David Cooper explores and defends the view that a reality independent of human perspectives is necessarily indescribable, a 'mystery'. Other views are shown to be incompatible with our human condition. Cooper restores to philosophy a proper appreciation of mystery - that is what provides a measure of our beliefs and conduct. - ;Philosophers, both western and eastern, have long been divided between 'humanists', for whom 'man is the measure of things', and their opponents, who claim that there is a way, in principle knowable and describable, that the world anyway is, independent of human perspec