Bihliography. 171 



p?e, 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 Martins 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- 

 bernation, 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, 

 on which subject we shall subsequently have occasion to speak more 

 in detail. With respect to the rest I agree perfectly with M. von Mar- 

 tins ; 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 Martins 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 afiection, probably also a kind of memory in the repetition of cer- 

 tain physical actions ; all this we may deduce from the various habits 



