Personality of plants

by Royal Dixon; Franklyn Everett Fitch

Such blanket reasoning leads nowhere. If you believe that you are a free, independent, decision-making soul (and who does not?) logically you must grant the same rights to the humble Squash.

Even in the terms of man’s own science, the plants can be shown to be intelligent. The psychologist Titchner classifies the three stages of mental processes as (1) Sensations (2) Images and (3) Affections. The term “affection” is here used in the special sense of a capacity for entering into intellectual states of pleasure or pain.

In view of what has already been said, it hardly seems necessary to prove the existence of sensation in plants. The very fact that all life is a constant response to stimuli and the adjustment to environment presupposes the existence of plant sensation. Only a few hours passed in the investigation of plant habits will show our vegetable friends giving definite responses to heat, cold, moisture, light, and touch, while laboratory experiments show their sensitive powers of taste and hearing.

The touch sense of the Sundew is developed to such an extent that it can detect the pressure of a human hair one twenty-fifth of an inch long. The tendrils of the Passion Flower attempt to coil up at the slightest contact of the finger and as quickly flatten out upon its removal. The stamens of the Opuntia or Prickly Pear have specialized papillae of touch exactly similar to the papillae of the Hermione Worm. When rubbed by the body of an insect, they transmit an impulse which causes the anthers to let loose a shower of pollen on the intruder. The animal world cannot exhibit a higher sensitiveness to touch than that displayed by the celebrated Venus Fly-Trap. On each side of the leaf midrib stand three sharp little bristles. They are the sense organs controlling the closing of the vegetable spring. Quick must an insect be to escape their vigilance.

Sensation and imagery are so closely connected in the human brain that the existence of one would seem to predicate the other. Fortunately, we have very good evidence to indicate the faculty of plant memory, which must necessarily be built up of images of one kind or another.

If a plant which is accustomed to folding its leaves together in sleep on the setting of the sun, be placed in a completely dark room, it will continue to decline and elevate its foliage at regular intervals, indicating that it remembers the necessity for rest even with the reminder of outside stimuli lacking.

By what faculty do plants become aware of the approach of spring? Only occasionally are they deceived by January thaws, and no matter how unseasonably cold a March may be, they go right ahead with the preparation of April buds and leaves. So accurate is plant knowledge about the seasons that Alpine flowers often bore their way up through long-lingering snow, even developing heat with which to melt the obstruction, when they feel that spring has really come. What gives plants such courage in the face of contradicting elements, if not an accurate sense of the passage of time and therefore the memory of other seasons, which implies imagery?

Until we develop a workable system of thought communication with plants, we can never scientifically prove that plants are capable of psychological “affections” or emotions. Mental states are purely personal matters. We would never be sure that any other human being went through feelings of love, anger, hate and pity, similiar to our own, if he were not able to tell us of them. Until the plants can describe to us their inner emotions, we can never definitely know whether they have real feelings, and if they parallel the human variety in any degree. But just as we have become able to read a man’s mental processes by his facial expressions, tone of voice and bodily posture, so we can guess at plant emotion by external manifestations. When a flower greets the morning sun with expanded petals, uplifted head and a generally bright appearance, why should we not say it is happy and contented? When an approaching storm causes a plant to droop its body and contract its petals and leaves into the smallest compass possible, why is not fear, apprehension and melancholy indicated? When the jaws of the Venus Fly-Trap close on its hapless victim, they must do so with a savage joy akin to that of a Tiger springing on its prey.

There are those who relegate a certain amount of intelligence to plants but deny them consciousness. They are unwilling to admit that plants are aware of their own physical and mental processes. This would seem to be the merest quibbling over terms and an entrance into that metaphysics which does away with all consciousness.

If plants were not conscious, at least under stimulation, they would have long since perished from the earth through inability to react to new conditions. Francis Darwin says: “We must believe that in plants exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves.” Many scientists believe that life and consciousness always precede and are superior to organization. It is urged that possibly many plants possess consciousness without self-consciousness or introspection.