Traditional religious ways and understandings of transcendence served a number of different but interrelated functions for which there is no clear substitute in secularism. Broadly these belong to the realm of meaning in that they provide a unifying context for overlapping but divergent concerns. To list some of these, there is the linking of a system of general behavioural rules with collective survival, futurity and well-being, there is the linking of the known and the unknown in the sense of an assurance that what we have learned forms a legitimate (or lawful) portion of what we don't know and are able to wonder about, there is the unification of different modes of knowing, the idea say, that there is a larger realm in which the rational, the aesthetic, the interpersonal and the mystical are embedded, that every different kind of experience has a place in a larger whole, and finally that there is the connection between the most private and individual personal experience and objective structures valid for everyone, a connection traditionally expressed through ritual and sacrament. Perhaps this could be summed up as the embedding of the rational between the irrational and the super-rational. Secularism, by discrediting and abolishing the third of these while retaining an acute but increasingly troubled reliance on the rational seems to have made the irrational into its only other. It is possible to regain the cosmic, or synthetic function of the super-rational from out of the purely rational? Is it enough to only be able to point to the inwardness of experience without being able to account for it?