THE SEATS OF THE SOUL IN HISTORY 



By DAVID FRASER HARRIS, M.D., B.Sc. (Lond.) 



It is well known to the historian of biology that even the 

 plants have been supposed to possess souls. 



The famous naturalist, Andrea Caesalpinus (15 19-1603), of 

 Arezzo, who is even now regarded in Italy as the dicoverer of 

 the circulation of the blood, enters into a long discussion on the 

 nature and seat of the plant-soul in his book, De Plantis Librixvi. 

 (Florence, 1583). He writes : " Whether any one part in plants 

 can be assigned as the seat of the soul, such as the heart in 

 animals, is a matter for consideration — for since the soul is the 

 active principle (' actus ') of the organic body, it can neither be 

 ' tota in toto' nor 'tota in singulis partibus,' but entirely in 

 some one and chief part from which life is distributed to the 

 other dependent parts. If the function of the root is to draw 

 food from the earth, and of the stem to bear the seeds, and the 

 two cannot exchange functions . . . there must either be two 

 souls, different in kind and separate in place, the one residing 

 in the root, the other in the shoot, or there must be only one, 

 which supplies both with their peculiar capabilities. But that 

 there are not two souls of different kinds and in a different part 

 in each plant may be argued thus : we often see a root cut off 

 from a plant send forth a shoot, and in like manner a branch 

 cut off send a root into the ground, as though there were a 

 soul indivisible in its kind present in both parts. But this 

 would seem to show that the whole soul is present in both 

 parts, and that it is wholly in the whole plant, if there were 

 not this objection that, as we find in many cases, the capabilities 

 are distributed between the two parts in such a way that the 

 shoot, though buried in the ground, never sends out roots — 

 for example, in Pinus and Abris, in which plants also the roots 

 that are cut off perish." 



We need not follow the subtle Csesalpinus through all the 

 details of his arguments as to where the soul of the plant must 

 reside, but he finally places it at the junction between the root 

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