catholic University. David McPherson can't be here in person. Unfortunately, his flight was canceled. So if there's a way to Zoom him in, we could talk about it and see if he could join us that way. Will Barbieri, Professor of Ethics at Catholic U, and Galen Watts, who has a really compelling set of considerations for us to close out this session with this afternoon. And then we'll break for lunch. After lunch, we'll come back to discuss some of the key themes that have emerged during our conversation, as well as this future project on beauty and what we might do, you know, in ways we might collaborate together as we move that initiative forward. Any questions before we get started? Great. Well, welcome everyone. I'm delighted to have you here, and I think this will be a fantastic interdisciplinary conversation. So without further ado, then we'll have Marie come on up, and we can get started.

Marie: So I'll first say that when I read poetry in other contexts, it's customary to snap to show appreciation, but I will not ask for that here. I think it might change the mood. So silence is totally acceptable. This first poem is called Things Are Good. Things are good. She and I don't talk anymore. But yesterday, the baby lay on my lap and pretended to swim, waving wildly one little limb, and left behind a bubble on my knee. The trains are still running. They work more often than not. And though my wallet had run dry, the driver let me on. My body began its monthly song. There upon a thankful ringing of the sheets, things are good. If I ask him, he sings or whispers unexpectedly the only words I want to hear. I finished once again the mystery I read for the first time last year in fall. I'd forgotten about the flood that ended it all. Bodies washed up on the fen from the raging river that broke the bridges and dams and filled the streets. An act of God that nature functioned as it should. So again, I say, things are good.

This poem is called Creators. The silver coin moon is blurring at the edges as if God, after drawing, took the side of his fist and smudged it across the sky. His hands are stained. All colors: dark blue, and metal flecks, and thin orange bands of sunset, crossing veins of rose and mauve and gold. He has traced a line along the streets and alleyways. Their pavements exhale dust in the summer heat, traces of creation's footsteps rising skyward. He has filled the backyard fences with lilacs. He has lined every alley with pale purple blooms bursting forth to be seen, their sweet scent to be noted. Summer sighs and unfolds in the uncurling of his fingers, how easily he begets beauty. My hands, less eager to make the sights I wish to devour with my eyes, beat out a halting rhythm upon a screen. Words, words and more words. Imperfect Thanksgiving for everything that is warmth and light. Thank you.

Charles: I was sort of working on this kind of problem all my life. Because to start in the middle, yeah, more or less in the middle, one of the books I wrote was A Secular Age. And the thesis was that not the secular rising thesis that religion is disappearing but very much that religious life is mutating. And what I tried to point to as a new phenomenon was a phenomenon of religious secrets. There's people who had very strong intuition somewhere that there was more to it all than standard, naturalistic or whatever you want to describe it view of the world allowed to exist, but that this is filled with people who were seeking. This is really remarkable thing. So this is a kind of banality now in this room. This is something that everybody takes for granted. This is a certain way, their starting position. And to be a little bit more autobiographical, this really started, this intuition started — not writing the book called A Secular Age. But this intuition started really when I was finishing my first degree here and heading off for Oxford. It started because I myself was pitched into a path of searching. I was brought up here in Quebec in a Catholic Church. On my mother's side, I'm a member of a very large, this pretty typical family. We went to church every Sunday. And so I had kind of a firsthand experience but not really firsthand, because the family was very relaxed. My father was Protestant, and there were also some people married into the family who were other than the Quebecois Catholics and so on. So the rule, nobody said this to me but not looking back, the rule was we just accepted each other and work with each other. Sometimes loved each other and sometimes fought with each other, as big families do, right? But nevertheless, I got a sense of what was going on by listening to the sermons at Saint-Pierre-Apôtre which were far from the worst sermons I've preached in. I tell you; I've preached in Quebecois churches. But then I also looked on at the politics of the time, Duplessis, who was really using people's fear of foreign religions in order to stir up the vote for the Union Nationale, you know, everything terrible he was doing.

So one of the things that I started in adolescence, my political life, I actually joined the provincial liberal party (speaks in foreign language). Our version of that was defeating Duplessis. But then, luckily enough, I existed in the culture, one of the cultures, that was creating the (speaks in foreign language) that would be the basis of Vatican II. Or I was listening, we were overhearing that culture. That theology, (speaks in foreign language), this was created by Dominicans and Jesuits, mostly, of course, living in France. But the thing about these particular orders, the Dominicans and Jesuits of Quebec had very close relations. You didn't get anywhere unless you did graduate work in the Dominican, the Socialist, or in Paris, and so on. So we began to read these texts before the world at large. I heard about them. So I was an undergraduate here. When was it? It was in '49 to a few years after that. They completely gave me another kind of inspiration.

