Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science’s powers to analyse. It is quintessentially ‘wild’, in the sense my father disliked so much: unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely—despite our endless efforts to ‘garden’, to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems—with wild nature. Almost all the richness
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