The study begins by situating the moment in the context of the history of ideas, then takes a cultural history approach drawing upon selected examples to point up crucial stages in the history of the moment at which its ongoing secularization becomes particularly apparent: Christian Middle Ages, Romanticism, Aestheticism, Modernism. In its given context, however, the moment also stands as an instance of metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical experience of the world militating against the progressive loss of transcendence. Against this background various aspects of the experience of the moment in...