When I was 15, I was watching television at home in the way most people did back then: together. On the screen in the corner of the little livingroom was a figure who would never get to present a major 13-part series now: a small man, balding and bespectacled, delivering long monologues about the history of science in Polish-accented English. He was called Jacob Bronowski and he was presenting his BBC series The Ascent of Man. Bronowski was dealing with the destructive power of illusions of certainty: “the assertion of dogma that closes the mind” to human suffering. He was...