How to Say Something Without Saying It

By Neel Burton | August 20, 2026

How We Can Mean Much More Than We Say

Illustration of the legendary telegram exchange between Victor Hugo and his publisher

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’

The publisher replied: ‘!’

Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.

Much of our communication works like that.

Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’

As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.

As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.

So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?

The Theory of Implicature

The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.

Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.

Let me give you an example of each.

If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.

A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.

With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.

When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.

More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.

In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.

Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:

Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.

Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.

After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.

In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.

We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.

Playing with Meaning

Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.

Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.

This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.

At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.

The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.

Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.

But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.

More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?

The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.

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What Is the Meaning of Life?

By Neel Burton | July 17, 2026

Purpose, Freedom, and the Search for Meaning

Sisyphus, by Titian. The ancient image of a meaningless life—and, perhaps, of a meaningful one.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The question of the meaning of life is perhaps one that we would rather not ask, for fear of the answer or lack thereof.

Still today, many people believe that humankind is the creation of a supernatural entity named God, that God had an intelligent purpose in creating us, and that this intelligent purpose is ‘the meaning of life’.

I do not propose to rehearse the well-worn arguments for and against the existence of God, and still less to take a side. But even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us, no one really knows what this purpose might be, or whether it is especially meaningful.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system—including the universe itself—increases up to the point at which equilibrium is reached, and God’s purpose in creating us, and indeed all of nature, might have been no loftier than to catalyse this process much as soil organisms catalyse the decomposition of organic matter. In a word, we may be no more than complex fungi or enzymes.

If our God-given purpose is to act as super-efficient heat dissipators, then having no purpose at all is better than having this sort of purpose—because it frees us to be the authors of our purpose or purposes and so to lead truly dignified and meaningful lives.

In fact, following this logic, having no purpose at all is better than having any kind of pre-determined purpose, even more traditional, uplifting ones such as serving God or improving our karma.

In short, even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us (and why should He have had?), we do not know what this purpose might be, and, whatever it might be, we would rather be able to do without it—or at least to ignore or discount it.

For unless we can be free to become the authors of our own purpose or purposes, our lives may have, at worst, no purpose at all, and, at best, only some unfathomable and potentially trivial purpose that is not of our own choosing.

Can We Really Create Our Own Purpose?

You might object that not to have a pre-determined purpose is, really, not to have any purpose at all.

But this is to assume that for something to have a purpose, it must have been created with that particular purpose in mind, and, moreover, must still be serving that same original purpose.

Many things acquire purposes that were never intended for them.

Many Junes ago, I visited the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the South of France. One evening, I picked up a rounded stone called a galet which I took back to Oxford and put to good use as a bookend.

In the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, these stones serve to capture the heat of the sun and release it back into the cool of the night, helping the grapes to ripen. Of course, these stones were not created with this or any other purpose in mind. Even if they had been created for a purpose, it would almost certainly not have been to make great wine or serve as bookends.

That same evening over a rabbit stew, I invited my friends to blind taste a bottle of Bordeaux—an evil trick, given that we were in the Southern Rhône. To disguise the bottle, I slipped it into one of a pair of socks.

Unlike the galet, the sock had been created with a definite purpose in mind, albeit one very different from (although not strictly incompatible with) the one that it came to assume on that idyllic evening.

The point I’m driving at is that purpose need not be fixed at the moment of creation: it can also emerge afterwards.

What If the Meaning of Life Lies Beyond This Life?

But this raises a related question. Can meaning come from us at all? Or must it come from somewhere beyond us—whether from the intention of a creator or from a life beyond this one?

Many would argue that the meaning of life lies beyond this life, which is merely a prelude to some eternal afterlife.

However, I can marshal at least four arguments against this position:

It is not at all clear that there is, or even can be, some form of eternal afterlife that entails the survival of the personal ego.
Even if there were such an afterlife, living forever is not in itself a purpose. The concept of the afterlife merely displaces the problem to one remove, begging the question: what then is the purpose of the afterlife?
Reliance on an eternal afterlife not only postpones the question of life’s purpose but also dissuades or at least discourages us from determining a purpose or purposes for what may be the only life that we do have.
If it is the brevity or finiteness of human life that gives it shape and purpose (an argument associated with the philosopher Bernard Williams), then an eternal afterlife cannot, in and of itself, have any purpose.

