that the cognitive capabilities of all organisms are limited by biology, e.g. a mouse will never be able to navigate a prime number maze. In the same way, certain problems may be beyond our understanding. Adherents Historical William James, American philosopher, in his essay "Is Life Worth Living?" (1896). James makes the point that much human mental activity (e.g. reading) is forever closed to the mind of a dog, even though we may share the same household and have a deep friendship with each other. So, by analogy, the human mind may be forever closed to certain aspects of the larger universe. This was a concept which James found liberating, and which gave an implicit significance to certain distressing aspects of the human condition. James makes an analogy with the suffering of a dog during a vivisection: the meaning of the vivisection is inaccessible to the dog. But that does not mean that the vivisection is meaningless. So it may be with our suffering in this world. Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who, in the first chapter of his last work, "Man and His Symbols" (1964), wrote: "...even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind. Within the mind they become psychic events whose ultimate nature is unknowable (for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance)." Contemporary Colin McGinn is the leading proponent of the new mysterian position among major philosophers. Thomas Nagel, American philosopher. Jerry Fodor, American philosopher and cognitive scientist. Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, and political commentator/activist. Martin Gardner, American mathematics and science writer, considered himself to be a mysterian. John Horgan, American science journalist. Steven Pinker, American psychologist; favoured mysterianism in How the Mind Works, and later wrote: "The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius—a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness—comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us." Roger Penrose, English physicist, mathematician