in praise of the naturalist

“There is not a lot of high-mindedness in Nature. I’d say there is moral blindness. Yet curiously, there are random acts of kindness.”

Greetings, please be seated, as the proceedings are to be preceded, with an allegory worth repeating. Saffron will relate an exchange between a mystic and a scientist and a naturalist:

“I need to see it—says the lab-bench physicalist. To the contrary—argues the unswerving spiritualist. But the revering student of Nature, sitting on the ground under moonlight, spying with her infrared flashlight the behaviors of night-flying lepidopterans, she answers—you two, you both reduce the splendorous tree of Life, you the researching scientist by pruning variables, and you the meditating mystic, pruning by integration, you bedfellows both yearning for unification, with your inviolable laws, be they physical or immaterial. Why not the pair of you join me instead, in the mud, and watch the show of flitting hawkmoths, actors in this messy midnight drama?”

There isn’t much fixed or absolute or universal in the Natural World, not oneness, instead there is one-of-a-kindness.

“Unbreakable laws reveal fissures, hard rules are exposed to have soft spots, lock-tight theories pop off rivets and develop leaks.”

The budding naturalist, when investigating plant and animal communities, observes that common knowledge is usually wrong, and so turns to scientific literature, but finds published studies to be frequently misleading so turns to firsthand experience, then learns of the limits to empirical findings. With each humbling step, the apprentice in natural history is further initiated into the realm of enigmatic complexity, unfolding vitality, pluralism and inconsistency, chance and contingency, unforeseeable emergence, nuance and anomaly, elaboration and novelty, all characterizing continuously.

“Those revelations impart a deep engaging reverence for Creation or a dose of deferential awe, depending on the initiate’s temperament.”

You might say that the naturalist is naturally situated in that unoccupied area of inquiry, that no-man’s land between the magisteria of Earth and ether, albeit dwelling more in the former than the latter.

“The path of the natural historian cuts deeply sometimes, yet the field of vision is broad most of the time, with Living Nature central in our sites.”

The naturalist assumes residence where paradoxicalness appears to preside, and general principles are nudged aside, where properties are intricately measured but not all the time, where Nature reveals itself upon rigorous study but not totally, where material evidence is awarded great weight but not too much weight, where experiments disclose the nature of Life but don’t divulge all.