Writing in the second book of his “Natural History” (Naturalis Historia), Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), whilst recounting the many interesting facts he has learned and collected about the Moon, suddenly breaks from his explanations to wax critical upon a “disease of the human mind” he has observed.
I first began the study of the history or religion and of theology in 1990 and have been including the subjects in my ongoing pursuit of knowledge and wisdom ever since, and in this one brief passage, Pliny, in this one aside in his “Natural History” that briefly interrupts the topic about which he was writing, has sliced straight through myriad Gordian knots tied by countless theologians down through the ages.
Nor in no other wise could offspring know
Mother, nor mother offspring- which we see
They yet can do, distinguished one from other,
No less than human beings, by clear signs.
While it is to be granted that the taxonomic classification and its associated rules of naming can be a bit convoluted when viewed from the outside, in all fairness it is positively Byzantine when viewed from the inside. Even so, it is certainly not random. Indeed, without it, and the centuries of work put to developing and refining its practices by some of humanity’s most inquisitive minds, it would be difficult if not wholly impossible to study the living world. The challenge is just how one new to it can come to gain an understanding of it and its practices in the first place.