The second inspiration that I got was also at McGill at that time and actually in this building. The great Islamic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith was here. Actually, he ended up founding here the Islamic Institute in a couple of streets over. His course was on comparative religion, I guess, is the word. What I was taking on was history, but I thought this is an elective course. This sounds interesting. And it was, to me, absolutely riveting. He was not one for tremendous rhetorical flourishes or for tremendous poetic invocations, but he actually wore a gown, which nobody else did at McGill. He walked up and down like that. But he gave you a sense of what it was to be a Muslim, a Buddhist. He went through a whole lot of very famous, well-known spiritual paths. And it was riveting because without that high-flown — I don't know how he did it exactly. Without any sort of high-flown rhetoric, he gave you a sense of what it was to be a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and so on. I was absolutely, as I said, riveted by that. It was something that I really needed to know. I didn't know why I needed to know it. I don't quite know. I can't necessarily say even today why I needed to know it. But I guess the trace in my life of that course and of all the other considerations that I had to go through, I had to switch the whole basis of my Christian faith. Right? Well, I didn't really have a very powerful Christian faith before, but I got one thanks to (unfamiliar). The working out of this was a big agenda. But I've discovered that I needed both the (speaks in foreign language) on one hand and Wilfred Smith on the other because I discovered that one of the most deepening experiences in my life has been close contact and close discussion with people from these other spiritual paths. And so in a certain sense, there is going on in me kind of encounter with, in some situations, Buddhism, in other situations, certain kind of Sufi Islam. In other situations, certain kind of Bhakti, love of God, and so on, that the sense of being accompanied by these other voices is always there. Maybe people will consider this very weird. But my own Christian faith comes even more alive when these voices are with me as well, these other points of reference.

Just to give a sense of that, the other day I had this television program in which Desmond Tutu met with the Dalai Lama. Something extraordinary emerged from that because they were both joking about the differences of their religious paths, and they were both immensely enjoying this joke, joking. It sounded very, in a way, frivolous maybe, making the whole issue of frivolity. But the backdrop of this, as the undertone of this whole thing, was their calling and passionate commitment to certain way of we, Christians, would reach for the notion of agape. But the thing that you felt was, there's something that brought us together. Now, I'm talking that brought them together. But I'm talking the resonances in me, something which brought us together in what we would call agape but, for instance, a Buddhist might call "karuna," which are not very far apart, except that the spiritual sources that put people into this are diverse. Somehow, when all these voices are singing together in a certain sense, singing together in this song of love and affirmation of the human, our desire to create a just condition for people who are suffering very badly from some kind of persecution, and then you have people who are not at all in any particular religious tradition, who are part of the same sense where we feel encouraged by, are hearing all these voices. So I don't expect this to be the description of what's going on in me and how to come about to be necessarily comprehensible to other people. Well, I just sense very much in this room, it probably is very comprehensible. So it's a peculiar position in which there's one dimension of the faith, my faith, which is sacramental and that's the path. But the fact that it can be and is accompanied by knowing other people, exchanging with other people who are on another kind of almost parallel path, and that the sense of mutual enrichment is created from this, is a very important part of my spiritual life.

Then, of course, there are doubts. There is a sense of possible loss. And I think the way for me, various forms of people call it mysticism. In Christianity, I'm thinking of John of the Cross, that that is also another voice playing from the past, from a quite different culture but very much the same basic symbols. And so I want to throw one more thing into the mix. There is this struggle with doubt, the struggle with potential loss of this very powerful. You know, Saint John called the Nautis Oscura, the dark night. The experience contains a number of dark nights in a way. I have to admit. There's a darkness that I'm always struggling with. So very, very complicated. It was incomprehensible to the pere curé of my childhood that one could have such a religious life. But that's why I feel immense distance from the Bon Curé. Some of them were really good, you know. Their hearts were overflowing with real love for their parishioners. I mean, there's the picture of the paradigm Bon Curé telling his flock that they had to have fewer children or whatever it was, all the misogynistic elements of that. All of that is not simple. My point is just, I can't give you two pithy sentences with this secular biography starting off as a kid. But all of that is working at the same time. Because it's another dimension of, since I have the spiritual, which is in relation to the cosmos, right? Somehow, it has emerged, you might almost say, from the cosmos as well as from various religious revelations over time, has emerged certain very powerful insights which have transformed us in history.

Of course, the thing in the 20th century, we came to be, as a reference point of this, was ethical development looking from and to the Axial period. Jaspers call it the Axial period. Where you have something which, I think, very much steps forward, which are very similar to each other. We might have the usual model in our minds of civilizational history. People start off primitive, and then they develop further. And the fact that these appeared in four centers, maybe five if you want to include Persia, is obviously to be explained. People think by diffusion is somebody got the idea so that we have our great figures. We have Christ, and we have Confucius, and we have Buddha and so on. And people ran with the message. Well, yeah, they did actually run with the message. But the thing that Jaspers picked up on, it couldn't have spread just by people running with the message. There's too much simultaneity, contemporaneity, between these breakthroughs. And so something else is working in human history. And I don't know if you can identify it. There are two different theories from a Christian point of view: Irenaeus is the idea of giving a certain pedagogy to human beings. But the idea that people would normally have of this is, well, yes, Christian message and then it spread out; or from a Chinese point of view, someone might say, "Well, Confucian." We just had all these ideas and then they spread out, and they did. And then Buddha, the idea spread. And it did. But that doesn't account. As what Jaspers said, that doesn't account for the way in which the simultaneity of the step forward. We could go into what's special about the axial age, I think we all in a sense of it. The way in which it's working is not simply that. For some reason, in some center, some genius or whatever got these visions, these ideas, and then other people ran with the wall as it were and carried it elsewhere. Yeah, that certainly happened. But something bigger and different happened. Somehow, these basic inspirations and steps forward, they happen beyond that. I mean, it happened in several places at once.

