I have on my shelf here two large compendia of flowers, giving all the information about names, growing conditions, forms and propagation. I don’t have similar works on the cellular structure, chemical make up and evolutionary history 0f individual plants, but there are lots of detailed books on the subject. Every time we find out a new facet of a thing we must investigate and detail it to the last degree, and in so doing we know…what?
We know about the facet of the thing, we know all the facets and we know where things fit into each other in the matrix that is nature, but can we say we know what a flower is any more than we could when we only knew it by sight or smell, by some unexpected appearance of the flower in a garden, when we didn’t even have a name for it?
Our penchant for listing, naming and classifying, evening knowing enough about something to make some (as we see it) improvements and even for knowing how to keep it healthy, improves our knowledge of parts of a flower, but doesn’t impart a greater understanding of what a flower is. We don’t get to know what a flower feels like, what it is to be a flower is beyond us. We only know what we can dissect and analyse.
There is far more to life than analysis.