The aim of science is to illuminate the mysteries of nature and discover the elemental truths pulsating sublime and indifferent beneath the starry skin of the universe. The aim of art is to give us a language for wresting meaning from the truth and living with the mystery. Creativity in both is a style of noticing, of attending to the world more closely in order to love it more deeply, of seeing everything more and more whole — a word that shares its Latin root with “holy.” This is why the greatest visionaries bend their gaze beyond the horizon of their discipline and of their era’s givens to take in the vista of life as a totality of being. How inseparable Einstein’s passion for the violin was from his physics and Goethe’s passion for morphology from his poetry, how difficult to tell where Kepler the mind ends and Kepler the body begins. There are few visionaries in the history of our species who have changed our understanding of nature and our place in it more profoundly than Jane Goodall (April 3, 1934–October 1, 2025) — something she was able to do in large part because she never saw science as a walled garden separate from the wilderness of life. Formed by her love of books since childhood, she placed the raw material of literature — compassion — at the center of her scientific work, drawing on her passion for artistic creativity to make her revelatory discovery of chimpanzee tool use — that selfsame impulse to bend the world to the will that sparked human creativity when we descended from the trees to the caves to invent fire and figurative art. Jane Goodall with the young chimp Flint at Gombe (Photograph: Hugo van Lawick, Goodall’s first husband, courtesy of Jane Goodall Institute)The essence of Goodall’s integrated, holistic view of life comes ablaze in a passage from a letter to a friend found in Africa in My Blood: An Autobiography in Letters (public library) — that magnificent record of how she turned her childhood dream into reality. The day before New Year’s Eve 1958, visiting her family in London for the first time since her departure to Africa twenty months earlier, she writes:It is lovely to be in an artistic atmosphere again. I realize now, more than ever before, that I can never live wholly without it. It feels so heavenly to be able to just sit in front of the fire & talk for hours — of cabbages & kings — poetry, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion. It’s wonderful, marvellous, terrific… I will stop now, because I have to wash my hair.Shampoo, song, and science — all of it the stuff of life, intertwined and integrated, lest we forget that only an integrated human nature can begin to apprehend nature itself — that “great chain of causes and effects” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation,” in the lovely words of Alexander von Humboldt, who knew that artists too are all the greater for taking a passionate interest in the realities of nature subject to science. It was Humboldt who first conceived of nature as a system, who saw “the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter.” It was Jane Goodall whose science revealed that kinship is the software the system runs on, and whose life reminds us that just the kinship within a creature — the unity and harmony between all parts and passions of a person — is as essential to being fully alive as the kinship between creatures. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.