Here Brian Wicker argues that the familiar empiricism of the British philosophical tradition is now worn out. It will no longer do as a basis, either for Christianity of for humanism. He turns to Marx, Wittgenstein, and Merleau Ponty three philosophers bred in a different, European tradition for an adequate interpretation of modern experience. For these thinkers, man does not stand apart from the world in isolated mental consciousness. Our life is a sharing in the world which sustains us. We are individual only because we already share in a community. This approach is discussed first in relation to the work of novelist makers of fictional worlds and then in relation to the history of religions as studied by Levy Bruhl, Van der Leeuw, and Eliade . Finally the argument turns to our most personal problem: death, and the resurrection which lies beyond it.