Neuroscience, it seems to me, is the current most hopeful candidate for the role of putative but delusory answer to all Mankind's deepest questions: what is Man's place in Nature, and how should he live. What is the good life, at least in the western world?

Theodore Dalrymple, self-styled iconoclast, opens a critical essay on neuroscience with this quote, and then goes on to challenge the, to him, misguided belief that science will ever be able to answer “life's persistent questions” (to quote Garrison Keillor). Neuroscience is the particular science being probed, but Dalrymple's critique bears on any natural science.