universe, and hence what his total experience of life 
     proves to be in comparison with the experience of the 
     man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or 
     wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at 
     once that the completely profane world, the wholly 
     desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history 
     of the human spirit. It does not devolve upon us to show 
     by what historical processes and as the result of what 
     changes in spiritual attitudes and behavior modern man 
     has desacralized his world and assumed a profane 
     existence. For our purpose it is enough to observe that 
     desacralization pervades the entire experience of the 
     nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in 
     consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover 
     the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic 
     societies. (p. 13)