Book Summary: The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist
In this sequel to The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist expands on his ideas about how the right and left brain affect our perception of the world and how we behave.
McGilchrist's ideas have profoundly influenced the way I understand myself, my clients, and my own marriage. I am grateful for the work he has put into compiling all of this information and explaining it in such a vivid and engaging way.
McGilchrist includes several examples of people who read his first book and applied it in their lives, and what he learned from them.
Chapter 1: Some Preliminaries – How We Got Here
In the opening chapter, McGilchrist sets the stage by reviewing how our brains evolved and why their asymmetry matters. He introduces the core idea that the brain’s two hemispheres attend to the world in different ways. For example, the right hemisphere is broadly vigilant – attuned to the living world, to relationships, and to anything new or significant – whereas the left hemisphere zeroes in with narrow focus, handling details and goal-driven tasks. This evolution of “two ways of thinking” is traced from ancient organisms to humans, explaining how each hemisphere’s viewpoint developed for survival. McGilchrist hints that modern society has come to rely too much on the left hemisphere’s analytic, grasping mode, and suggests that re-balancing our perspective (by appreciating the right hemisphere’s holistic, context-rich awareness) will be crucial for the journey ahead.
Chapter 2: Attention
This chapter explores how attention shapes our reality. McGilchrist reminds us that what we pay attention to literally governs what we perceive; we cannot perceive things we consistently fail to notice. The right and left hemispheres attend differently: the right hemisphere offers a broad, open attention (alert to the whole scene), while the left fixes on narrow targets (like a predatory zoom-in). Through examples (including cases of neurological damage), McGilchrist shows that a too-narrow, fragmented attention (a left-hemisphere style) can miss the bigger picture, whereas a more flexible, sustained attention (a right-hemisphere gift) lets the world “announce itself” to us. The chapter uses vivid anecdotes – such as patients who ignore half their visual field when one hemisphere is damaged – to illustrate that how we attend changes what is real for us. In essence, McGilchrist argues that attention is not a neutral process but a creative act, one that can either impoverish or enrich our reality depending on its breadth and quality.
Chapter 3: Perception
Building on attention, McGilchrist turns to perception – how we interpret and make sense of what we notice. He emphasizes that perception isn’t a passive recording of facts; it’s an active process combining incoming sensory information with our prior experiences and expectations. Each hemisphere contributes differently. The right hemisphere tends to perceive holistically, integrating impressions and context into a live, “presenced” whole. The left hemisphere, by contrast, re-presents the world as a collection of familiar concepts or symbols, somewhat like a map or catalog. McGilchrist illustrates this with scenarios where people’s backgrounds lead them to perceive the same situation in divergent ways. For instance, if our attention (Chapter 2) is fixated on something trivial, our perception can miss crucial context. Conversely, a broader awareness can perceive meaning and connections that a narrowly focused mind would overlook. The takeaway is that perception isn’t just seeing “what’s out there” – it’s a dynamic encounter between a living mind and the world, one that can vary hugely depending on our mental approach and what our right or left brain is primed to see.
Chapter 4: Judgment
Now McGilchrist moves to judgment, the stage where we form conclusions or make decisions about what we’ve perceived. He notes that judgment, in the sense of evaluating or deciding, is largely a left-hemisphere function – it categorizes things, labels them, and decides “what to do” about them. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is more of a neutral observer that holds possibilities without immediately judging. This chapter explains that our judgments are only as good as the attention and perception they spring from. If we focus on the wrong details or perceive in a fragmentary way, our judgments will likely be off-target. McGilchrist uses a playful example: a person distracted by something odd in the crowd might misjudge a referee’s call in a sports match simply because they weren’t fully attending to the game. He also discusses how the left hemisphere’s zeal for clear, quick answers can sometimes lead us to confident but shallow or incorrect judgments. The message is that while analytical judgment is necessary (we do need to weigh options and make calls), we should temper it with the right hemisphere’s tolerance for uncertainty and its awareness of the bigger context. Good judgment, McGilchrist suggests, requires not just logic but wisdom – an ability to hold one’s decision in context and admit when one could be wrong.
Chapter 5: Apprehension
Here McGilchrist uses “apprehension” in its older sense of “grasping” or understanding something. He explains that the left hemisphere is skilled at apprehending in the sense of seizing upon bits of information – it “grasps” facts and holds on tightly. This is useful for building knowledge, but it can also isolate those facts from their context. The right hemisphere, by contrast, doesn’t try to grip experience in the same way; it’s more comfortable with comprehension as a broad holding of experience without pinning it down immediately. In this chapter McGilchrist warns of the downside of the left hemisphere’s grasping nature: taken to extremes, it leads to a world of disconnected pieces. He describes how a person relying only on left-hemisphere apprehension might end up with a head full of data but little understanding, like knowing the parts of a machine without seeing what they do together. Through neurological case studies, he shows that when the right hemisphere is impaired, people can describe things but not truly understand them as a whole. The chapter’s conclusion is that true understanding requires both hemispheres – the left to grab hold of specifics, and the right to weave those specifics into a coherent whole. Without the right hemisphere’s broader vision, we risk “apprehending” the parts but missing what they mean together.
Chapter 6: Emotional and Social Intelligence
McGilchrist now shifts focus to forms of intelligence beyond raw IQ – specifically our ability to navigate emotions and social relationships. He argues that emotional and social intelligence depend heavily on right-hemisphere functions, since it is the right side that helps us understand the whole person and the context of interactions. The right hemisphere is key for empathy, reading tone of voice or facial expression, and feeling connected with others. By contrast, the left hemisphere, if too dominant, might view people more as objects or categories, missing the rich nuances of personal interaction. McGilchrist uses a memorable reference: he mentions the character Raymond from the film Rain Man – an autistic savant with astounding cognitive abilities but profound social disconnect – as an illustration of what intelligence looks like when emotional and social understanding are absent. In this chapter, neurological evidence (like what happens in autism or certain brain injuries) underscores that without the right hemisphere’s contributions, a person can be fact-rich but people-poor: they may know about others but not truly understand or relate to them. McGilchrist’s broader point is that our capacity for emotion and social connection is a genuine form of intelligence – one that has been undervalued in a culture obsessed with analytic reasoning. Re-engaging the right hemisphere’s strengths – such as empathy, humor, and the ability to sense the bigger social picture – makes us not only more human but actually smarter in a fuller sense of the word.
Chapter 7: Cognitive Intelligence
In this chapter McGilchrist discusses what we typically call “intelligence” – the kind measured by IQ tests or academic problem-solving – and links it largely to left-hemisphere activity. This cognitive intelligence involves skills like logical reasoning, manipulating abstract symbols, and recalling factual knowledge. McGilchrist acknowledges these skills are important (after all, our left hemisphere’s analytical power has given us science and technology), but he also cautions that this form of intelligence on its own is not sufficient for a meaningful or balanced understanding of the world. He explains that left unchecked, left-hemisphere cognition can become rule-bound and even detached from reality – reciting formulas without wisdom. The chapter uses examples of individuals with high analytic IQ who struggle with common sense or relationships, highlighting that pure intellect can turn brittle or counterproductive when divorced from the right hemisphere’s grounding in lived experience. McGilchrist’s discussion reinforces a theme: more information or faster logic isn’t the same as better understanding. Ultimately, he suggests that the fullest intelligence integrates the cognitive strengths of the left brain (like precision and reasoning) with the insights of the right brain (such as intuition and contextual understanding). When cognitive prowess is balanced this way, it becomes powerful knowledge guided by good judgment, rather than just a clever machine running on rules.