There's actually a chapter in the last book I call the history of ethical growth in which I followed this out. The very strange way in which certain insights begin to work and they remain for a long time carried out by minorities, by precisely big rules or very dedicated, saint-like figures or by followers of Buddha and so on, and they certainly do spread that way. But there's also a deeper push forward which takes the form of suddenly conceiving the demands of these spiritualities together as becoming suddenly very much more demanding so that, out of the axial period, you get in many cases a certain distaste for certain class differences in slavery. But it becomes tolerated by ordinary people or non-violence, yes, for certain people. In Christendom, it meant that monks and clergy shouldn't take up arms and so on, though they were famous cases of mace-wielding bishops and so on. But it was considered to be strange. But on the other hand, people said, "Well, you can't ask everybody to give up. I mean, how will the economy run? You know, you got to be practical." Then suddenly, in the 18th century, we get this flip in which it becomes very quickly in a way, certainly in Western civilization in this particular case, it becomes very quickly something that unconscionable. Never practiced this. The same thing goes — not the same thing exactly but kind of similar shifts when it comes to violence. Once again, in Christendom and in many civilizations, really dedicated spiritual figures weren't supposed to engage in war paraphernalia. But on the other hand, how do you run the world without it? And then along comes a figure called Gandhi. This extraordinary spread, Gandhi to Martin Luther King, to many other figures, so that it's a remarkable thing is how in the 20th century we've had a series of overturning of very terrible regimes, very much overturning without any violence. It's a remarkable fact that all those Bolshevik regimes in Eastern Europe, which were very, very violent and held their population under, that with the exception of the Romanian dictator, they all were overturned without spitting blood. That's quite a lot, not very far. We have a long way to go. And perhaps you could even argue that this kind of steps forward produce even worse denials, which are even more — because the 20th century, I can't say we're all better. I mean, the 20th century is just really horrifying, spilling of blood. But there are these moves forward. And we're now in an epoch. Now our democracies are all threatened by reaction against the attempt to produce more just and universally concerned societies. And you get everywhere. We just had one of these reactions very close by. So we heard the blast from here. But nevertheless, a marker is put down. New demands are being made and so on.

I think that there are these relations to our whole planet, to the spiritual lives that are alive in our planet. And what I wanted to show in the book was that, in the particular department of our sense of connection to our larger cosmos, to our larger home, actually, one of these new moves, this new move, the move of the cosmic connection of the authors I tried to cite in the 19th and 20th century, these moves are attempts to redo or to compensate for a loss of other kinds of connection that existed before, like the visions of the great chain of being of the cosmic order so that there is this very strange kind of universal, which you can perhaps show in this domain of our relation to the cosmos. But I'm running this in some ways parallel to the ethical development, from the actual period, and in some ways show, and I wanted to put on the whole thing. First of all, because there's a lot of very beautiful poetry and also other works of art, you know, that I want to put that on agenda. But you also have this kind of question. What is it about our relation to the cosmos? Is it just how we feel now, and they have another feeling then and so on? Or is it something more substantial that draws together indigenous spiritualities at one end of history way back and these various forms that I'm trying to uncover in the 19th and 20th century? This is a huge question mark, all these huge question marks. What is it? But my very strong intuition is that there is something constant here, constant but changing along with the cultural surroundings in which these intuitions occur. There are many more questions here than there are answers. So we're making a parallel here between the kind of ethical development across the ages and the implicit issue of what is the draw on us of a sense of cosmic connection, again, across the ages and across different cultures in very different forms. And we're a little bit stumped. I don't know where to go to explain this or to give it. But it's an important question that we should think of, that we should know.

Naomi Fisher

Naomi: Well, I am so honored to be here and very happy to be a part of this conversation. Thank you so much to Brandon for organizing this, and for Charles, of course, for bringing us all together. So in my abstract, which I think at least some of you had in advance, I described two related problems. The first is the potential disconnect or compartmentalization between epiphanies on the one hand and then discursive, descriptive thought on the other. So I worry that perhaps, you know, we go to the mountains and have this great experience, but then that has very little relevance for what we do in our day-to-day lives or in our sort of language or systems of thought. The second was the potentially problematic solitary nature of the epiphanic so that we maybe paradigmatically experience these things alone. Although sort of some conversations I've had since being here, maybe I think like, "Oh, maybe there are ways of conceiving of this differently." So I'm interested to talk about that. But in these comments, I'll actually focus primarily on the first thing and the way that the Romantics and Schelling, in particular, think of the imagination as providing a kind of mediation. Because I think that's where maybe these German idealists and Romantics have something interesting to say to us about how the imagination does some mediating work between this sort of experience, insight into some absolute on the one hand and then systems of thought on the other.

So I work on Schelling primarily, also on Kant. But Schelling, he's maybe the only figure who is uncontroversially both an idealist and a romantic. So I believe his philosophical works are an excellent resource for understanding the philosophical contours of Romanticism. In his identity philosophy period—so that's like in the years right after Jena, or he's still at Jena but right after the sort of heyday of Jena—in the years 1800 to about 1804, 1806, he becomes really interested in the function of the imagination and art in giving intuitive access to the absolute, specifically to its unity. Neoplatonic scholars would call, yes, the one features heavily here. So I put some texts on your handout, and these are typical for Shelling at this time. Schelling has a division similar to that, that I read also in Cosmic Connections, between sort of systematic scientific thought on the one hand and then, on the other hand, what Schelling calls variously: absolute cognition, exhibition, reason, intellectual intuition. And he's keen to demonstrate the mutual relevance of these two modes of thought.

