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Bibliography. 171 
ple, a soul. The soul.of plants is much less complex than that of ani- 
mals; it is, in fact, in itself, of a more obscure and undefined nature. 
Perception, imagination, consciousness, sensation, desire, volition, ap- 
pear here to have sunk into the night of a gloomy, confined existence, 
and the narrow path of analogy and induction towards this subject, 
unattainable by our inquiries, is open to us but for a short distance. 
The vegetable soul must not, however, be compared with the soul of 
man, or with that of the higher animals, but rather with the nucleus, 
or that point of the axis only, around which the life of the lowest and 
most simple animals revolves. Von Martius thinks that we can ad- 
mit of no organ of soul in plants; yet we may probably succeed, as I 
think, in our time, in discovering this organ even in plants; the ner- 
vous system has, as is well known, been already observed in vegeta- 
bles, by some learned botanists, although others, it is true, have not 
been able to convince themselves of the fact. 
“A series of phenomena are moreover enumerated, such as the spe- 
cific. susceptibility of plants for the actions of light, heat, air, mois- 
ture, &c., which, without a certain degree of sympathy and of per- 
ception, without a kind of internal consciousness, could not possibly 
have effect. Perhaps in them all the various grades of spiritual action 
combine to produce one single obscure idea. ‘The more general and 
intense the irritation. which acts upon plants, the more powerful is 
the perception. The sleeping and waking of plants, as also their hy- 
ernation, correspond exactly to the similar phenomena in animals, 
only that these states in plants are involuntary. The soul of the 
plant is diffused throughout it; in so far, however, as the vegetable 
soul acts according to its nature, formatively, plastically, one might 
Say that it is situated in the more highly organized plants, principally 
in the node, in which the vegetable powers slumber. 
; “This latter opinion might however be disputed, as might generally 
the entire current doctrine of the composition of plants of internodes, 
°n which subject we shall subsequently have occasion to speak more 
in detail. With respect to the rest I agree perfectly with M. von Mar- 
tius ; nay, it is to me inconceivable how all those phenomena of the 
vita sensitiva of plants can be thought to be explained by the indefi- 
nite expression of irritability. 
“Von Martius next enumerates the other manifold processes which 
the Vegetable soul has to superintend when the plant is propagating 
by sexual intercourse, and concludes these observations with the fol- 
lowing words : « Among intricate perceptions and ideas, a dark sensi- 
bility and Consciousness, a sympathy, a stimulus, an increase of this 
to affection, probably also a kind of memory in the repetition of cer- 
tain physical actions; all this we may deduce from the various habits 
i 
