THE " INTELLIGENCE " OF PLANTS 89 



she sanctions is, in Ruskin's words, an innocent but exquisite 

 luxury, namely, luxury for all by the help of all. 



The harmony which Prof! Bergson thinks existed only at the 

 beginning, has, in my view, never been discontinued. On the 

 contrary, it became eVer more effective though under different 

 forrrs. The more perfected partners merely betook themselves, 

 as advanced " specialists," to wider fields of action. They 

 " relied " in the main upon the integrity of the symbiotic sense. 

 What Maeterlinck calls the " foresight " of the plant is thus a 

 close associate of the symbiotic sense equipped with which the 

 plant is able to gauge the needs of the partner by " intuition " 

 as it were a direct way of the " mind " to arrive at conclusions. 



The case here made out for Plant Psychosis may not inaptly 

 be summarised by the German saying : " Wem Gott ein Amt 

 giebt, dem giebt er auch Verstand." Maeterlinck almost hints 

 that animal intelligence may have been derived from plant 

 intelligence, as the more fundamental and original of the two. 

 He says this : 



In a world which we believe unconscious and destitute of intelligence, 

 we begin by imagining that the least of our ideas created new combina- 

 tions and relations. When we come to look into things more closely, it 

 appears infinitely more probable that it is impossible for us to create any- 

 thing whatsoever. We are the last comers on this earth, we only find 

 what has always existed and, like astonished children, we travel again 

 the road which life has travelled before us. 



Every flower has its idea, its system, its acquired experience which 

 it turns to advantage. When we examine closely their little inventions, 

 their diverse methods, we are reminded of those enthralling exhibitions 

 of machine-tools, of machines for making machinery, in which the mechan- 

 ical genius of man manifests all its resources. But our mechanical genius 

 dates from yesterday, whereas floral mechanism has been at work for 

 thousands of years. When the flowers made their appearance upon the 

 earth, there were no models around them which they could imitate ; they 

 had to derive everything from within themselves. 



The latter part of the statement is, of course, challengeable ; 

 for we know row that the higher plants were preceded by bacteria 

 which at any rate devised many primitive mechanisms of work 

 .and even the methods of Symbiosis, in virtue of which they 

 could supply a prime need of higher plants, namely, Nitrates. 

 The plants, therefore, did not devise everything spontaneously 

 from within themselves. They derived inspiration from helpers. 



Maeteilinck has, however, a special passage in which he 

 shrewdly hints at the existence in Nature of some such principle 



