CHAPTER XIV
THE HIGHER LIFE OF PLANTS
“I swear I think now that everything, without exception, has an immortal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the animals!
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!”
—Walt Whitman
Maurice Maeterlinck, in one of his delightful essays, pays a remarkable tribute to the spiritual powers of plants.
“Though there be plants and flowers that are awkward or unlovely,” he says, “there is none that is wholly devoid of wisdom and ingenuity. All exert themselves to accomplish their work, all have the magnificent ambition to overrun and conquer the surface of the globe by endlessly multiplying the form of existence which they represent. To attain this object, they have, because of the law which chains them to the soil, to overcome difficulties much greater than those opposed to the increase of animals.... If we had applied to the removal of the various vicissitudes which crush us, such as pain, old age, and death, one-half the energy displayed by any little flower in our gardens, we may well believe that our lot would be very different from what it is.”
No truer thought was ever set on paper. Though man prides himself upon his imagined superiority to non-human creation, and even denies the capacity for the higher things of life to animals and plants, he, in reality, nearly always shows himself vastly inferior to them in actual applications of moral and spiritual principles.
Have the plants souls and spirits? No man who has carefully and conscientiously studied them can wholly deny it. They exhibit a pluck, a determination, a moral perseverance which awaken all our admiration. Where we are weak, they are strong. Where men would lie down and die, they go steadily forward. When a plant perishes in the struggle for existence, it is because the odds have been too great. To make the most of heredity and environment is an axiomatic rule in plantdom.
Man’s mind has developed at the expense of man’s body. The plants always maintain an admirable balance between the two. There are degenerates and unscrupulous individuals among them, but they never forget that their first duty is to themselves. Self-culture is with them a passion. Whoever heard of a plant over-eating or over-drinking or giving way to any of those indulgent vices which are the bane of the human world? They have their faults, but they are sources of strength rather than weakness.
In relation to its companions of the vegetable realm, the Murderer Liana is a double-dyed villain, yet it is only practicing in an open and frank way, the food-getting methods, which all life, by its very nature, is forced to adopt. To live by the destruction of others is the sad lot of both the smallest plant and the most highly developed animal.
Aside from the peculiarly human susceptibility to self-indulgence, it is hard to find a single spiritual trait not exhibited by some member of the plant kingdom.
Love? There is no higher devotion than that shown by the water plant called Vallisneria. The female flowers reach the surface of the water at the end of long, tapering, spiral-like stalks, but the males are compelled to remain far down near the bottom. At the flowering season, the males, responding to the universal mating instinct, deliberately break themselves from their stalks and rise to the surface to be near their loves for a little while. All too soon, however, they are carried away by unruly currents to an untimely death, leaving behind them, in their pollen, the principle from which another generation of their species shall arise. They have presented themselves a living sacrifice on the altar of love.
Courage? Think of all the hardy trees which dwell in the high and cold places of the earth—places that are so exposed and desolate that the trees and plants find it necessary to contract themselves into the smallest possible compass, often living largely underground. On the other hand, think of the death-defying Cacti which live in infernos of the desert heat and dryness and yet put forth flowers of joy.
Faith? Hope? What sustains the perennials through long, bleak winters and makes them sure of the promise of spring? When the Alpine flowers are so positive that spring has really come that they push their inquiring heads up through the snow which still covers the mountains, they are showing a superhuman faith, literally risking death in order that they may get a strong and early start in life.
Charity? When trees like the Oak and the Maple allow a whole multitude of lesser plants to dwell in the snugness of their shadows, they are showing forth some of the kindly qualities of plantdom. If they chose to they could discourage lowly neighbours after the manner of the monopolistic Beech or the aristocratic Pine.
Name a human sin or virtue, good quality or bad, and one does not have to search far in the plant world for its counterpart. Along with kindness, mercy, gratitude, submissiveness, and parental love we also find cruelty, hard-heartedness, ingratitude, arrogance and neglect of offspring. Even at that, the credit side always exceeds the debit and no plant is guilty of self-destruction. It must be borne in mind, that what we call sin and malignity are to them legitimate courses of action.