Crucial to Schelling's view of the connection between these modes of thought is the imagination. We imaginatively represent the particular object, whether it's an object in nature or a work of art, as an expression of the absolute. And in doing so, the features of that object which are relevant to its integrity and unity come to the fore. Schelling draws an analogy with geometrical proof to highlight the connection between intuition on the one hand and discursivity on the other. In a geometrical proof, a single triangle constructed by the geometer can exhibit the essence of space or triangularity more particularly in a geometrical demonstration. He says, and this is one of the quotes on your handout, "The triangle that the geometer constructs is the absolute, the simply real one." So just as the geometer with the imperfect and particular triangle is exhibiting the essence of triangularity, so too any finite thing seen in the right way exhibits the absolute. So the geometer knows which of the features of the triangle are relevant to the demonstration and which are not. To attend in the right way to the triangle is something we do, I think, naturally. But it's sort of remarkable, I guess, when you sort of think why. Why is like this particular angle not relevant, but the way that I can draw a curve over here with a compass is relevant? And so being able to attend to those features which exhibit the very nature of space, as opposed to sort of the mere particularity of a triangle, seems like something we're doing maybe with the imagination. And so something similar enables the connection, I think, between this epiphanic insight and other kinds of discursivity. So we imaginatively see the things around us in terms of their relation to the absolute, their exhibition of the absolute, and the truth about their essence is made manifest from which we can then draw discursively articulated conclusions.

Schelling talks a lot about genius, which is a word with a lot of baggage. I think he's thinking primarily of Goethe—specifically Goethe the poet, of course, but also Goethe the scientist, the botanist—where Goethe is able to sort of recognize the same absolute form and the structures of plants and sort of the generation of leaves. He also does work on the skeletal structure of human beings and animals and the similarities there. So this notion that we can sort of see the integral unity of the particular thing and also recognize the same form in its mutual instances, or the same essence perhaps in its mutual instances, Schelling attributes that to this poetic insight. Works of art are both created and seen aright through the activity of the imagination. In Schelling's lectures on the philosophy of art, he toys with the word "einbildung" or imagination. And I have some notes there on your handout about that particular wordplay, which is really fun. Our imagination in forming unities participates in the power of divine creation, and thereby is a manifestation of the divine. Not only do we manifest the divine in such creation, but the works of art that are created are themselves images of the absolute. And so he states that the excellent German word "Einbildungskraft" (power of the imagination) actually means the power of integration. "Ineinsbildung" means like forming into one. I translated integration. But you can see there, obviously, “einbildung” is part of that word in a way. The "einbildung" can mean like informing. Yeah, there's various ways he toys with this. Obviously, prominent in that word is also "bild," which means image. So just like an imagination, I suppose.

He says, "Upon this power is based all creation. The true construction of art is the exhibition of its forms as the forms of things, as they are in themselves or in the absolute." And the "or" there I think is important. It doesn't mean like either this or that. I think it means, it's just like glossing what it means to be in themselves. That is what they are in the absolute. So what they are in themselves is what they are in the absolute. Just as the geometer sees the triangle more truly when she sees it as sort of in its absoluteness as the essence of triangularity, so too we see the artwork or any created thing more truly when we see its essence as absolute, or as an image, or exhibition of the absolute. To create something is to create it as its own integral unity as an individual, and this unity is an image of the unity and integrity of the absolute. So as I say on your handout, there's this vertical dimension where creation is a bringing-together of disparate elements into an integral unity. So you're like creating something new with its own integrity. Importantly, for Schelling, he has this robust notion of being. So you can't just say that there's an object constructed out of these, this paper and this pen. To be is to have a kind of integral unity. And so anything that is truly is sort of an image of the unity of the absolute.

We can compare Schelling's theorizing here to the work of the Romantics. So I have Novalis' poem there on your handout, the Marian lead. Let me just read it. "I see you in a thousand images, Maria, beautifully expressed. Yet none of them can depict you as my soul perceives you. I only know that the world's turmoil, since then like a dream, fades away, and an indescribably sweet heaven remains eternally in my heart." It's obviously more pretty in the German, but that's my sort of wooden translation. But the thousand images are variously expressive of the one truth which is, here, Maria. Maria is mirrored and beautifully expressed in a plurality of images. This is consistent with Schelling's own conception of the imagination as a way of seeing the world more truly than can be captured through discursive description. The insight into these expressions seems to be enabled by the soul's immediate—that is unmediated—perception and love of Maria. So the poet here illuminates an imaginative but true way of seeing things as expressions of something beyond articulation.

Since Schelling's time, I think that the epiphanic is increasingly not seen as insight into the truth of things. Science maybe gives the objective truth, and epiphanies are mere subjective feelings. Pleasant but perhaps not truth apt or relevant to any cohesive picture of the world. Perhaps to look to poetry for insight into how to alter our concept seems almost ridiculous to a contemporary frame of mind. Yet I would contend that there are ways of recovering an openness to transcendence or modifying even our scientific modes of thought to allow for transcendence. That is if we give up the notion of a comprehensive or fully accurate system of metaphysics or science, embracing instead systems of knowledge that point beyond themselves the thought that an imaginative way of seeing things does not seem naive.

The artistic or epiphanic needs to be interpreted within our systems of discursive thought as a more reliable, full account of things than any science or mere description could provide. I'm not sure about this, so let me venture that this does not necessarily involve some shared, articulated presuppositions, even very thin ones—for instance, a belief in God, supernatural realities goodness, teleology, transcendence—but rather a sort of general indication of the limits of description in such a way that these spiritual transcendent realities, or maybe underlying realities, or realities shot through the cosmos are accessed extra systematically. So I suggest that these realities are accessed and shared not through a common, universally communicable description but rather through communal practices, living in such a way or engaging in such activities that acknowledge a reality beyond our modes of description.