Chapter 8: Creativity
Turning to creativity, McGilchrist identifies this as a primarily right-hemisphere domain. Creativity, whether in art, problem-solving, or scientific insight, thrives on a mindset that the left hemisphere alone cannot provide. He describes creativity as arising when we allow the mind to wander, make unexpected connections, and remain open to intuition – essentially when the left hemisphere’s linear, analytical interference is quieted. In this chapter, McGilchrist draws on neuroscience and anecdotes to show that the most original ideas often come in moments of holistic thinking or even daydreaming, rather than through step-by-step logic. He even quips that to be maximally creative, it can help to “get the left hemisphere out of the way,” because the left brain tends to stick to known patterns and explicit rules. By contrast, the right brain is comfortable with ambiguity, metaphor, and novelty – all crucial for creativity. Real-world examples include artists and inventors who experience breakthroughs in a flash of insight or while doing something unrelated, suggesting that creativity is more about receiving an insight than forcibly constructing one. McGilchrist reassures that analysis and refinement (left-hemisphere tasks) have their place after the creative insight emerges, but the insight itself is a product of relaxing control. In summary, the chapter portrays creativity as a dance between both hemispheres – with the right hemisphere leading in generating new ideas and the left following in shaping and executing them – showing how deeply we need the less structured, more receptive mode of thinking to create anything truly new.
Chapter 9: What Schizophrenia and Autism Can Tell Us
Here McGilchrist uses extreme cases – schizophrenia and autism – as windows into how an imbalance in hemispheric operation affects our view of reality. Both conditions, in different ways, exemplify an overreliance on left-hemisphere thinking at the expense of the right. Schizophrenia, he notes, often comes with hyper-rationality and a loss of intuitive grounding: sufferers can become trapped in rigid thought patterns and delusions that seem logical internally but don’t match reality. Autism spectrum conditions can involve an extraordinary focus on details and systemizing (left-hemisphere traits) coupled with difficulties in social intuition and context (right-hemisphere traits). McGilchrist points out the striking fact that schizophrenic and autistic thinking is not “irrational” in the chaotic sense; if anything, it’s too rational and rule-bound – an onslaught of facts or sensations without the guiding “common sense” that the right hemisphere provides. Modern Western society, McGilchrist provocatively suggests, shows some parallels to these conditions: as we lean heavily on analytical, fragmenting modes of thought, our culture too can start to exhibit a kind of collective tunnel vision or emotional bluntness. The chapter’s vivid conclusion is that when the holistic, meaning-seeking capacities of the right brain are underutilized, reason goes awry. It can produce elaborate yet context-insensitive worldviews – much as a schizophrenic might devise an elaborate but false logic, or an autistic individual might focus intensely on patterns but miss their human significance. This sets the stage for McGilchrist’s deeper dive into how re-balancing our hemispheres can restore sanity and humanity to our thinking.
Chapter 10: What Is Truth?
This chapter opens Part II by asking the fundamental question “What is truth?” and examining how each hemisphere approaches it. McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere conceives of truth as a thing – a static fact to be collected and stacked up by logic – whereas the right hemisphere sees truth as a process of discovery, an unfolding relationship with reality. He explains that the left hemisphere’s version of truth is like building a pyramid of secure bricks (verified facts leading to the next), aiming for certainty, clarity, and finality. In this view, truth is impersonal, context-free, and in theory the same for everyone who follows the correct method. The right hemisphere’s take, however, is that truth is something alive and never fully captured by formulas – it’s revealed by removing misconceptions and “unconcealing” reality, as one might clear debris to reveal a path. This truth is inherently relational: it happens in the encounter between a truthful knower and the world, and it’s never absolutely complete or final. McGilchrist uses this contrast to suggest why modern debates about truth often deadlock. We have, he says, become dominated by the left-hemisphere mindset that sees truth as just data and logic, dismissing the right hemisphere’s insight that meaning and context are integral to truth. He concludes that truth is not merely about propositions matching facts; it’s also about trust and fidelity to reality. To be truthful is as much a disposition – a commitment to seeing openly and responding to what is – as it is an accumulation of correct statements. Surviving this chapter’s technical rigors (the author warns it’s one of the book’s most concept-heavy) assures the reader they’re “good to go” for what follows.
Chapter 11: Science’s Claims on Truth
In this chapter, McGilchrist critically examines science as a path to truth. He acknowledges the immense power of science but also highlights its intrinsic limits. Modern Western culture often treats science as the only road to truth, edging out religion or intuition – a shift from a world guided by spiritual values to one guided by “scientism” (the belief that science can eventually explain everything). McGilchrist’s key point is that while science is superb at answering certain kinds of questions (especially “how” questions about mechanism), it cannot grasp everything we care about. For instance, scientific methods struggle with subjective, qualitative aspects of life – they can tell us the wavelength of light that makes a sunset, but not why we find it beautiful or what it means to fall in love. He argues that science often pretends to be wholly objective by “taking us out of the picture,” yet in doing so it removes precisely those human experiences (like value and purpose) that make life meaningful. Moreover, McGilchrist notes that science operates through models and metaphors, which inevitably shape what scientists observe. The left hemisphere’s influence shows up here: it favors viewing the world as a machine, but that very model can blind us to aspects of reality that don’t fit the mechanical paradigm. He also raises the “replication crisis” and other issues to show that science is a human activity prone to error, bias, and institutional pressures. In summary, McGilchrist doesn’t reject science – in fact, he lauds its successes – but he urges humility about its scope. Science depends on values like honesty and curiosity which it cannot supply by itself, and it often brackets out the intuitive, emotional, and ethical dimensions of life as “not real” because they can’t be measured. This, he warns, gives us great power but at the cost of a shallow worldview, one that “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The chapter calls for reuniting science with broader wisdom, so we can use its left-brain genius without losing sight of the right-brain truths of human experience.
