To lead you to this happy result, and to assist you to arrive at it, has been the great motive and object of this literary correspondence. May it fulfill my earnest and anxious wish! True felicity will not otherwise be attained.

FURTHER

LETTER XIX.

CONSIDERATIONS ON THE LIVING PRINCIPLE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS, AND ITS IMMATERIAL NATURE.-DIVISION OF EXISTING THINGS INTO THE MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL.-THE FOUR GREAT CLASSES OF THE LATTER.--ITS POSSIBLE CONNECTION WITH OTHER SYSTEMS.

We have now surveyed succinctly all the material forms in which the living principle appears on earth, except the human frame. We have found it to be invested, in the different kingdoms and individuals of nature, with very dissimilar configurations, and displaying such qualities in all as these varying structures have enabled or assisted it to exhibit. Let us bestow a few thoughts on the diversities of its appearance, and endeavor, from the phenomena which they disclose, to form, if possible, some notions of its real nature, or at least attempt, with cautious and moderated freedom, to suggest a few reasonings upon it. We will begin by considering it in its connection with the vegetable kingdom.

Nothing seems more clear to our perception, when we allow no previous theory or prepossession to obscure its discernment, than the fact already alluded to, that life is not the material frame which it animates. From our consciousness of ourselves, from our observations of others, and from the phenomena which the living principle exhibits in all the departments of nature we have examined, this grand physiological truth emerges to our view. I feel it most satisfactorily in myself; and the more strongly as my body becomes weaker, more infirm, and inefficient, while my mind retains all its faculties, activities, and power of operation. What is thus true of life, wherever we can adequately discriminate it, we may consider to be so in each of its forms and abodes where we can less investigate it; and therefore in plants as well as in animals, and in these as well as in

man. Life I would therefore assume to be a principle in vegetation distinct from its material substance, and additional to it. But to live is to be. Life is being. Vegetables, from having it, are therefore living beings; living in those peculiar configurations which distinguish their different classes.

But by a living being we usually mean a living personality of some sort or other-that which feels, and thinks, and wills. Are vegetables living beings of this description?

All animals that feel have a nervous organization, by which their sensations occur to them. Plants have a medulla or pith, which ramifies into their most important parts, and accompanies their most important functions, and which seems to be essentially operative in their growth and vigor. But pith is not nervous matter. On this there can be no mistake; the eye and touch, as well as the chemist's decomposition, prove their dissimilarity. Pith, therefore, cannot be attended with the same effects to vegetables which their nerves occasion to the animal classes. It is thus manifest at once that plants cannot possess nervous sensitivity.

The principle of life within human beings, and apparently in most animals, is attended with the feeling of pain or pleasure; with the perception of external objects; and with a power of associating, remembering, comparing, and judging of the sensations and ideas which occur. Were plants created to have such sensibilities, or have they acquired them since their primitive formation? The first president of the Linnean Society, and chief founder of our botanical school, was inclined to allow them a sort of conscious sensitivity.(1) Dr. Darwin, their elaborate poet and enthusiastic friend, went much farther, and gave them not only sensitivity and organs of sense, but also a passion of love, a common sensorium, dreams, ideas, and self-consciousness.(2)

(1) To such a question, the amiable first president of the Linnean So-` ciety deliberately answers, "As they possess life, irratibility, and motion; spontaneously directing their organs to what is natural and beneficial to them; and flourishing according to their success in supplying their wants; may not the exercise of their vital functions be attended with some share of sensation, however low; and some consequent share of happiness? However this may be, the want of sensation is certainly not to be proved with regard to vegetables." Introd. Bot. p. 4.

(2) Vfter stating the facts on which he grounds his deductions, he declares, "Vegetable life seems to possess an organ of sense, to distinguish

The calmly reasoning Dr. Hartley thought that their sensations could not be disproved.(3)

We may unhesitatingly answer on this inquiry, that aş plants have not nervous sensitivity, they cannot have the animal feeling of pleasure and pain; and as they have not the animal eye or ear, they cannot have his perceptions from what he sees and hears, and therefore not his ideas, nor any such intellectual materials as he has for his capacity to act upon. Whatever faculties they may have, they cannot have animal sensations, perceptions, ideas, images, or emotions.

Yet a living being may be a living personality without these. All these arise to the animal and to ourselves from our nervous organizations, and principally from those of our eyes and ears. But without either of these, the animal mind would be what it is, independent of these, and what it was before they accrued to it. So the vegetable mind, whatever it be, and whether its living principle deserves such a name as mind, or not, must be what it is, though it has none of the ideas or sensations of the animal. It will subsist with its own original and essential qualities and properties, such as they are, and whatever they may be found ultimately to be.

But to have a personality of mind and character, plants must have the faculties of self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, moral perception, and moral volition. They must feel that they exist; they must be sensible of a difference in actions, as to their rightness or wrongness; they must be able to discern which is either of these; and they must spontaneously direct their will, and by that their conduct, according to their feelings or judgment.

the variations of heat; another for the varying degrees of moisture; another of light; another of touch; and probably another, analagous to our sense of smell. To these must be added the indubitable evidence of their passion of love."

"And I think we may truly conclude, that they are furnished with a common sensorium belonging to each bud; and that they must occasionally repeat these perceptions, either in their dreams or waking hours; and consequently possess ideas of so many properties of the external world, and of their own existence." Darw. Zoonomia, v. 1, p. 145,

sect. 13.

(3) "If vegetables have sensation, which may indeed be a speculation very foreign to us, but is what we cannot disprove." Hartley on Man, Y. 2, p. 404,

All moral beings must have sufficient liberty of agency on their moral perceptions and volitions, or they can do no moral actions, nor exhibit a moral character; and they must be in a society of other beings who will be affected by their conduct, or occasion their moral principles to be in application and operation. Plants have not this freedom of action, nor this social state. Each is insulated from the other, without needing or giving any mutual assistance; neither act on the other; and their living principle is in a fixed and rigid frame, which it cannot move out of its rooted position. All its shoots and fibres are of the same character. It can fan the air with its leaves, but it is under the strictest confinement of material necessities, and can only be what it is, and live as it does; acting in its interior functions and vascularity, but passive and inactive as to every other being in nature, except as it exhales its fragrance, and presents its flowers and fruits to all that approach. Thus plants having no actions towards others to perform, no duties and no social offices, have no moral choice to make, no moral knowledge to acquire, and no moral agency to exert. Plants therefore are not made or meant to be moral beings, and cannot, from any of their qualities, attain or exhibit a moral character. Hence their principle of life has not this species of personality; they are not moral persons; nor can their living principle love, dream, feel, or think, as animals do.

But may not plants have that interior personality which arises from self-consciousness, though without any other intellectuality, and without any communication of the perception to others? They are not more fixed in their localities than the oyster, nor so denuded of vascular mechanism as the polype,(4) nor more apparently insensate than the

(4) The fresh-water polype, hydra virides, "is a small lump of transparent jelly of the size of a pea only when contracted; but about three quarters of an inch in its extended state, like the finger of a small glove with a few ravelings round the edge. It has neither wings nor legs; nor bones, nor muscles; yet it protrudes its tentacula, moves from leaf to leaf, and from stone to stone. It quits the dark, and approaches the light side of the vessel where it is kept. It basks in the sunbeam, enjoys the warmth of summer, and becomes torpid in cold weather."

Some of these may be turned inside out without injury, and seems the same animal either way. Yet, "it retreats if touched, and defends itself if attacked. It pursues its prey with avidity; and though it has neither tongue, teeth, nor palate, yet it devours as if with relish, and forces the