Rob mentioned yesterday, he mentioned choirs. And I think that might be sort of way of thinking about this as we are deeply attentive to the contribution of the other person as we're engaging in this creative act. The gain of Romantics, we're also eager to develop a universal poetry, a new mythology that would draw together the culture into a cosmopolitan whole. I believe that Schelling's own work is not meant to be a sort of constricting, limiting metaphysical system but rather a way of thinking about systematicity more generally, that maintains its openness to transcendence and can take a variety of forms. This is in part evinced by his development of multiple philosophical systems and methods, which are not themselves meant to be exclusive or competing but rather different ways of imaging and articulating the conceptually inexhaustible world in which we live.

Rob Gilbert

Rob: So thank you to Brandon very much for inviting me. It's lovely to be here. It's an honor to be here. As I'm a biologist, I'm going to talk a little bit about ways in which I believe enchantment has an important role in science. I think it's important just to ground the lead I'm taking from Cosmic Connections. So as you remember, in Cosmic Connections, there's a clear and focused definition of enchantment, disenchantment around — we're going to talk about disenchantment around demagification, for example, and the impact that has on thinking about or how it might relate to thinking about a mechanistic understanding of the world, the way the world operates, which is how a lot of science or all science essentially is carried on. And so a key starting point for me is that clear definition. So as Charles Taylor says, in focusing on what we mean by disenchantment for the purposes of Cosmic Connections and for the argument that follows, he says, "The post-Galilean science of nature sidelines form in this sense—the sense of seeing some kind of purpose, shape, enchantment in things—sidelines this as irrelevant and looks for regularities for efficient causal relations in the world of matter." That is, of course, how science operates. It's looking for regularities. In fact, that's a great word. Regularities: that is what scientists are constantly looking for. That's what experiments are designed to try and show us. A second quotation here, which is relevant, is later Charles Taylor says, "The felt link to an external object must be the result of its causal action on my senses or receptors. There is no place for any other kind of relation involving a more intimate connection." That's the thing I'm going to talk about and contest, I guess. But actually, there is a more intimate connection going on when scientists do the work that they do. I am going to try and say that there is a more intimate connection. And of course, there's going to be some very interesting opportunities for discussion. Indeed, I would perhaps want to say moments of epiphany the scientist has in perceiving what they perceive.

Now, in terms of enchantment in science, I think there are various words I might use as synonyms there. I think the scientist is perceiving or recognizing purpose sometimes is one of the other words you could use for enchantment of scientist sees or the sort of enchanted way of viewing things that they make use of. Purpose, meaning, form, voice actually. So it's as if the world is speaking to you. And as my abstract says, a friend of mine has pointed out that, actually, what helped me to see that when we see things as beautiful, they are speaking to us. And so there's a sense in which there's a voice the scientist perceives. It invites playful responses. I'm going to say a little bit about play in science and playful engagement. And it is a beauty as I say that addresses us, I think, when the scientist sees what you could call enchanting aspects of the world or, more importantly, where the enchantment the scientist feels they find to be a route to understanding the way things actually are, which is a very surprising thing. But I want to suggest it really is how things are.

Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk through some of the examples now and make a set of key points that were also in my abstract that was circulated. So the first thing is to recognize the sense in which molecular biology is an example of a very powerful mechanistic paradigm for understanding the way the world is, and the way in which molecular biology has been extraordinarily impactful in doing this. And so every year, there's a kind of annual jamboree of the Nobel Prizes. It is not uncommon at all for molecular biology to be strongly recognized in that as it was this year in the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which went to the people using artificial intelligence approaches to understand protein folding, among other things. For example, molecular biology is very powerful. David Baker's Nobel Prize is part of that group of people. His was for being able to mechanically design proteins because of what we understood about how proteins have been adapted, how they have evolved. So we have a very strong mechanistic paradigm that we see played out in molecular biology.

On my handout, I just wanted to point to an example I give in my abstract, is a series of crystal structures which were epochal in the middle of the 20th century. Myoglobin, hemoglobin, Perutz and Kendrew, Doroty Hodgkin's structure in vitamin B12. But the structure of chymotrypsin was the first enzyme. That at 1A is a picture of the electron density map. And as perhaps some of you will know, originally, electron density maps had to be drawn on perspex sheets and then stacked up. You would then get a sense of the shape of the molecule inside. This is from x-ray diffraction. It's possible then having done that to then build an atomic model. You can see this tracing of the atomic model there from that vintage image there of chymotrypsin's electron density with the atoms and the bonds between them drawn on. So you can see there's a very simple depiction of a chemical basis for understanding the working of this enzyme. The key thing I think just to take home from this is that, really, the paradigm has not shifted from the 1950s onwards in some fundamental sense. It's just got more and more complicated, okay? So there's a more and more sophisticated way in which exactly this way of understanding things is playing out.

