Quite a few people have noticed that the modern world sometimes generates a sense of anomie, or ennui, or purposelessness. An insistent line of philosophical thought traces this problem to the modern world's supposed neglect of beauty. Whereas the ancient pagans saw the world as filled with spiritual agencies that gave the natural world a unique splendor, and Christians saw the world as a theophany, a revelation of God's beauty, modern persons are informed that beauty is merely a subjective feeling of pleasure, an accidental by-product of evolution by natural selection, which tells us that the real meaning of life is to reproduce and that our drive for beauty is just a sublimation of eros.