Chapter 12: The Science of Life – A Study in Left Hemisphere Capture
McGilchrist intensifies his critique by zooming in on biology – the science of life – arguing that it has been “captured” by left-hemisphere thinking. He observes that for a long time, biology (and related fields) have treated living organisms as if they were machines, an approach inherited from a Victorian-era mindset that even physics has since left behind. In this chapter, he challenges the machine metaphor for life. Organisms, he explains, are not like car engines assembled from parts; they are processes – more like flames or rivers, constantly changing and self-creating. McGilchrist lists fundamental differences: unlike machines, living beings can’t be switched off without dying, they grow and develop from within rather than being constructed from blueprint instructions, and they are inherently unpredictable and adaptive in a way no machine is. He also debunks overly gene-centric ideas (like the notion of DNA as a “master program”). For example, he cites cases where organisms manage to grow needed features even when the supposed genes are removed, implying life has resilient, system-wide intelligence beyond a simple genetic code mechanism. Throughout the chapter, McGilchrist’s refrain is that the left hemisphere’s view – life as a set of parts moving in linear causation – fails to capture what life truly is. Life is non-linear, full of feedback loops and emergent order. By relying on mechanical models, biologists can inadvertently ignore the very qualities that make organisms alive (such as purpose, sentience, or value). McGilchrist isn’t dismissing biology’s accomplishments; rather, he’s calling for a richer understanding that re-introduces the right hemisphere’s perspective – seeing organisms as dynamic wholes in relationship with their environment. Only then can we avoid what he calls a “mental apartheid” where scientists describe life in machine language even while implicitly sensing it doesn’t quite fit. The chapter ultimately advocates for a new biology that recognizes life’s living essence, not just its skeleton of mechanisms.
Chapter 13: Institutional Science and Truth
Moving from theory to practice, McGilchrist addresses how science as an institution can sometimes stray from its truth-seeking ideals. He notes that human institutions tend to evolve in ways that may undermine their original purpose, and science is not immune to this. The chapter is organized around several problem areas. First, specialization: as scientific knowledge explodes, researchers focus on narrower slices of truth. This yields depth, but McGilchrist warns it can also lead to tunnel vision – scientists become experts in tiny areas and must take the rest on trust. He uses William James’s quip that institutions often become obstacles to their own goals to frame this discussion. Specialization, while necessary, can fracture the unity of knowledge, leaving us with technical brilliance but little wisdom (the valley floor view without climbing the mountain, as he metaphorically puts it). Next, he examines the reliability of scientific evidence, highlighting the replication crisis: a startling percentage of studies (even ones in top journals) cannot be reproduced. This is not because science is malicious, but because data interpretation is tricky and often biased – what we “see” is influenced by what we expect or want. McGilchrist also discusses publication and peer review pressures. “Publish or perish” culture, the chase for funding, and academic cliques can incentivize quantity over quality. The result is sometimes corner-cutting, overly safe research (to guarantee results), or conversely hyped claims to stand out. He cites the proliferation of jargon and hyper-specialized papers that even other experts struggle to read, and wryly notes that this can make research impenetrable and, frankly, boring – not a recipe for insight. Finally, McGilchrist addresses peer review and fraud: while peer review is meant to ensure quality, it can reinforce groupthink and can miss fraud or errors as reviewers are themselves busy specialists. He acknowledges sensational cases of scientific fraud and hoaxes (referencing Appendix examples) as symptoms of a system under pressure. Despite these criticisms, McGilchrist’s tone isn’t anti-science; it’s a plea to strengthen science by being honest about its sociological pitfalls. He suggests that a little more right-hemisphere wisdom – embracing breadth, humility, and the big-picture context – would help scientific institutions remain truly open to reality, rather than, as he quotes Heinlein, becoming so specialized that they “know almost everything about almost nothing.”
Chapter 14: Reason’s Claims on Truth
McGilchrist delves into reason itself, asking how far pure reason can go in delivering truth. He starts by distinguishing two very different modes of “reason” that often get conflated. One is the narrow, step-by-step rationality beloved by the left hemisphere – linear, explicit, algorithmic thinking (like a computer following rules). The other is a broader reason in the classical sense – a wise understanding that balances logic with experience and intuition. McGilchrist points out that English uses one word “reason” for both, whereas other languages (like German with Verstand vs. Vernunft) recognize them as separate. This confusion has led us to either overrate reason (in its narrow form) or dismiss it entirely. In this chapter, he firmly asserts that genuine Reason – the kind that the right hemisphere supports – includes but transcends cold rationality. For example, a strictly logical mind might be great at solving puzzles, yet completely miss the point in a real-life situation requiring judgment and humanity. McGilchrist uses vivid contrasts: rationality can win arguments, but reason knows when arguing isn’t even the right approach. He notes that compelling someone through logic often fails – minds open through insight and perspective, not bludgeoning with facts. In fact, he cites philosophers (Pascal, Nietzsche) to show a longstanding awareness that the heart and the “gut” play a role in recognizing truth that syllogisms alone cannot force. McGilchrist also touches on the modern penchant for hyper-analytical philosophy and finds it lacking. Earlier philosophers were polymaths engaging imagination and ethics, whereas now philosophy can feel like hair-splitting arguments divorced from life. This he attributes to an imbalance – too much left hemisphere, not enough right. The chapter underscores that objectivity, properly understood, doesn’t mean stripping away all human presence; it means seeking a view that many minds can agree on by sharing perspectives. That process is inherently social and empathetic – a second-person, intersubjective endeavor, not the view from nowhere. In summary, McGilchrist’s take on reason is that it’s indispensable but not all-powerful. Reason must “scrutinize itself” and remain humble. When reason (small ‘r’) forgets its limits – ignoring imagination, emotion, and the tacit knowledge we carry – it becomes sterile or even dangerous. True Reason combines clear thinking with lived wisdom, and our two hemispheres together are what give us that capacity.
Chapter 15: Reason’s Progeny
Continuing the exploration of reason, McGilchrist here considers the offspring of an overly rational mindset – the kinds of thinking and systems that pure reason (mis)creates when left to its own devices. He shows that when reason detaches from intuition and experience, it tends to produce mirror-like doubles: one set of ideas that sound rigorous and abstract (left hemisphere’s child) and another that is embodied and concrete (right hemisphere’s child). For example, he contrasts abstraction vs. embodiment. Modern rationalism often strips concepts of context and life (think of a mathematical model of love, which loses all the warmth and nuance), whereas embodied understanding puts concepts back in living terms. McGilchrist references the history of philosophy, noting how thinkers like Spinoza or Hobbes tried to reduce human behavior to geometric or mechanical terms – an enterprise he views as a telling overreach of left-hemisphere thinking. He wryly comments that it’s “degeneracy” when we devote ourselves to such chill abstractions at the expense of reality. The chapter also examines how this overzealous rationality handles meaning and paradox. Strikingly, McGilchrist points out that the quest for absolute certainty (a left-brain obsession) often generates paradoxes or false clarity. Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes in logic are one example of reason tying itself in knots. Here, he reiterates a theme: the left hemisphere loves certainty and clarity, but reality often isn’t absolutely certain or clear – and insisting that it must be can lead to sterile or even absurd conclusions. McGilchrist brings morality into this discussion by citing a psychological experiment: when the right hemisphere is artificially suppressed, people’s moral judgments can flip to a simplistic consequentialism, such as valuing an outcome over intent. For instance, they might say accidentally poisoning someone is worse than trying to poison and failing – a hyper-rational but ethically naive stance. This illustrates how a “rational” progeny of thought, isolated from emotional and contextual insight, can be deeply out of tune with human reality. Ultimately, McGilchrist argues that much of philosophy and science’s weird conundrums (from logical paradoxes to amoral theories) are byproducts of cutting mind off from soul – the left hemisphere running away with an idea and the right not there to ground it. To recover meaning, we often need to reunite with what was there all along: our intuitive, lived sense of things. Reason’s clever children, in other words, need their wiser parent (the whole brain) to come home.
