While we owe a great deal to the scientific method and its objective reasoning and always will, we need to transcend the mechanistic world view that we have inherited from it. Here we need to engage science’s wise and beautiful older sister, art. We have known this for some time. Here is how Aldo Leopold put it the year I was born.
The Taboo
There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music, he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.
Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac
1949