So, whether or not God exists, whether or not He gave us a purpose, and whether or not there is an eternal afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

Existence Before Essence

To translate this into Sartrean (or existentialist) terms, whereas for the galet it is true only that existence precedes essence, for the sock it is true both that essence precedes existence (when the sock is used on a human foot) and that existence precedes essence (when the sock is used for an unintended purpose, for example, as a bottle sleeve).

We human beings are either like the rock or the sock, but whichever we are like, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

In fact, let me correct myself. We human beings are neither like the rock nor the sock—because capable of discovering and creating meanings.

This echoes Kant’s insistence that human beings are not merely means to some external end, but self-determining ends in themselves. It is this capacity for autonomy—for rationally determining our own ends—that gives us our special dignity.

Human life may not have been created with any pre-determined purpose, but this need not mean that it cannot have a purpose, or that this purpose cannot be just as good as, if not much better than, any pre-determined one.

And so the meaning of life, of our life, is that which we choose to give it.

But how to choose?

Camus and Nietzsche

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

The tragedy of Sisyphus became the very source of his freedom. The universe may not provide us with a ready-made meaning, but this need not prevent us from creating one, and living with dignity, courage, and even joy.

Nietzsche, too, challenged us to embrace our fate, even to love it. In Ecce Homo, he wrote, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

How to Find Meaning

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (d. 1997) wrote about his experiences during the Second World War.

Tellingly, Frankl found that those who survived longest in the concentration camp were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of inner freedom and purpose.

He observed:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope: even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can still be given a meaning, and so too can suffering.

Life in the concentration camp taught Frankl that our deepest drive is neither pleasure, as Freud had argued, nor power, as Adler had maintained, but meaning.

After his release, Frankl founded the school of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘reason’ or ‘principle’), which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. The aim of logotherapy is to carry out an existential analysis of the person, and, in so doing, to help them uncover or discover meaning for their life.

According to Frankl, meaning can be found through:

Experiencing reality by interacting authentically with the environment and with others.
Giving something back to the world through creativity and self-expression, and,
Changing our attitude when faced with a situation or circumstance that we cannot change.

‘The point,’ said Frankl, ‘’is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.’

The Final Freedom

Whether or not God exists, whether or not He created us for a purpose, and whether or not there is an afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

We began with a fear: that if life has no pre-determined purpose, it must be meaningless. But it now seems, the opposite is true. A purpose imposed upon us from outside may give us a goal, but not necessarily meaning—for meaning requires that we recognise and embrace it as our own.

The meaning of life is not hidden in the stars, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure. Nor is it handed to us at birth. Instead, it emerges from our attitudes and choices.

Thus, it is more of an activity than a state—something that we create, discover, and renew throughout our lives.

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Why Imagination Matters

By Neel Burton | July 13, 2026

The Psychology and Philosophy of Imagination

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral — John Constable, *Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows* (1831).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge: ‘I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’

What Is Imagination?

Imagination is the faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images, propositions, concepts, emotions, and sensations above and beyond and sometimes independently of incoming sensory stimuli, opening up the realms of the abstract, the figurative, the possible, the hypothetical, and the universal.

Imagination comes in many forms and by many degrees, ranging from scientific reasoning to musical appreciation, and overlaps with a number of other cognitive constructs including belief, desire, emotion, memory, supposition, and fantasy. Belief, like perception, aims at according with reality, while desire aims at altering reality. Like belief, emotion also aims at according with reality, but more particularly at reflecting the significance of its object, or class of object, for the subject—an aspect that it shares with many forms of imagination. Like imagination, memory can involve remote imagery. But unlike imagination, memory is (or aims to be) rooted in reality and serves primarily to frame belief and guide moment-by-moment action. Memories are often more vivid than imaginings, which are, in turn, more vivid than mere suppositions. Suppositions tend to be cold and cognitive, lacking the emotional and existential dimensions of imagination, and much of its vividness. Finally, fantasy may be understood as imagination directed towards the improbable.

I say the improbable rather than the impossible, because there is a theory that, just as perception justifies beliefs about actuality, so imagination justifies beliefs about possibility (or at least, metaphysical as opposed to natural possibility). To quote David Hume, ‘it is an established maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.’