Chapter 16: Logic and Paradox – A Further Study in Left Hemisphere Capture
In Chapter 16, McGilchrist takes a deeper look at paradoxes – those baffling logical puzzles – and shows they often arise from a left-hemisphere mistake: confusing our thought models with reality. He explains that many classic paradoxes (like Zeno’s arrow or Russell’s barber) appear troubling only because the left hemisphere insists on chopping up continuous, complex phenomena into neat, discrete bits. Reality, he argues, isn’t actually contradictory; it’s our descriptions of reality (when too rigid) that tangle us in knots. For instance, Zeno’s paradox says an arrow can never reach its target because it must go halfway, then half of the remainder, and so on infinitely – suggesting motion is impossible. McGilchrist points out the fallacy: an arrow in flight is never actually at those abstract “halfway” points except in our imagination after the fact. The left brain takes a flow (the arrow’s path) and freezes it into an infinite series of still snapshots, then declares motion impossible – a prime case of the map being mistaken for the territory. Likewise, logical riddles like the barber paradox (“who shaves the barber?”) are shown to stem from applying absolute, either/or rules to situations that reality would never constrain in that way. McGilchrist’s broader point is that continuity and both-and thinking (right-hemisphere strengths) dissolve many paradoxes. Time and space, for example, are not actually made of tiny indivisible instants or points – that’s just how the left hemisphere tries to analyze them. In truth, time flows and space is continuous; acknowledging that (a right-hemisphere intuition) cuts the Gordian knot that logic tied. He also connects this to psychological observations: people with heavy left-hemisphere bias (like certain schizophrenics) often struggle with continuity – seeing the world as fragmentary freeze-frames – whereas a healthy right hemisphere keeps the dynamic whole in view. The take-home message is enlightening: much of what we label “paradoxical” or unsolvable (in philosophy, math, or daily life) may be a sign that we’re looking at it with the wrong lens. If we step back and allow the right hemisphere to integrate context and embrace ambiguity, many paradoxes aren’t paradoxes at all – they’re artifacts of our thinking. McGilchrist essentially shows us that reality is more fluid and less binary than strict logic assumes, and learning to be comfortable with that fluidity is a kind of liberation from pseudo-problems.
Chapter 17: Intuition’s Claims on Truth
Shifting focus, McGilchrist begins a trio of chapters on intuition and imagination as genuine paths to truth. In Chapter 17, he defends intuition – our immediate, gut-level knowing – against its skeptics. He notes there’s a whole “cottage industry” of academics highlighting how intuition can err, pointing to optical illusions or cognitive biases as reasons to distrust our gut. McGilchrist flips this perspective: yes, intuitions can be wrong, but so can anything (and we don’t abandon our eyes because of mirages). In fact, most of the time our intuitions serve us remarkably well – they are a form of fast intelligence honed by life. He gives compelling examples: seasoned firefighters or soldiers who sense danger before any analytic sign appears, or a horse trainer who consistently picked winners by “feel” until he started second-guessing himself analytically (and lost his edge). These stories show that expertise often lives in the body and unconscious mind. McGilchrist explains that intuition is not magic or irrational; it’s the brain’s way of rapidly summarizing vast experience and subtle cues that would take ages to articulate in words. He also emphasizes intuition’s role in creativity and problem-solving. Studies have shown, for instance, that people’s bodies (sweat responses, etc.) can sense the solution to a card game or puzzle before their conscious mind works it out. Being overly analytical can actually interfere – the famous “sleep on it” advice or why insights pop up in the shower ties into this idea that the right hemisphere (and allied unconscious processes) solve problems in a holistic way when the left hemisphere is relaxed. McGilchrist also revisits the shortcomings of the ultra-rational view here: thinkers like Daniel Kahneman, who dubbed intuition “System 1” thinking and highlighted its biases, are critiqued for undervaluing how expert intuition is not the same as a novice guess. With training and experience, our intuitions become not only faster than conscious thought but often more accurate in complex situations. Ultimately, McGilchrist’s stance is that intuition is indispensable. It is the right hemisphere’s forte in grasping truth in the moment, especially where complexity or human factors are involved. While we shouldn’t be blindly credulous of every hunch, neither should we relegate truth-finding solely to plodding analysis. After all, by the time the left hemisphere has tediously worked something out, the intuitive right hemisphere may have already been living the answer.
Chapter 18: The Untimely Demise of Intuition
In Chapter 18, McGilchrist laments how intuition has been sidelined in modern times and makes a case for its restoration. He discusses how Enlightenment thinkers and their successors came to view intuition with suspicion, often branding it as unscientific or childish, and how this has left a hole in our way of engaging reality. Modern analytic philosophy, he notes, sometimes prides itself on stripping out all subjectivity – but in doing so it creates a dry, detached picture of the world that few humans can truly live by. McGilchrist argues that we actually need intuition because reality itself isn’t given to us fully packaged in language or equations. He reminds us that all understanding is interpretative – there’s no “view from nowhere,” and trying to operate as if there were can make us blind. In one striking passage, he describes the right hemisphere as providing a rich, inchoate sense of reality (a sense of the whole, implicit meaning of a situation) while the left hemisphere is like a machine running algorithms without being able to judge truth. Value judgments, common sense, and gut feelings come from that right-brain world of implicit knowledge. The chapter also touches on the idea that even our smartest left-brain feats rely on unspoken intuition at their base. He cites how very intelligent people are often just better at rationalizing their own biases if they lack self-awareness. In other words, without the grounding of intuition and humility, high IQ might simply invent elaborate justifications for what one wants to believe. McGilchrist advocates embracing our “prejudices” in the original sense: the pre-judgments gleaned from experience that guide us through life (we all have them, and they’re often useful). The goal is not to have no intuitions or prejudgments – that would leave us like newborns every day – but to have flexible, examined ones. He also revisits how the left hemisphere’s dominance can make people (and cultures) cynical and mechanistic, whereas a healthy respect for intuition keeps the sense of wonder and the human element alive. In sum, Chapter 18 calls for the rehabilitation of intuition as a valid mode of knowing. Far from being opposed to reason, intuition is its wise elder sibling – guiding reason where to look and infusing it with meaning. Ignoring intuition hasn’t made us more rational; arguably, it’s made us more unmoored. McGilchrist invites us to undo this “untimely demise” and let intuition work in tandem with analysis once more, as two halves of a whole mind.
