As Phillips puts it, we have 'misconstrued our needs'. His sages will help us to think of death as the exemplary fact, 'the fact that lures us into fictions' which we should not need since, rightly considered, the fact, unadorned, simply makes life intelligible. Darwin and Freud make death count in a new way by keeping it secular and finding a wholly secular, this-world language for it. The chapter on Darwin concentrates on his studies, early and late, of the earthworm, his celebration of the incessant labour of the millions of creatures who make the earth inhabitable, 'contingently hospitable', by sustaining its fertility. His delight in the worm is like that of an anthropologist discovering a new tribe.
Worms make possible the agricultural efforts of humanity.
Through the bodies of worms the earth is reborn again and again. Darwin hints that we should have to revise our assumptions of hierarchy, our relation to God as well as to the worm, and we might be tempted to reconsider ideas of political and social order that reflect those assumptions. We should have to think again about our natural status, about how lucky we are that nature is 'contingently hospitable', even though there is nothing contingent about our inevitable extinction. What we have, and as it is the only thing to be glad of we should be glad of it, is the kind of life that the inevitability of extinction makes possible. But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us - the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all.