After a thoughtful consideration of such facts as these, only the blindest prejudice can continue to laugh at plant intelligence. Why then has the world of human thought been so long and reluctant to acknowledge it? Simply because it always reasons along authentic and established lines. For many years it has been taught to associate animal movement with special groups of cells called muscles and intelligence with special groups of cells called nerve tissue. Failing to find any trace of nerve tissue in plants, it ignores a hundred convincing facts to the contrary, and declares that plant intelligence is a myth. Failing to detect a mechanism of sensibility, it denies the existence of sensibility, even though in the little Mimosa the sense of touch travels from leaf to leaf before our eyes.
It must be realized that the animal brain merely acts as the electrical motor for the life-power which drives the universe. This motor and all of its auxiliaries are absent in Protozoa and other one-celled animals, but the power is not. In the same way, they are absent throughout all plantdom, but the eternal life principle manifests itself in many mighty acts.
What is a nervous system, anyhow? It is a group of cells, the specialized function of which is to transmit impulses from one to the other by certain obscure chemical reactions. Why cannot ordinary tissue cells do the same thing, possibly in a feebler, less efficient way? Plant cells are all joined together by fine connecting strands, forming a “continuity of protoplasm” through which such impulses could readily travel. Whether investigators agree to this or not, it is an indisputable fact that it is true.
Though science is now beginning to verify the fact of plant intelligence most conclusively great and independent thinkers of all times have long felt its truth. Certain minds are always in advance of their age. While science laboriously proves every step of its way with painstaking and commendable exactness, they are soaring far ahead in new and fascinating fields. Sometimes they go astray, but quite as frequently they are the pioneers of great and progressive ideas.
CHAPTER XIV
The Higher Life of Plants
“I swear I think now that everything, without exception, has an immortal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the animals!
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!”
—Walt Whitman
Maurice Maeterlinck, in one of his delightful essays, pays a remarkable tribute to the spiritual powers of plants.
“Though there be plants and flowers that are awkward or unlovely,” he says, “there is none that is wholly devoid of wisdom and ingenuity. All exert themselves to accomplish their work, all have the magnificent ambition to overrun and conquer the surface of the globe by endlessly multiplying the form of existence which they represent. To attain this object, they have, because of the law which chains them to the soil, to overcome difficulties much greater than those opposed to the increase of animals.... If we had applied to the removal of the various vicissitudes which crush us, such as pain, old age, and death, one-half the energy displayed by any little flower in our gardens, we may well believe that our lot would be very different from what it is.”
No truer thought was ever set on paper. Though man prides himself upon his imagined superiority to non-human creation, and even denies the capacity for the higher things of life to animals and plants, he, in reality, nearly always shows himself vastly inferior to them in actual applications of moral and spiritual principles.