Chapter 19: Intuition, Imagination, and the Unveiling of the World
Closing Part II, McGilchrist celebrates imagination alongside intuition as essential to revealing truth. He begins by noting how the Enlightenment’s dismissal of intuition went hand in hand with a downgrade of imagination, yet nearly all breakthroughs – scientific or artistic – have an imaginative leap at their heart. Using examples like Einstein (who famously said he thought in images and music, not in mathematical equations), McGilchrist shows that insight precedes analysis. A scientist or mathematician often “sees” a solution in a flash (a right-brain moment) and only later can the left-brain fill in the logical steps. He underscores this with anecdotes: the discovery of the spiral structure of galaxies came to astronomer William W. Morgan in an instantaneous vision before he had proof, and great mathematicians frequently rely on the beauty and elegance of a mental image to guide their work. Imagination, far from being a fanciful add-on, is what “unveils” aspects of reality that rigid analytical thinking cannot reach. The chapter also discusses how we can cultivate imagination and why it’s vital for a fresh perception of the world. McGilchrist cites the Romantic poets (like Shelley and Wordsworth) who warned that without imagination, our perception grows stale – we start seeing the world as merely familiar labels rather than something continuously new and astonishing. Imagination revivifies perception by allowing us to experience the world with childlike wonder or see it through novel metaphors. This ties to his earlier points about the right hemisphere keeping experience from turning into a lifeless schematic. He also touches on art: a true work of art has a life of its own beyond the artist’s left-brain intentions. Characters in a novel, for instance, can “take on a life” such that the author feels they teach him – a sign that imagination taps into something greater than personal will. McGilchrist contrasts the right-hemisphere view of imagination (as a gateway to truth) with the left’s view (imagination as “lying” or unreal). He firmly sides with the former: imagination is a way of knowing. By playing with possibilities and images, we allow hidden truths to emerge that literal language or analysis might never expose. As this part concludes, McGilchrist has made the case that knowing the world fully demands more than measurement and logic – it requires the intuitive and imaginative faculties that open us to depth, beauty, and meaning. These are the bridges to Part III, where he applies this enriched way of knowing to the nature of reality itself.
Chapter 20: The Coincidence of Opposites (Coincidentia Oppositorum)
Entering the metaphysical territory of Volume II, McGilchrist begins with the idea of coincidentia oppositorum – the unity of opposites. He suggests that many deep truths manifest as apparent contradictions that are actually complementary. For example, a famous paradox from Heraclitus: a river stays the same only by continually changing. McGilchrist explains that opposites like this are not mistakes in logic but features of reality – boundaries both separate and connect (the bank of a river divides water from land, yet it’s precisely where they meet). This chapter argues that Western thinking, dominated by the left hemisphere, has trouble with such both/and scenarios because it wants clear either/or distinctions. But the world often isn’t either/or; it’s both/and. Life and death, order and chaos, part and whole – each pair of opposites in some sense requires its counterpart, in the way that north pole and south pole define one magnet. McGilchrist relates this to the hemispheres themselves: the brain’s two opposed ways of attending are both needed and actually work best in tandem. He even shares an Iroquois myth of twin brothers – one embodying broad sky awareness, the other flint-like focus – which poetically captures the interplay of the two cognitive styles and concludes that harmony comes when the more holistic brother leads. In more practical terms, McGilchrist notes that problems arise when we insist on one-sidedness. If we demand absolute consistency (no contradictions ever), we might reject important truths just because they’re paradoxical. He quotes Pascal: “Contradiction is not a sign of falsity” – sometimes reality is richer than linear logic can capture. In such cases, holding two opposing ideas together is not confusion but higher understanding. This theme resonates throughout spiritual and philosophical traditions (e.g. yin and yang, the dialectics of Hegel, etc.), and McGilchrist brings it into the conversation as a corrective to overly reductive thought. In summary, Chapter 20 sets a tone of openness to mystery and complexity: light and dark, self and other, reason and intuition – rather than choosing one, McGilchrist says truth is often found in the tension and balance between opposites, an insight our integrative right hemisphere grasps more readily than our dividing left.
Chapter 21: The One and the Many
Here McGilchrist tackles a classic philosophical puzzle: how do unity and multiplicity relate? Rather than a dry metaphysical treatise, he gives it a fresh angle by tying it to how we categorize the world. He notes the chapter’s title might imply grand metaphysics, but he’s actually examining how any one unique thing (a person, for instance) can only be understood against the backdrop of many similar things. In simple terms, you are only “one of a kind” because you share a kind with others (you’re unique, but first you are a human being like others). McGilchrist highlights this paradox: sameness enables difference. An individual differs from others only by being consistent in itself over time – you are the “same person” today as yesterday, which is why you’re different from someone else. This sounds abstract, but he makes it concrete: Children delight in naming categories (“Doggie! Birdie!”) as they learn, which is useful, but if we get stuck in seeing only the category, we lose the vibrant uniqueness of each instance. The left hemisphere excels at pigeonholing things into general classes (the Many), whereas the right hemisphere sees each thing in its particularity (the One-as-irreplaceable). McGilchrist argues that we need both perspectives. He uses a humorous literary example: Don Giovanni pursued women in general – one of every type – which meant he never truly loved any one woman in particular. Similarly, someone who claims to be a “citizen of the world” but belongs to no specific place may end up feeling rootless. These examples drive home that meaning arises when the universal and the particular interplay properly. The chapter also references William Blake, whom McGilchrist loves to quote: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel…”. This underscores that true value and goodness live in concrete reality, not in abstract slogans. In brain terms, the right hemisphere keeps track of those “minute particulars” and imbues them with value, while the left likes grand schemes that can sometimes become inhuman. McGilchrist concludes that the world tends toward diversification – life revels in creating ever more distinct individuals, not just replicas. Appreciating “the One and the Many” means recognizing each unique part and the whole it’s part of. Only a balanced mind – one that can see the forest and the trees – can do this justice. This chapter, therefore, is a plea against both excessive homogenization (treating everything as the same) and excessive fragmentation (treating everything as unrelated). The one and the many need each other, just as our thinking needs both the unifying right hemisphere and the differentiating left.
Chapter 22: Time
McGilchrist now examines time, a fundamental aspect of reality, through his hemispheric lens. He posits that time is deeply connected to life and consciousness – everything flows and changes – and this aligns with a process-oriented, right-hemisphere view of the world. He contrasts this with the left-hemisphere habit of treating time as if it were space: something we can break into units (seconds, minutes) and arrange on a line. While clock-time is useful, McGilchrist says it’s an abstraction. The reality of time is lived duration, what philosopher Henri Bergson called la durée. We experience time as a flow: the past, present, and future bleed into one another in memory and anticipation. The left hemisphere, however, struggles with true continuity. As mentioned earlier with Zeno’s paradox, when the left brain tries to analyze time, it often chops it into freeze-frames and then is puzzled by movement. McGilchrist also notes how this plays out in pathology: people with right-hemisphere damage often lose the feel of time moving – life becomes a series of static moments (some schizophrenic patients, for example, feel stuck in an “eternal now” with no fluid transition, which is deeply disorienting). The chapter argues that science’s view of time as a dimension (or something that can even be reversed or treated as static, like in the notion of a “block universe”) is a useful model but not the whole truth. He points out that in physics, time is often treated mathematically by turning it into a spatial dimension (hence “spacetime”), which is powerful for equations but essentially removes the flow – it’s like looking at a full movie reel all at once instead of watching the movie unfold. McGilchrist favors Heraclitus’s vision: everything is in flux, you can’t step in the same river twice. He ties purpose and freedom into this: if time is real, then the future is open and not predetermined, allowing for genuine novelty and choice. Strict determinism, which imagines the universe as a movie already filmed, denies this flow of time and thereby denies real change or free will. McGilchrist finds determinism not only philosophically but morallyproblematic, since it undercuts responsibility (and, ironically, undercuts the meaningfulness of the theory itself, as Thomas Nagel and others observe). In closing, Chapter 22 emphasizes that time and change are not illusions but fundamental features of reality that any true account of the world must acknowledge. The right hemisphere, with its appreciation of music, narrative, and evolution, naturally grasps this. McGilchrist calls us to trust our lived sense of time – the fact that we grow, strive, and remember – as telling us something real about the cosmos, something no static formula can fully capture.
