A New Map of Wonders by Caspar Henderson review – scientific approach akin to spiritual vision
'The fate of our times," wrote the sociologist Max Weber in 1917, "is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world." Though its urgency was new, Weber's anxiety - that the rise of monotheism, followed by the gradual secularisation of culture and the march of science, were robbing the world of wonder - was an old one. In "Lamia", published in 1820, John Keats expressed a fear that Newtonian optics would "unweave" the rainbow. In 1949, the critic Lionel Trilling warned of the "reductive spectre" of psychoanalysis which, he thought, "haunts our culture". Nowadays, Trilling's spectre has been replaced by what the writer and retired medical physician Raymond Tallis has identified as contemporary culture's propensity toward "neuromania": the belief that neuroscientific explanations for consciousness can fully account for all human experience and endeavour.
Henderson wants to re-enchant the world, but not at the expense of scientific explanations of it
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