The difference between the horse and oak
Between an evergreen, bacterium, or bird,
Between an ape and the tomato plant
Or spiders and the nesting cardinals
May be discovered to be as great as
That we find between whole groups of human
Individuals if we engage in
A taxonomy of minds, observing now
This person’s vast web of thoughts, and then
Another’s mind unfold, each a primordial
Jungle of symbolic references—
Some clusters thickly habitual others
Marginally thin but still linked in—and
We can then classify these webs and clouds
Into domains and kingdoms, phyla, class,
Orders, family, genus, species and the like
Until we have at least as vast a realm
As nature holds of living things that cannot talk.
I like this. You're on to something here. The variety of terms used to sort things out from one another should match the variety of the things themselves.
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