When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the golden eggs.

He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead stuff of the flower.
And therefore he will never do anything but fail, when he tries to find out the life in things.

How can he, when he has to take the life out of them first?
He could not even find out how a plum-pudding is made by merely analysing it.

He might part the sugar, and the flour, and the suet; he might even (for he is very clever, and very patient too, the more honour to him) take every atom of sugar out of the flour with which it had got mixed, and every atom of brown colour which had got out of the plums and currants into the body of the pudding, and then, for aught I know, put the colouring matter back again into the plums and currants; and then, for aught I know, turn the boiled pudding into a raw one again,--for he is a great conjurer, as Madam How's grandson is bound to be: but yet he would never find out how the pudding was made, unless some one told him the great secret which the sailors in the old story forgot--that the cook boiled it in a cloth.
This is Analysis's weak point--don't let it be yours--that in all his calculations he is apt to forget the cloth, and indeed the cook likewise.
No doubt he can analyse the matter of things: but he will keep forgetting that he cannot analyse their form.
Do I mean their shape?
No, my child; no.

I mean something which makes the shape of things, and the matter of them likewise, but which folks have lost sight of nowadays, and do not seem likely to get sight of again for a few hundred years.