Chapter 23: Flow and Movement
Continuing the theme, McGilchrist doubles down on the idea that flux – continuous movement – is the natural state of reality, and apparent stabilities are just eddies in the stream. In “Flow and Movement,” he expands beyond time to all processes. He asserts bluntly: everything flows. A mountain is just rock flowing so slowly that we perceive it as solid; our bodies are rivers of matter, constantly replacing cells; even our thoughts and selves are ever-changing processes. Stability and solidity, in this view, are relative – useful perceptions at a certain scale, but not absolutes. McGilchrist also highlights the creative role of resistance: it’s when flow meets some opposition that patterns form (like whirlpools in water). This means even randomness and constraints have their place in generating order and new forms. The chapter contrasts the right hemisphere’s comfort with continuous change and “curved,” organic patterns, with the left hemisphere’s penchant for straight lines and discrete steps. He cites the insight of various thinkers (Schelling, Bergson, etc.) that reality is not linear, but the left hemisphere simplistically projects lines and grids onto it. A fascinating neurological anecdote here is Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience during a stroke: when her left hemisphere went offline, she felt a blissful merging with the flow of her surroundings – boundaries dissolved and there was just continuity. While we obviously need our boundaries and categories to function, McGilchrist uses this to illustrate that the sense of separateness and static objects is to some extent a construction of the left brain. In practical terms, he says, we have to foreground certain things for action (the left hemisphere’s task), but we mustn’t forget the background, the whole from which these things arise. If we take the left hemisphere’s analytic carving as final, we end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of reality – bits that don’t quite reconnect into life. He uses an audio metaphor: no matter how high the sampling rate, a digital recording is never the actual continuous sound wave. Similarly, dissecting the world into data points, however finely, will never recreate the living flow. The chapter is rich with examples of how an overemphasis on parts leads to absurd outcomes. One anecdote is of a man who, after a brain injury, drew what should be curved shapes as made of tiny straight segments – he literally couldn’t produce a smooth curve. His water pouring looked stop-motion to him. Schizophrenics, again, see people as completely changed if even minor details differ (unable to sense the underlying continuity). McGilchrist links this to certain philosophical stances like Derek Parfit’s – the idea that selves are just a series of disjointed states – which McGilchrist views as an analytical overshoot similar to a schizophrenic outlook. Ultimately, “Flow and Movement” makes a plea: Embrace the flow. Understand that concepts and static models are tools, not the real, wet, flowing reality. Our right hemisphere can perceive that continuous dance, and we should too, if we want to grasp life as it is.
Chapter 24: Space and Matter
In this chapter, McGilchrist explores space and matter, challenging conventional views that see them as fixed, inert stuff. He notes modern physics itself has evolved: space is not an empty void but more like a field or a potential, teeming with energy (even a vacuum seethes with “virtual” particles). McGilchrist eagerly seizes on this to propose a more fertile conception of space: rather than a sterile container, it’s productive and full of possibility – akin to a womb or the Buddhist idea of Sunyata (emptiness that is generative). He argues that Western thought made a misstep in imagining space as dead nothingness; instead, space could be thought of as an active relational field. Similarly, with matter, he invokes quantum physics where matter at its core dissolves into energy and probabilities until observed. The solidity we experience is like those eddies in Chapter 23’s flow – stable forms that energy takes, much as a whirlpool is form taken by water. Thus, matter isn’t a set of little billiard balls as once thought; it’s more like patterns of activity in something fundamentally alive or mind-like. This leads to a bold idea: perhaps mind is more fundamental than matter. McGilchrist suggests that trying to derive consciousness from matter (the usual scientific-materialist view) is putting the cart before the horse. Consciousness is what we know most directly (our own experience), while matter, as physics now admits, is quite mysterious and insubstantial on close inspection. So he entertains the notion that the physical might be an aspect or product of consciousness, rather than the other way around. He points out this elegantly sidesteps puzzles like the “fine-tuning” of the universe, because if mind or value permeate existence, of course the universe is set up for life and awareness. It also casts things like beauty and order as reflections of an underlying cosmic mind, rather than flukes. The chapter then delves into depth – literally the third dimension, but also metaphorically depth of meaning. McGilchrist notes how depth perception is connected to a sense of reality (3D vs flat). Schizophrenics and some modern art (like cubism), he observes, lack depth – the world becomes a 2D surface, which he sees as an impoverishment. Depth brings richness and perspective; its loss is devitalizing (Tillich’s comment that modern man lost a “dimension of depth” is cited). He also brings asymmetry and imperfection into play: the universe has a handedness (chirality), and symmetry in excess is lifeless (perfect symmetry means nothing happens). It’s the slight imbalances that allow matter to clump into stars, or organisms to arise. This aligns with his broader theme that not only is the universe not a uniform machine, it’s more like a work of art – full of quirks, asymmetries, textures that make it interesting and fecund. Lastly, McGilchrist addresses the provocative idea (one he almost named the book after) that “there are no things, only relationships.” He explains that what we consider distinct things are really nodes in a web of interactions. We never encounter “matter” or “things” in isolation; we only know them through their relations – how they affect other things, including us. Even physics ends up describing particles by what they do, not what they “are” intrinsically. McGilchrist takes this further to a philosophical position akin to process philosophy or radical relationalism: that perhaps the world is fundamentally made of relations (activities, qualities, processes) and the idea of a standalone “thing” is a useful fiction. This has spiritual echoes too, which he explores: mystics find unity behind things, but he cautions that unity (the One) shouldn’t erase the Many (the real existence of individual souls or entities). He cites Berdyaev and Mahayana Buddhism: reality is not just emptiness (One), but emptiness is form and form is emptiness – meaning the divine or ultimate manifests as the myriad things without being separate from them. So, Chapter 24 paints a view of the cosmos as inherently meaningful, dynamic, and interwoven. Space is alive with energy, matter is a form of mind, depth and value are real dimensions, and everything exists in relation. It’s a far cry from the clockwork universe – more like an organic, unfolding story in which we are participants rather than observers.
