Flower in the crannied wall
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. |
The conceit of Tennyson's seemingly abstruse little poem is easily puzzled out: Anyone wishing to understand a flower all in all, that is, comprehensively, would also need to fully understand photosynthesis; to fully understand photosynthesis, they would need to fully understand light; to fully understand light, solar energy; to understand solar energy, particle physics, then gravity, electromagnetism, quantum fields, string theory, spatial dimensions, time... There is no end to this concatenation of conditions. Because of the causal interconnectedness of all things, to fully understand a flower or anything else, it is necessary to understand the entire universe and a complete understanding of a given object or phenomenon necessarily entails the complete understanding of every other. To put it another way, the precondition to a truly comprehensive knowledge of one thing (a flower, the mating habits of the poison arrow frog, electricity, Hamlet, the circulatory system) is omniscience. It follows from this and the impossibility of infinite human intelligence that not only the universe but every object on your table and everything you see out your window is cognitively closed and will remain forever a sacred mystery.
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