"You talked in the course of your history about the foundation of the ethical societies, which had their origins in non-conformist Christianity. Do you think that the more abstract end of philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology is as closely related to the permanent interests of the human spirit as ethics? I do, actually, yes. I mean, I think that this aspect of the human spirit, as it were, it's a desire to understand what we are. What am I, as it were? I mean, not in the way that that's going to be answered by a physiologist or an anatomist or a biologist or whatever it is. And this, again, relates to the question of ideals. When we ask the question, what are we, we mean things like, what are we as personal beings, right? Things that have values, things that stand in moral and ethical and emotive and sexual relationships to other people and all of that stuff. The words personal being that we're concerned with. But that question is, as it were, a metaphysical question. I mean, it may be part of the answer is that we're moral beings and it may be that we're aesthetic beings and so on and such like. But it is fundamentally a metaphysical question. I think people do want to, do feel that there is, that there's this question hanging there that requires an answer. Now, one interesting aspect of the, when philosophers sort of evacuated that territory, was the rise of two things, and when they evacuated metaphysics, I know there's been a return, but when they evacuated it, the rise of two things, and you can see the strength of this very much. One was natural science in its application to the living world, as it were, natural history, as it were. And that becomes very popular. And, but also things like astronomy and this sort of thing. What's the nature of reality? Well, just us, the astronomers, or us. And they're probably on television and they've got very engaging presentations. And the other one is on the sort of the other side of things, the normative existential, if you like, side of things, is the rise of biography. The enormous interest in history and biography. And I think this is, the interest is there, you know, the humanistic interest is there, but it wasn't being, and to some extent, still isn't being served by philosophers. But you can see that it's there, the Appetite, because people are coming forward, perhaps unwittingly, to serve it. And biography and history are part of the one side of it, and natural history and astronomy, I think, are part of the other side of it. So these are the two elements of the address that the human spirit is interested in. What's the nature of reality? What's our place within it? And how ought we to live?"