Could ghosts, the devil, time travel, and other imaginary things really be possible? I think inconceivability may be a better guide to impossibility than conceivability to possibility. But what does it mean for something to be conceivable or inconceivable, and by whom? It is easy to conceive of something other than oxygen in the place of oxygen, if one does not know anything about oxygen. In that much, knowledge and science constrain imagination—although, no doubt, they also help to focus it. The interplay between knowledge and imagination is most problematic when the ‘knowledge’ is wrong.

In any case, until very recently, most human societies did not mark a strict divide between imagination and belief, or fiction and reality, with each one informing and enriching the other. In fact, it could be argued that, in many important respects, the fiction took precedence over the reality—and even that this has been, and no doubt still is, one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. Today, there are pills for people who confuse imaginings and beliefs, but back in the day no one ever thought that life, despite its much harder hardships, might be meaningless—which I think tells us quite a bit about imagination and its uses, and also, incidentally, about mental illness and its causes.

Imagination and Meaning

The uses of imagination are many, more than I can enumerate. Most children begin to develop pretend play at around 15 months of age. What are children doing when they pretend play? And why are they so absorbed in works of imagination? When I was seven years old, I devoured book after book and pleaded with my parents for those not already in the bookcase. By playing out scenarios and extending themselves beyond their limited experience, children seek to make sense of the world and find their place within it. This meaning-making is full of emotion—joy, excitement, awe—and finds an echo in every subsequent act of creation.

Whenever we look at an object such as the Mona Lisa, we see much more than just the frame and the brushstrokes. In fact, we barely see the brushstrokes at all. In imagination as in our dreams, we ascribe form, pattern, and significance to things, and then reflect them back onto those things. Without this work of interpretation and assimilation, the world would be no more than an endless stream of sense impressions—as it may sometimes seem to those who lack imagination—with no hope of escape or reprieve.

Imagination in Everyday Life

More than that, by imagination we are able to complete the world, or our world, by conjuring up the missing parts, and even to inhabit entirely other worlds such as Middle-earth or the Seven Kingdoms. Imagination remains highly active throughout adulthood. What are novels, films, computer games, and even pornography if not aids to the adult imagination?

If imagination lets us feel at home in the world, it also enables us to get things done in the world. Science advances by hypothesis, which is a function of imagination, and philosophy makes frequent use of thought experiments such as the brain in the vat, the trolley problem, and Plato’s Republic. More than that, imagination enables us to form associations and connections, and thereby to apply our knowledge to real-life situations. It opens up alternatives and possibilities, and guides our decision-making by playing them out in our mind. So many of our failures—and, dare I say, a few of our more boring successes—are in fact failures of the imagination.

Imagination and Other Minds

Imagination also enables us to talk to one another, understand one another, and work together. Without it, there could be no metaphor, no irony, no humour, no past or future tenses, and no conditional either. Indeed, there could be no language at all, for what are words if not symbols and representations? Every conversation depends upon imagination—for every listener must recreate in the theatre of the mind what the speaker can only suggest. By imagination, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, think what they think, feel what they feel, and project them and our relationship into the future. Difficulties with imagination are thought to contribute to some of the characteristic features of autism, including impairments in social interaction and communication together with restricted interests and patterns of behaviour.

Cultivating the Imagination

Imagination is the highest form of thought, and almost divine in its reach. With enough imagination, we could identify and solve all our problems. With enough imagination, we would never have to work again—or, at least, not for money. With enough imagination, we could win over, or defeat, anyone we wanted to. But our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even imagined what it would be like to have that kind of imagination.

I’m lucky to have received a decent education, but one thing it certainly didn’t do for me is cultivate my imagination. In fact, medical school in particular did everything to destroy it. In recent years, I’ve been trying to recover the bright and vivid imagination that I left behind in primary school. For that, I’ve been doing just three things, all of them very simple—or, at least, very simple to explain.

Recognising the importance of imagination.
Making time for sleep and idleness.
Taking inspiration from the natural world.

I’ll conclude with these few words from William Blake:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

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Why Wonder is the Beginning of Wisdom

By Neel Burton | December 2, 2014

The Psychology and Philosophy of Wonder

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 24 July 2026.

In Plato’s Theætetus, written some 2,400 years ago, Socrates presents the sixteen-year-old Theætetus with a series of difficult contradictions. This is the exchange that follows:

Socrates: I believe that you follow me, Theætetus; for I suspect that you have thought of these questions before now.

Theætetus: Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.

Socrates: I see, dear Theætetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven] is the child of Thaumas [Wonder].

