The bee and the butterfly take their pollen and their honey, and the
strange moths so curiously coloured, like
The curious colouring of the
owls, come to them by night, and they turn towards the sun and live their
little day, and their petals fall, and where is the soul when the body
decays? I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wild
flowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end? What purpose? The plant
knows, and sees, and feels; where is its mind when the petal falls?
Absorbed in the universal dynamic force, or what? They make no shadow of
pretence, these beautiful flowers, of being beautiful for my sake, of
bearing honey for me; in short, there does not seem to be any kind of
relationship between us, and yet - as I said just now - language does not
express the dumb feelings of the mind any more than the flower can speak.
I want to know the soul of the flowers, but the word soul does not in the
smallest degree convey the meaning of my wish. It is quite inadequate; I
must hope that you will grasp the drift of my meaning. All these
life-laboured monographs, these classifications, works of Linnaeus, and
our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology, and the flower has not
given us its message yet. There are a million books; there are no books:
all the books have to be written. What a field! A whole million of books
have got to be written. In this sense there are hardly a dozen of them
done, and these mere primers. The thoughts of man are like the
foraminifera, those minute shells which build up the solid chalk hills
and lay the level plain of endless sand; so minute that, save with a
powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on your fingers to be
more than dust. The thoughts of man are like these: each to him seems
great in his day, but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become
triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand on your
thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic,
and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time
they will make a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there are
no books; the books are yet to be written.
Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise,
the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a
large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein they failed,
judged by the monograph standard, but gave a subtle food for the mind.
Some of this I would fain see now inspiring the works and words of our
great men of science and thought - a little alchemy. A great change is
slowly going forward all over the printing-press world, I mean wherever
men print books and papers.
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