So at 1B, you've got a series of images. The thing in the background, the sort of gray scale, is actually an image of a mitochondrion, which is the energy-generating organelles inside every nucleic cell, every nucleated cell. The image below is the 3D-rendered thing with the yellow tubes. That's actually a 3D representation. It's not a representation just. It's actually a 3D structure of the electron density from inside that mitochondrion. The yellow things are ATP synthases which are generating ATP. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is the universal energy currency in the cell. The large thing in the middle at the top right is a close-up of a dimer. So two of these ATP synthases come together, and they shape the membranes. You don't need to know any of this. All you need to take from it is this key point that what we're doing is simply iterating from this basic insight that you can represent molecules atomistically and then, from that, get a kind of mechanistic understanding of how they operate. And it's just getting more and more complicated as we use electron microscopy in more and more sophisticated ways, shorter time scales, fancy x-ray diffraction techniques and so on. So we get now these depictions we can draw, which can now give us structures of unique cells. Actually, we can get a structure of the inside of a cell where all its different protein complexes are. And as I say, this is just one example. See inside, the energy-generating mitochondrion of the cell and see how that is structured. Bottom left at 1C, this is another complex from inside the mitochondrion is the thing. It's a complex of complexes. Four different complexes come together, which actually are the generators of a proton gradient, a pH gradient, across the inner mitochondrial membrane that helps the ATP synthases to generate ATP. I'm not going to carry on in this mode, but I just want to get the point across about how sophisticated the mechanical approach is. Right? That's the key thing I want to get across. So it's become very, very powerful.

Now, obviously, this approach is not just interesting. Biochemists do what they do because they are delighted. They are excited by what they study. It is not just interesting. It's also useful, right? That's the next thing to say. So 2, the key thing here is, obviously, what we're talking about here is a four-dimensional chemistry. So I emphasized that with 1A, we can see the chemistry of the chymotrypsin. We're doing it in four dimensions now. We're doing it for complex proteins, and we're doing it in four dimensions. We see them play out in time. Now, the fruitfulness of this, the power of this is seen in the ways in which that then helps us to get new insights that help us change the world. I haven't shown this example here, but a key example I often reach for are key forms of drug discovery, drug design, based on structural insights. You design a drug. You feed it to people. It stops them dying. So there is nothing kind of subjective about that, right? If you were fed Gleevec or imatinib—it's a drug widely used against forms of leukemia—if you're fed that and it stops you dying, that's a very real change that's been brought about for you because of the insights the scientists have. So we're dealing with something quite pretty realist here, our insights. They're not just points of view, okay? These mechanical insights seem to be very powerful.

2A is actually an image. I thought this would be of more contemporary relevance, perhaps, and also because of the depiction of 2C of it in a kind of using an artistic reference point. But at 2A, that's actually the blue and red thing. It's actually the kind of action part of an antibody from a convalescent patient suffering from COVID-19. The purple bit is actually the protein on COVID-19 that binds to our cells. And so this is looking at our human antibody bound to the virus. That helps you understand how human antibodies might stop the virus working. 2B is to just make this point that it's three or four-dimensional chemistry. So that inside looks kind of shapely the purple thing and the red and the blue thing joined together. But if you're looking close, it isn't just obviously a picture at the level I've shown in 2A. It's also a picture that gives you the chemical inside shown at 2B. The point is you can do this many, many times. This is a figure from one of my colleagues, David Stewart and his group. What he's done and others is to look at where all lots of antibodies bind on the surface of the receptor-binding domain of COVID-19 spike protein, which is the protein that's used in the vaccines. And he's seen, as you see, that if you characterize the receptor-binding domain as being a bit like David's torso, some of the antibodies go in at the neck. Some of them go in at the right shoulder. In fact, it's those at the right shoulder which turned out to be particularly powerful because it's an unusual site. Again, we're going to leave all this in one moment. But I just want to get that point across, the mechanistic aspect, the mechanistic lens is extremely powerful, before I go on to think about where that mechanistic perspective is coming from and actually how people are getting it, which is of the real interest here. But I needed to get that established, okay?

So now the final thing to say is that, before we move away from looking just at the science, is to say that, clearly, we're using analogies with respect to engineering potentially here, in bioscience. People often talk about levers and springs and hinges, right? They talk about they mutate the hinges to stop them working and so on. There's a whole world of talking about biological molecules in terms of middle-sized objects, right? Again, that might not work, but it does work rather well. It's just another way of emphasizing the power of the mechanistic as a lens, right? This is just an example of three. It's just myosin. The thing that you can actually see is a molecule at B and C at 3 is myosin, which is the thing which allows our muscles to move. And as you can see, it's got two different states: pre-stroke and post-stroke. That's what is enabling my arm to move now, of course. In here were little myosin molecules doing this and enabling my myosin and my striated muscle in my arm to work against the active filaments in my arm to enable me to do this. So it works as a phenomenon. It worked as a descriptor, okay? It's powerful. But there's also something slightly kind of odd about that. Because it's quite poetic, isn't it, in itself? Right? There's something very analogical there. Because we're talking about something which is actually rather, what is very biological. It's very dynamic, right? Proteins are not static things. The pictures look static. They're not static. They're very dynamic. There's huge amounts of going on in them, and yet we can actually analogize them as being a bit like bits of clocks or just levers in other kinds of mechanical devices. That's quite interesting. There's something analogical there. There's something potentially a little bit poetic there already, which I think is quite interesting potentially.

