And we look in the wrong places for answers. Politicians, for instance, seeking to tell our thoughts back to us and address the broadest possible range of people, speak so widely and with such generalities as to mean almost nothing. They too speak as though there are no issues of significance left to discuss, and apply themselves to matters of organisation. Some aspects of that organisation, such as education, are important. But few politicians raise any deep vision of what a meaning-filled life is or even might be. And perhaps they should not. Yet although the wisdom of our time suggests that education, science and the sheer accessibility of information must surely knock any deeper urges out of us, these questions and the need to answer them have not been knocked out of us, however much we pretend otherwise.

The way in which science, the dominant voice of our time speaks to us and of us is itself revealing. At the opening of his 1986 work The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins wrote: ‘This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it.’ Right there is the gulf that now exists between the accepted secular-atheist world view of our culture and the reality of how people live and experience their lives. Because although Dawkins may feel that our mystery has been solved – and although science has indeed solved part of it – most of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. On the contrary we still experience ourselves, as our ancestors did, as torn and contradictory beings, vulnerable to aspects of ourselves and our world that we cannot understand.

In the same way, while no intelligent person could reject what we now know to be our kinship with the animal kingdom, few people rejoice in being referred to as mere animals. The late atheist writer Christopher Hitchens often used to describe himself in front of audiences as a ‘mammalian’. Yet while it may shock and even stimulate us to recall our origins and the materials we are made from, we also know that we are more than animals and that to live merely as animals would be to degrade this thing we are. Whether we are right or wrong in this, it is something we intuit. In the same way that we know that we are more than mere consumers. It is unbearable for us to talk about ourselves as though we are mere cogs in an economic wheel. We rebel not because we are not these things, but because we know that we are not only these things. We know we are something else, even if we do not know what that else is.