Chapter 25: Matter and Consciousness
Now McGilchrist tackles head-on the relationship between mind and matter, arguably the central mystery of consciousness. He begins with a striking observation: people think matter is straightforward and consciousness is mysterious, but perhaps it’s the opposite. We are intimately familiar with consciousness (it’s the one thing we can’t doubt, as Descartes noted), whereas matter, when probed by science, turns out to be elusive – quantum physics shows it dissolving into energy and probability fields. He quotes a point that materialism ironically tries to derive the concrete (experience) from the abstract (matter as conceived by physics). McGilchrist challenges the standard model that the brain somehow “produces” consciousness the way a generator produces electricity. He leans towards a transmission or filter theory: the brain may be more like a radio tuner that picks up or limits mind, rather than the originator of mind. This would explain phenomena like near-death experiences or terminal lucidity, where consciousness seems to bloom when the brain is shutting down, as if the filter’s removal lets a greater mind shine through. He discusses evidence that consciousness isn’t tightly correlated with brain mass or complexity as we’d expect – e.g. intelligent people with very little cortical tissue, or the sophisticated behavior of single cells and plants. These examples suggest mind-like qualities are more widespread in nature (a view akin to panpsychism or panexperientialism). Another key argument McGilchrist makes is that consciousness is fundamental to reality because it’s involved in shaping what we observe. In quantum physics, the observer effect hints that at the microscopic level, the act of observation (linked to consciousness) “collapses” possibilities into actual events. He connects this with the cosmos at large: if mind is primary, the universe’s fine-tuning and the emergence of life are not baffling flukes but expected, since mind was there from the start. This view also dissolves the need for contrived explanations like multiverses to explain why we’re here – instead, a universe with consciousness inbuilt will naturally have the properties needed for consciousness to manifest more fully (like in us). McGilchrist cites Noam Chomsky’s wry comment that consciousness isn’t mysterious until you start intellectualizing it; it’s the most direct reality we know. Many scientists, ironically, talk as if matter is solid and figured out, when it’s actually a bundle of paradoxes (wave/particle duality, etc.), and then treat consciousness as an anomaly, when it’s actually what we directly experience every moment. He also touches on the hard problem of consciousness (how subjective experience arises from brain activity) and suggests the problem might be insoluble only if we insist on a materialist starting point. If instead we say consciousness is an ontological primitive (like space, time, mass, etc.), then matter and mind might be two aspects of the same underlying reality. Throughout, McGilchrist is careful not to oversimplify: he doesn’t say “brain doesn’t matter” – obviously, brain damage can affect the mind. But he likens it to a radio receiver being damaged; the signal (mind) might still be there, you just can’t tune it properly. By Chapter 25’s end, McGilchrist prepares us for a cosmology in which mind pervades the cosmos. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon or illusion; it’s the most real thing, the forum in which reality shows up. This not only validates our inner life as something fundamental, but it also means we might have to revise our notion of matter as “dumb stuff.” Instead, perhaps the universe is better understood as something like a thought or an organism, where what we call matter is just how consciousness appears when viewed a certain way. This sets the stage for Chapter 26’s discussion on value and Chapter 27’s on purpose, because if mind and life are baked into reality, then ideas of meaning and goal are no longer anomalies but expected features.
Chapter 26: Value
In Chapter 26, McGilchrist addresses value – concepts like goodness, beauty, meaning – and asserts that they are not just subjective add-ons but woven into the fabric of reality. He begins by stating that value is something we discover in encounter with the world, not something we arbitrarily slap onto an otherwise valueless world. Science, with its left-hemisphere blinkers, often claims values are secondary or “in the eye of the beholder” because you can’t measure a moral or aesthetic value under a microscope. But McGilchrist points out an irony: science itself runs on an intrinsic value – truth – which it cannot prove or even define using scientific methods. Our commitment to truth is a matter of faithfulnessto reality, a sort of moral stance of the scientist. So even in denying values, science covertly relies on them. He invokes Kant’s argument from morality: we all feel that some things are truly good or evil, and that doesn’t make sense in a purely materialist universe. If the universe were just particles, concepts like good and evil would be meaningless. Yet we know in our “heads, chests, and stomachs” that value judgments are real. McGilchrist suggests that the reality of evil (even more than good) hints at a moral structure to reality – the fact that we can recognize something as deeply wrong implies an orientation of the world towards the good, a standard being violated. The existence of any objective value points to a transcendent or spiritual dimension (some ground for value beyond individual whims). He discusses how psychopathsprovide a pathological window: they are people who by brain or upbringing lack the emotional depth to perceive value in others. Tellingly, this correlates with deficits in right-hemisphere function. Psychopaths tend to see others as objects (left-hemisphere’s instrumental view) and can lie or harm without remorse – an extreme case of valuing nothing but utility or personal gain. McGilchrist uses this to argue that love and value are intertwined: “we love what we value and value what we love”. To truly know something or someone, you often have to love it – have a sympathetic engagement – which is why the detached, “view from outside” can miss truths. Philosophers and scientists who approached their subject with love and wonder (he gives examples from Pascal to Nietzsche acknowledging love as the path to knowledge) often gained deeper insight than those who were cold or contemptuous. He contrasts two attitudes: one of devotion (right hemisphere) and one of exploitation (left hemisphere). When Darwin said a scientist should have “a heart of stone” with no affections, McGilchrist cites this as an example of losing something crucial – Darwin himself lamented that his joy in music and poetry dried up, which McGilchrist might say is a loss of right-hemisphere vitality. The result of excluding goodness and beauty from “real” considerations is that science and industry often degrade what they touch, treating a forest, for example, as just timber or an artwork as just chemical pigments. But McGilchrist argues beauty and goodness are not just human sentimentality; they are aspects of reality that the right hemisphere picks up. Neuroscience backs this: right-hemisphere damage can make people indifferent to art, humor, and the moral weight of actions, rendering the world bland and ethics shallow. The chapter also addresses how certain modern teachings (like strict determinism or cynical “gene’s-eye” views of behavior) can erode moral behavior by convincing people their values aren’t real. He notes studies where people primed to disbelieve in free will or to think everyone is selfish actually behaved more antisocially. In contrast, a worldview that recognizes higher values tends to encourage people to live up to them. McGilchrist ultimately makes a bold claim: only a conception of reality that includes the sacred – that sees life, at least, as inviolably valuable – can underwrite moral realism. In other words, if we see the world as nothing but dead matter, then logically nothing is good or bad except what we arbitrarily feel. But if we see the world (and each other) as imbued with something sacred or inherently worthy, then morality has a firm basis. Thus, Chapter 26 paves the way to the final chapter by asserting that values are not an illusion but a clue to the nature of reality.
