All plants and animals of whatever kind begin life on exactly the same level. The wayside Daisy and the Human Being both start their earthly careers as single cells. In both cases, there is no visible machinery of life and consciousness, yet we can say “Here is a potential Daisy. Here is a potential Man.” The wonderful, all-pervading spirit of life belongs to both.
The language of the Bible classifies man with all life under the Hebrew term Nephesh chayiah, that is, living soul or creature. The Old Testament favours a rigorous protection of animals and plants against wanton destruction. Is not the equality of the three kingdoms of life hinted at in the following passage from Jonah?
“Thou hast had pity on the Gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night.”
“And I shall not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle.”
Some marvelous experiments carried on by Sir Jaghadish Chaundra Bose in Calcutta, India, offer interesting light on the higher life of plants. By exceptionally delicate and ingenious instruments, Sir Jaghadish has been able to measure the plant movements associated with growth, shock and response to stimuli in general. He has come to the conclusion that plants not only have a conscious intelligence, but have their good and bad days, their moods, their whims. He believes they react to slight or pleasurable stimuli by general expansion. Violent stimuli cause pain and contraction. A plant struck a blow quivers and shakes in veritable agony. Plants about to die undergo a violent spasm and then by making no response at all to outside influences, show that they have actually given up the ghost.
Sir Jaghadish is satisfied that a plant pulled up by the roots experiences a shock comparable to that of a man being beaten into insensibility. Many trees and plants, as every gardener knows, fail to survive transplanting and die from pure shock, even if their tissue has been in no way injured. Sir Jaghadish has performed the interesting experiment of administering a powerful chemical to act as an anesthetic to trees about to be transplanted. Such specimens have stood the re-location well but in some cases have shown an apparent loss of memory and a general state of upset habit, exactly as would a man or animal coming out of a stupor.
All this strongly suggests a soul or driving spiritual force in every living creature. Regarding its exact nature there are many opinions. Maeterlinck believes that there is a general scattered intelligence, a sort of universal fluid, which penetrates all organisms in an amount proportionate to their conductivity. Man offers the least resistance to the divine principle and so receives a generous share. The plants receive lesser amounts, but really belong to the same intellectual order. They exhibit the same ideas, the same hopes, the same logic and undergo the same trials in a lesser degree than their more educated brothers. The plants and man both grope, hesitate and correct themselves in their labourious evolutionary development.
Of course, this theory is only a conjecture, but is very appealing and much more modest than the traditional attitude which assumes that man is a miraculous and marvelously endowed being fallen from another world and therefore lacking any definite ties with the rest of terrestrial life.
If then we believe that a vital spiritual force dwells within every plant, what becomes of it after the death of its enclosing walls? Each cell of a tree in effect dies many times each season. Continual waste and renovation bring periodic transformation of cell structure. The abode is changed but not the inhabitant. There must be an animating, non-physical force which carries on the cycle. If it is superior to the forces of bodily dissolution, must it not also be infinite, immortal?
With so many modern people doubting (or pretending to doubt) the immortality of man, it may seem presumptuous to claim immortality for the plants, yet that is the unescapable conclusion to which the writers of this book are driven. All life is one, indivisible and inseparable. There is a divine spark in every living creature and it is reasonable to expect it to live beyond death. Immortality by reproduction is not enough. If it were true that the eternal principle continually passes from parent to offspring, and that when the parent dies, he is dead spiritually as well as physically, then we should expect immediate degeneracy and death after reproduction takes place. That a portion of soul essence descends through countless generations we do not doubt, but each plant and animal is also a spiritual entity. Man and plants are both tools in the hands of Maeterlinck’s all-prevailing intelligence. Yet man feels that he is a free agent. Why not the plants also?