The beauty of the world is not something we merely come upon or that we are aware of fabricating from our own imaginative pleasure in delineating it. It is not as if we discover it but as if it discovers us. Beauty, although serenely self-contained - as it may be, and often is - also seems to be directed at us, to be an adumbration of a forgotten dimension of our being, and this is known in the ready joy that it evokes and that we call wonder. The beauty of a flower may be a specifically directed message to certain insects, a flag of pure attraction, but in eavesdropping on this communication we feel that there is something meant for us in there too, an undirected message of pure purposeless and unreserved being. What flowers in us is just the opposite of such simplicity and containment, the need to question this very fragile and evanescent persistence in so far as we suspect that it reflects our own fragile condition, and then to do something about it. In the same way the in social life of animals we can recognise all the essential feelings that 'make us human' but entirely lacking in the transcendental, and even more so the anti-transcendental. We have built cathedrals and cruise missiles, composed symphonies and scriptures out of the same few hormones and neurotransmitters as dogs use and cows. Knowing this we immediately take a position, barking or lowing contentedly as the case may be.