Chapter 27: Purpose, Life, and the Nature of the Cosmos
In the penultimate chapter, McGilchrist confronts the controversial question of purpose in the universe. Modern science often downplays or rejects teleology (natural purpose) as unscientific, but McGilchrist argues this has been taken too far. He points out that living organisms are brimming with purpose – even the theory of evolution has survival and reproduction as implicit goals driving it. Yet many scientists, uncomfortable with “purpose”, describe life in oddly purpose-evading ways. McGilchrist thinks this is a mistake: you simply can’t make sense of biology without concepts like function or aim (e.g. the “purpose” of the heart is to pump blood). He stresses that at different scales, different explanations appear – zoom in too much (say to molecules) and you see mechanism, but zoom out and you can discern purposeful patterns (like an organism striving). He introduces a nuanced view: the universe’s design might allow for both determinism and freedom in a layered way. The laws of physics give regularity (so not everything is chaotic), but within that framework, there is genuine spontaneity (quantum randomness, genetic mutations, etc.) which life uses to its advantage. He gives a fascinating example of maize plants under radiation stress re-shuffling their DNA – seemingly injecting randomness on purpose to find a solution, yet not in a haphazard way. It’s as if life “plays dice” in a targeted manner, which is a paradoxical mix of chance and intent. This supports his idea that organisms have intrinsic purposeand even harness randomness towards it. On a cosmic scale, McGilchrist suggests the universe’s purpose might simply be to create – to endlessly produce complexity, beauty, and new forms. The extravagance of evolution (all those bizarre creatures and experiments of nature) hints at a principle of creativity for its own sake, not just utility. He aligns with the “principle of plenitude” – everything that can happen, within the bounds of order, tends to happen, out of an overflowing generativity of the cosmos. This is diametrically opposed to the image of a stingy, minimalist universe. He addresses the fine-tuning argument: rather than accept that this fine-tuning suggests purpose or design, many have posited a multiverse to avoid it. McGilchrist wryly notes that if all possible universes exist, there must be one with purpose – so either way, purpose isn’t so easily dodged. For him, the elegance and improbability of our universe is evidence that something like mind or value shaped it, which implies an overarching telos (end-goal) or at least direction. The chapter distinguishes intrinsic vs extrinsic purpose: machines (extrinsic purpose given by us) vs organisms (intrinsic purpose – a flower isn’t trying to do something else, its blooming is its purpose). McGilchrist argues that natural “false starts” or dead ends (like extinct species) don’t negate purpose; they are part of a larger exploratory process akin to an artist’s drafts. Evolution’s “mistakes” are like crumpled pages on the floor – they don’t mean the poet has no purpose in writing the poem. He gives the intriguing observation that some simple life forms can live orders of magnitude longer than complex ones (bacteria vs humans). If sheer survival was the only purpose, multi-million-year bacteria beat us easily. The fact that evolution moved to creatures with shorter lifespans but perhaps higher consciousness suggests that maximizing life span or stability isn’t the sole aim – instead, it points to “extravagant creativity” (nature valuing intense bursts of complexity/awareness even at the cost of efficiency). McGilchrist also brings in examples where teleology must be invoked: the immune system and the fight against cancer rely on cells “knowing” to sacrifice themselves for the organism. If you tried to explain this purely mechanistically, it’s very hard; it behaves as if the cells have purpose (to keep the organism alive). Either some organizing field or structure enforces this (a holistic cause) or we accept that goal-oriented behavior is built in at the cellular level. Toward the end, he quotes Whitehead’s joke about scientists denying purpose while being very purposeful about it, and Nagel’s point that a purely Darwinian naturalism undercuts its own credibility. These drive home that a philosophy which says “everything is meaningless” cannot consistently exempt its own claims from that meaninglessness – it saws off the branch it sits on. Therefore, McGilchrist implies, a sensible worldview mustallow that our search for meaning and truth is itself rooted in the cosmos’s nature (which likely has a “bias” toward meaning/truth). Chapter 27 thus prepares us to re-embrace concepts like telos (end or goal) at all levels of existence, and it paves the way for viewing the world not as a random accident but as a kind of creative, evolving story – one where our purposes as conscious beings fit into a larger purposeful whole.
Chapter 28: The Sense of the Sacred
In the final chapter, McGilchrist addresses the sacred – those aspects of reality that evoke awe, reverence, and a sense of something beyond complete understanding. He argues that our modern, left-brain dominated outlook has largely lost this sense, to our detriment. The left hemisphere, as he’s shown, values what is explicit, definable, and controllable. But the sacred lives in the implicit, the mysterious, the unquantifiable. McGilchrist notes that what can’t be put into words or equations tends to be dismissed or forgotten in our current culture, yet that realm of wordless depth is where most of reality actually resides (things like love, personal identity, the feeling of being alive – none can be fully articulated, yet they’re profoundly real). He suggests we need to “step back” from the pane of glass we’ve pressed our nose against, to see the wider context and connections that give things meaning. In religious traditions, practices like ritual, music, and prayer serve to do exactly that – to remind us of the whole when we get caught in the part. McGilchrist carefully describes God or the Divine in an apophatic way: as “unwords” – placeholders for something inherently beyond our full grasp. Terms like Tao, Brahman, or God point to the sacred mystery without pinning it down, and this is intentional. He says attempts to define or explain the divine should be resisted; instead, acknowledging its mystery is the more truthful approach. This aligns with the right hemisphere’s comfort with uncertainty and paradox. McGilchrist praises “gnomic utterances” (paradoxical, poetic sayings) as appropriate religious language, because they convey some truth of the sacred while preserving its ineffability. He also ties this to psychology: a huge part of our own minds is beyond conscious awareness (the intuition, the unconscious, the emotional). So if our little individual self has depths we can’t articulate, why would the ultimate reality of the cosmos not also transcend our understanding? The chapter endorses an animistic or pantheistic instinct – the idea that the world is alive and ensouled – as “our natural and instinctive tendency”. McGilchrist suggests that the default human experience (especially in hunter-gatherer cultures) is to see themselves in a world full of spirits or presence, which modern education has worked overtime to discredit. But he sees wisdom in that older view: treating the world as sacred fosters a respectful, reciprocal relationship with it, whereas seeing it as a heap of inert stuff (the junk box universe) invites exploitation and nihilism. He clarifies that religion is not a proto-science (not a set of explanations to compete with physics) but a disposition and practice of relating to the mystery. Science deals in third-person, repeatable observations, which is great but by design limits itself to impersonal aspects of reality. The sacred, by contrast, is often encountered in the personal, subjective, unique experiences – the very things science brackets out. Therefore, a purely scientific worldview, while powerful, only illuminates a “tiny subset of reality”. A spiritual or sacred outlook doesn’t necessarily conflict with science; it complements it by acknowledging the whole, especially those parts that science can’t measure (meaning, purpose, value, consciousness). McGilchrist concludes by comparing two visions of the world: the materialist one, which leaves us with a “junk heap” of meaningless stuff, and the sacred one, which sees the world as charged with value and purpose. In the sacred view, the world is like a text written by the Logos (order, reason) but interpreted through Mythos (story, meaning). Everything becomes not just what it is, but what it signifies in a greater scheme. This imbues life with significance and provides the only solid ground for things like moral truths (for if nothing is sacred, why should any moral law really bind?). McGilchrist gently invites us to remember the sacred – not necessarily in a specific religious way, but in re-opening ourselves to wonder and humility before the vastness we participate in. It’s an invitation to restore balance: to let the right hemisphere’s sense of awe and connection temper the left hemisphere’s desire to dissect and dominate. By doing so, we might heal some of the spiritual malaise of modernity – recovering a world that, while explained by science in many parts, is not explained away. The book thus ends on a note that is both philosophical and deeply personal: truth, for McGilchrist, is beautiful and good as well as factual, and recognizing the sacred is about seeing the full truth of the world, with both hemispheres working in harmony to make us whole.
Source: McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.
