The author argues for the reality of a transcendent dimension, and maintains that the experience of the sacred plays a decisive role even in a secular society.

Scruton discusses the meaning of the sacred, evaluating and criticizing theories such as those of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, as put forward in works such as Totem and Taboo (1913), and the anthropologist René Girard, as put forward in works such as Violence and the Sacred (1972).

What he mostly defends in these essays is a thinking person's right to say no to a boiled-down Darwinism that reduces all relationships to contracts and all human behaviour and emotions to biological selection and adaptation.

... Scruton argues persuasively that much of what passes for scientific fact today is just the latest fashion in physics.

But one wonders who would find this eloquent plea on behalf of the right to interpret things in various ways objectionable.