If plants have every property of the human soul, why have men been so slow to admit their kinship with the trees and the flowers? Life, law and love are divine and bind man to all creation. He is spiritually as well as physically related to the plants. In the past, he has endeavoured to set himself apart from Nature and look down upon her as upon another world. Because he has a brain, he has imagined that anything which has none cannot possibly possess an intelligence and an inner life. To uphold this theory he has shut his eyes to a thousand denying facts.
All plants and animals of whatever kind begin life on exactly the same level. The wayside Daisy and the Human Being both start their earthly careers as single cells. In both cases, there is no visible machinery of life and consciousness, yet we can say “Here is a potential Daisy. Here is a potential Man.” The wonderful, all-pervading spirit of life belongs to both.
The language of the Bible classifies man with all life under the Hebrew term Nephesh chayiah, that is, living soul or creature. The Old Testament favours a rigorous protection of animals and plants against wanton destruction. Is not the equality of the three kingdoms of life hinted at in the following passage from Jonah?
“Thou hast had pity on the Gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night.”
“And I shall not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle.”
Some marvelous experiments carried on by Sir Jaghadish Chaundra Bose in Calcutta, India, offer interesting light on the higher life of plants. By exceptionally delicate and ingenious instruments, Sir Jaghadish has been able to measure the plant movements associated with growth, shock and response to stimuli in general. He has come to the conclusion that plants not only have a conscious intelligence, but have their good and bad days, their moods, their whims. He believes they react to slight or pleasurable stimuli by general expansion. Violent stimuli cause pain and contraction. A plant struck a blow quivers and shakes in veritable agony. Plants about to die undergo a violent spasm and then by making no response at all to outside influences, show that they have actually given up the ghost.
Sir Jaghadish is satisfied that a plant pulled up by the roots experiences a shock comparable to that of a man being beaten into insensibility. Many trees and plants, as every gardener knows, fail to survive transplanting and die from pure shock, even if their tissue has been in no way injured. Sir Jaghadish has performed the interesting experiment of administering a powerful chemical to act as an anesthetic to trees about to be transplanted. Such specimens have stood the re-location well but in some cases have shown an apparent loss of memory and a general state of upset habit, exactly as would a man or animal coming out of a stupor.
All this strongly suggests a soul or driving spiritual force in every living creature. Regarding its exact nature there are many opinions. Maeterlinck believes that there is a general scattered intelligence, a sort of universal fluid, which penetrates all organisms in an amount proportionate to their conductivity. Man offers the least resistance to the divine principle and so receives a generous share. The plants receive lesser amounts, but really belong to the same intellectual order. They exhibit the same ideas, the same hopes, the same logic and undergo the same trials in a lesser degree than their more educated brothers. The plants and man both grope, hesitate and correct themselves in their labourious evolutionary development.
Of course, this theory is only a conjecture, but is very appealing and much more modest than the traditional attitude which assumes that man is a miraculous and marvelously endowed being fallen from another world and therefore lacking any definite ties with the rest of terrestrial life.
If then we believe that a vital spiritual force dwells within every plant, what becomes of it after the death of its enclosing walls? Each cell of a tree in effect dies many times each season. Continual waste and renovation bring periodic transformation of cell structure. The abode is changed but not the inhabitant. There must be an animating, non-physical force which carries on the cycle. If it is superior to the forces of bodily dissolution, must it not also be infinite, immortal?
With so many modern people doubting (or pretending to doubt) the immortality of man, it may seem presumptuous to claim immortality for the plants, yet that is the unescapable conclusion to which the writers of this book are driven. All life is one, indivisible and inseparable. There is a divine spark in every living creature and it is reasonable to expect it to live beyond death. Immortality by reproduction is not enough. If it were true that the eternal principle continually passes from parent to offspring, and that when the parent dies, he is dead spiritually as well as physically, then we should expect immediate degeneracy and death after reproduction takes place. That a portion of soul essence descends through countless generations we do not doubt, but each plant and animal is also a spiritual entity. Man and plants are both tools in the hands of Maeterlinck’s all-prevailing intelligence. Yet man feels that he is a free agent. Why not the plants also?
Every plant has racial and family traits, and each one also has a marked personality. If immortality is a fulfilling, a conserving continuance of the present earthly existence, then the plants deserve and have a right to expect a chance for infinite development.
The plants serve to make this earth a floral paradise. Why should they not be equally necessary in a world of spirit? It is to man’s credit that he has always pictured heaven as a place made beautiful by great hosts of trees and flowers.