Human beings have gathered a vast amount of knowledge, but we each know only a little of it. We become specialists in narrow fields, from Airbus pilots to Zulu historians, then find it difficult to see what all of these areas of expertise might mean together.

This book makes two radical claims. The first is that all of our human faculties have evolved to show us important things about the universe, including our appreciation of beauty, our ability to make scientific measurements, our awareness of meaning and goodness, and our experiences of consciousness and community. We usually...