14 The Living Plant 



dividual processes of plants and animals are purely physical or 

 chemical, with no trace of a vital force in the old sense. Further- 

 more, the orderly sequence and cooperation of these processes 

 is largely explained by their linking up through the medium 

 of stimuli, as will later be explained in the suitable places in this 

 book. But it does not seem to me probable that the processes 

 only happen to be thus linked up, or that these particular link- 

 ings are merely the accidental survivors of innumerable ones that 

 happened in the past. Indeed, the most reasonable explanation 

 of the phenomena of organic nature in the large seems to me this, 

 that all of the life processes are subordinate to some influence 

 which is using living matter as a seat for its operations. Thus 

 there would exist in nature not tw^o, but three working entities, 

 matter, energy, and this X-influence. Perhaps the living matter 

 is the home which the principle of intelligence in Nature has 

 built for its residence. This is something more than vitalism, 

 or even the neo-vitalism of some philosophers; it is a super- 

 vitalism. But its acceptance harmonizes some of the greatest 

 difficulties in the interpretation of Nature, as the following pages 

 will illustrate in the suitable places. 



Finally there remains one matter which I wish to add at this 

 place. It may seem to the reader, as it will to some of my col- 

 leagues, that in laying so much stress as I do upon causative 

 adaptation, and a number of things of that sort, I am reading 

 into Nature a principle closely akin to intelligence. If I seem 

 to do this it is because that is my intention. I believe that the 

 evidence now accumulating is sufficient to show that the same 

 principle which actuates intelligence also actuates all the work- 

 ings of Nature ; or, as I have expressed the matter on a later page 

 of this book, all living matter thinks, though only the portion 

 thereof which enters into the brain of man is aware that it thinks. 

 Our intelligence is a kind of epitomized expression of the prin- 

 ciples underlying the operations of nature, very much as mathe- 

 matics is an epitomized expression of the relations of number. 