But let's talk about more kind of fundamental ways in which delight, enchantment you might say, plays a key role in science. So play. 4, we have Christopher Robin playing Poohsticks. It's going to be a specific reference to Poohsticks in a moment. But scientists are engaged in a playful process when they interact with the world. From earliest days as children, we classify things. And I think that is part of our growth into scientists — grouping blocks which are the same size or the same color, or lining things up which we start to do as children. It's something that, really, we're just doing more and more of as we become adults and trained as scientists. We fit objects to one another. We kind of make things fit together, and we'll come back to ideas about fit in a minute. We infer a purpose if we play with toys, and we sort of imagine the toys doing this or the toys talking to me. There's a sort

of inference of purpose there which I think the scientist is in some way still doing not so consciously, but I think there's an element there of how we're training ourselves to think in ways which will be useful. Hypothesis formation is a kind of form of fantasy, right? It's sort of thinking about how might things be, how do these things look together. Toys are a really important way in which scientists do their work. Experiments use equipment. Scientists' attitude to their equipment is rather like the attitude of children to toys, okay? In a sense, also, they squabble over them, right? If somebody has a bigger toy, I want that big toy. Right? We've got the biggest toy. This toy is very expensive. You can only use it if you give me a lot of money. So there's a lot there around playfulness, which the scientist really is engaged in. That is a lot of what's going on, is this playfulness. That's one set of ways. And the reason why I said I refer to Poohsticks again is that, and in fact one of the techniques I have used a lot. In fact, there's a school of techniques which involve looking basically at how molecules move through fluids or move through a vacuum. But it's useful to see how fast molecules move under a particular force because it helps you to understand aspects of their mass and their shape. And in the end, isn't Poohsticks just seeing how objects move in a medium under a particular force? You stick the stick in the stream, and it rolls. Then if the stick is large or small, that will affect how it flows. And so if it hits a rock, that will affect how it flows. So we use equipment which, in some ways, is interacting with small molecules and proteins, nucleic acids, whatever, in ways which are analogous to the way of a child sticking a stick into a river.

Now, let's just move further towards talking more specifically about beauty. Essentially, what I'm saying is that when we grapple with the world, the reason why we're doing that as scientist is because we are enchanted by it. Because we perceive something that delights us. I think we are like a child at play telling stories about the world when we're a scientist. Talking to scientists, we can't stop talking about beauty. So many of my colleagues are constantly saying, "Oh, it's so beautiful. It's such beautiful result. This is a lovely set of data and so on." Then we represent our data in ways which are aesthetically pleasing. Some of you may have found or may find these images bewildering. But sometimes people will find the kind of images scientists produce beautifully in some sense in themselves even if they don't quite know what they're showing. The key thing I wanted to point out here is that when I'm using the word "beautiful" as a scientist, I am using it in an everyday kind of way. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not an expert in ethics, but I know what beautiful means. Beautiful means I'm delighted by something. I want to see more of it. I'm glad I've seen it. I value it for itself. And so my rose petal here — just to point this out and then maybe an opportunity for me to tell that I go talk quite a lot to tell about the Scottish author A.L. Kennedy later about a rose petal. But I'll leave that on one side. The point is that the rose petal elicits a certain response from us. And I don't think that the response of a scientist to seeing data is fundamentally different. It is different in terms of how they've been trained, the level at which they're seeing the beauty, maybe the meaning it has for them. But in some sense, the response has a relationship to the way I respond to an ordinary, beautiful object. I'm glad it's there. I value it for itself. That's the key thing. I value it for itself.

I'm now going to talk very quickly about just specific forms of beauty just because they categorize the kinds of beauty scientists see. Form and fit is one way in which scientists perceive beauty. 6A is examples of form and fit. The molecule EDTA, that's actually one of the reasons I became a scientist. It's because I was excited by this as a kid at school. I thought the way this molecule fitted around metal ions was really lovely. I don't know why, but I did. And so that led me to become a biochemist. Then the second thing is from my own work. You can see I hope how the purple thing on the right-hand side at 6A, which is RNA, fits to the the blue and the green and the yellow and the cyan which is a protein complex that's just binding to this piece of RNA. That piece of RNA is actually a very important piece of RNA in suppressing cancer. The protein that's bound to it, the other colors, the protein that's bound to it is trying to stop it doing that. But you can see how there's form and there's fit. These things fit each other. That, to me, as a scientist is aesthetically pleasing. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to be a scientist, maybe want to be a scientist, and keeps me at it. 6B is obviously a DNA. 6B on the left is the cartoon that Watson and Crick published in 1953. DNA on the right is obviously a molecular structure. Clearly, Watson and Crick were correct in what they hypothesized. But the way they write the paper is idealistic. They say, "How would it be as we put these data together?" This kind of fits, right? It's written not in a kind of very systematic, scientific way. It's actually written taking bits of data from various sources and coming up with an idea that is beautiful and makes sense and is extremely powerful, as you all know, and as they said themselves with full modesty. But again, it's form and fit, okay? Here, there's a way in which there's logic and the simplicity here that the scientists are seeing.

I also want to highlight that the scientist values things as beautiful because there's something inherently unique about them. Now, that applies to the rose petal as well. The rose petal is beautiful because it's unique. It's a rose petal I found on the ground and I took home, right? But also, at 6C, that's a picture of the inside of a cell done using electron microscopy. Obviously, it's been false colored. It's a 3D representation of the inside of a cell. It's extremely packed. It's very information dense. But it's unique, right? No cell looks like any other cell. So one of the forms of beauty scientists see is the uniqueness, the fact you can understand that cell and that cell is in that state. There's an aspect there, I think, of the aesthetic delight there. There's also an element in which symmetry is often talked about by people in science and also people imagining what beauty for scientists might mean. Clearly, symmetry is important. Clearly symmetry is an important part. It's an ideal way of understanding things. My examples here are Buckminsterfullerene (C60) spherical carbon, which follows the same. It's icosahedral symmetry. So same symmetry as a football. Bluetongue virus is another example of the same symmetry. But the bluetongue virus is 100 million atomic mass units, 100 million daltons. The buckminsterfullerene is 720. So that's about 140,000 times difference in mass. The same symmetry basically applies. Scientists like this, right? These people who studied this, they think this is lovely, and it helps them understand the way things are. But it's not only about symmetry. That's why I've only put it in as a minor element here. The HIV, you can see the symmetry is not the same. The symmetry is broken. But actually, underlying symmetry is the same. It also consists of a load of pentagonal and hexagonal structures come together just like a football, just like C60, just like Bluetongue virus. But they've been distorted in the way they're arranged, so the symmetry is somehow broken. That allows HIV to be as it is.