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle surmises that it must have been wonder that led the first philosophers to philosophy, since puzzled people think of themselves as ignorant and turn to philosophy to escape from their ignorance. St Thomas Aquinas concurred, adding in his commentary on the Metaphysics that, ‘Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.’

If Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas are right in tracing philosophy—and, by extension, science, religion, art, and all else that transcends the mundane—to wonder, then it behoves us to ask: What exactly is wonder?

What is Wonder?

Wonder is a complex emotion involving surprise, curiosity, contemplation, and joy. It can be thought of as a heightened state of consciousness and emotion brought about by something unusually beautiful, rare, or unexpected—that is, by a marvel. ‘Marvel’ derives from the Latin mirus [wonder] via mirabilia [‘wonderful things’]. ‘Admire’ shares the same root and originally meant ‘to wonder at’, although, since the sixteenth century, this sense has been steadily eroded—along, some might say, with wonder itself. Aquinas spoke of philosophers and poets in the same breath because both are moved by marvels, with the purpose of poetry being, broadly, to record and, in some sense, recreate marvels, to inspire wonder.

Wonder is most similar to awe. But compared to wonder, awe is more explicitly directed at something that is much greater or stronger than ourselves. As such, it is more closely associated with fear, reverence, or veneration than with joy. Without this element of respect and reverence, all that remains of awe is fear, that is, no longer awe but terror or horror. Awe is also less detached than wonder, which allows for much greater and freer contemplation of its object.

Wonder may be stirred by grand landscapes, natural phenomena, extraordinary achievements, or astonishing facts. It is expressed by a bright-eyed stare, sometimes accompanied by an opening of the mouth and a suspension of the breath. By drawing us out of ourselves, wonder reconnects us with something greater than our everyday. It is the ultimate homecoming, returning us to the world that we came from and were in danger of losing to our narrow selves.

But notice how this kind of wonder is not the same as the more abstract wonder that moved Theætetus to philosophy.

Socratic Wonder

The wonder of the philosopher, also known as Socratic wonder, is not so much wonder in the sense of awe as wonder in the sense of puzzlement or perplexity. Rather than grand vistas and the like, Socratic wonder arises from contradictions in thought and language, and impels us to investigate these contradictions in the hope of resolving them into some higher truth.

Socrates himself came to philosophy—and to his revolutionary method of doing philosophy—after being bewildered by the Delphic oracle, which, despite his professed ignorance, pronounced him the wisest of all men. To get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and finally the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’

Wonder in the sense approaching awe is a universal experience found also in little children (picture a child at the circus or zoo) and even in higher-order primates and some other animals. Socratic wonder, by contrast, is much more rarefied, and, as Socrates implies by calling it ‘the feeling of a philosopher’, not given to all and sundry.

In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon called this kind of Socratic wonder ‘broken knowledge’, and there is a sense in which wonder, which may be cognate to the German Wunde [wound], breaches us and draws us out of ourselves. That breach yearns to be filled, not only by philosophy but also by science, religion, and art, giving rise to a third kind of wonder: the wonder of insight and creation.

Like Plato and Aristotle before him, the philosopher AN Whitehead (d. 1947) observed that ‘philosophy begins in wonder’, adding that, ‘at the end, when the philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.’ More than remain, the wonder grows. Scientific breakthroughs such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the periodic table of the elements, and Einstein’s theory of relativity are often more wondrous than the mysteries they were intended to solve. Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom—not the extinction of wonder, but its perfection.

The Loss of Wonder

Unfortunately, many people do not open themselves up to wonder for fear that it may distract or derail them. After all, wonder is wounding, and thauma is only one letter removed from ‘trauma’. To wonder is also to wander, to stray from society and its norms and constructs, to stand alone, to be free—which is, of course, deeply subversive, and why even organised religions need to tread a fine line with wonder.

To rationalise the fear of it, wonder is dismissed as a childish emotion that ought to be outgrown rather than invited and cultivated. So much is true, that children brim with wonder, before it is leached out of them by need and neurosis.

Today, many young people who go to university do so not for the sake of marvelling or even learning, but of obtaining a piece of paper by which to advance careers that they have scarcely had the freedom to question—entirely bypassing the wonder and wisdom that might have saved them from needing a career in the first place. For the child is not merely innocent but a natural philosopher, still open to wonder before the world.

Jesus said:

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

And again:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven… whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.