I'm sorry. I'll be finished in just a minute. Now, so the point is then that there's a sense in which we, scientists, have a lot of different ways in which they perceive beauty in the world. In this, they can be awestruck by what they see, or they can be overwhelmed. Or maybe 6C looks a bit overwhelming. In a way, it does to me. But then also, scientists may find a way to make sense of what they're studying by getting into the detail and really understanding it, yes, in a mechanical way. There's also I think a kind of enchantment in the fundamental belief that there's purpose to be found in the molecular structure, that there's a reason why it is the way it is and the way in which it operates. It's interesting, Charles, at the end of Cosmic Connections, you make the very interesting point about ethics. That even if we haven't got better, people want to be seen to be obeying ethics. Similarly, scientists want to be seen to be obeying the rules even if they're not, even if they're a bit sly. And if they do try and kill each other's grants, they actually want to be seen as ethical. So it's an interesting point. So we have a kind of belief in what we're doing as something which is of ethical value, that it has purpose, and we're seeing purpose in what we study.

Finally, in terms of my examples, before I wrap up, in terms of representation of science—this is thinking more of in terms of the public domain—7 is not a scientific result. It's a bit of artistic representation of the inside of a cell by Dave Goodsell from Harvard. He's done many of these. The point is, we can then represent things to the world which give us an insight into the complexity of what we're studying, and those things in themselves have some kind of aesthetic value. Deep space images, such as that on the right at 7, from the Hubble telescope, they clearly elicit from the general public a profound response, something which is seen as beautiful. Also awe inspiring. Possibly, terrifying. But to bring it together, in all, I think that enchantment—which I characterized at the beginning as having various aspects in science—I think is essential to scientific work from the beginning to the end because it reflects interest in what we study. If we're not willing to be enchanted, moved by what we study, then I don't think we'll understand it. The alternative is to be bored by something. If you just look at something and you're bored by it, you just sort of see the surface of it. When we are enchanted by things, whether it is something scientific or the natural environment, we forget about ourselves. We have a kind of ecstatic experience. And I think that experience of forgetting ourselves and immersing ourselves in what we study is an important aspect of how the scientist achieves what they achieve. As I say, it's as if we're addressed by what we study.

I would also want to say, and this again is a reference back to Cosmic Connections, you might almost suggest that the world has kind of changed out there by the scientific enchantment that scientists have, by the perception and the knowledge we gain in here, as it were, or between ourselves. It kind of changes the world. It is as if it creates an interspace, a new way of understanding things that scientist maybe can particularly grasp. But through representation for public benefit, maybe it can be grasped more widely. And this does come back to what Naomi was saying. I think there's a sense in which when you see the meaning of things, it's as if suddenly you perceive something that you couldn't see before. So, Naomi, you were talking about the ways in which suddenly, yes, it's an epiphanic moment, in which it's almost as if when you look at data and you can't quite see the pattern. There's nothing there to see. And suddenly, there is something to see. There's a real change, a real switch. I'm saying that may actually, it's a real change in reality. That you know that. Maybe you're the first person ever to know that. That changes reality, right? But it is coming from a resonance that you have with what you're studying. So in speaking of enchantment in scientists, I am using enchantment as a synonym for love. If we are enchanted by things, we value things, and we think they're beautiful, we delight in them, I think we love them because we want them to be what they are, and we want to understand them how they are. Of course, this comes back to the old thing of loving what you study and studying what you love. That's how you gain knowledge. As I say, this particular response is illicit.

I want to end by just saying that Cosmic Connections ends with the thought that the loss of one mode of connection on one way of being connected, one way of experiencing enchantment, the loss of that creates space for another which suggests the constant human desire for such enchantment. I suggest that science may be one of those ways in which human beings have come to seek enchantment in a disenchanted world, and maybe that science is a vehicle for realizing that. I'm actually going to end with a quotation from David Bentley Hart, who I've found a very helpful companion, I suppose, in reading what he's written as I've thought my own thoughts. In his book published this year All Things Are Full of Gods, which is a dialogue—not a dialogue. It's a four-way conversation anyway, so it can't be a dialogue or a tetralogue. Anyway, one of the characters—I suspect it's Hermes. I can't quite remember—is talking about the persistence of the desire to find enchantment, which is what I'm talking about as science as a reflection of that. This character says in All Things Are Full of God, "Their..." Their being us. Remember, these are gods talking. These are four gods: Eros, Hermes, Havestian, and Psyche. The four gods and Hermes probably, I think, is saying, their, us humans, "Their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn’t speak. This is why it is that even now, in their disenchanted age, they delight in fables about talking animals, and in stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells them that there’s a subjective depth in all things that knows them as they would wish to be known."