Erewhon, Samuel Butler [novel books to read txt] 📗

“Plants,” said he, “show no sign of interesting themselves in human affairs. We shall never get a rose to understand that five times seven are thirty-five, and there is no use in talking to an oak about fluctuations in the price of stocks. Hence we say that the oak and the rose are unintelligent, and on finding that they do not understand our business conclude that they do not understand their own. But what can a creature who talks in this way know about intelligence? Which shows greater signs of intelligence? He, or the rose and oak?

“And when we call plants stupid for not understanding our business, how capable do we show ourselves of understanding theirs? Can we form even the faintest conception of the way in which a seed from a rose-tree turns earth, air, warmth and water into a rose full-blown? Where does it get its colour from? From the earth, air, etc.? Yes⁠—but how? Those petals of such ineffable texture⁠—that hue that outvies the cheek of a child⁠—that scent again? Look at earth, air, and water⁠—these are all the raw material that the rose has got to work with; does it show any sign of want of intelligence in the alchemy with which it turns mud into rose-leaves? What chemist can do anything comparable? Why does no one try? Simply because everyone knows that no human intelligence is equal to the task. We give it up. It is the rose’s department; let the rose attend to it⁠—and be dubbed unintelligent because it baffles us by the miracles it works, and the unconcerned businesslike way in which it works them.

“See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves against their enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete the most dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they contrive to make), cover their precious seeds with spines like those of a hedgehog, frighten insects with delicate nervous systems by assuming portentous shapes, hide themselves, grow in inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to deceive even their subtlest foes.

“They lay traps smeared with birdlime, to catch insects, and persuade them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made of their leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves, as it were, into living rattraps, which close with a spring on any insect that settles upon them; others make their flowers into the shape of a certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like the horseradish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they make themselves.

“What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one wants to do, and to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent? Some say that the rose-seed does not want to grow into a rosebush. Why, then, in the name of all that is reasonable, does it grow? Likely enough it is unaware of the want that is spurring it on to action. We have no reason to suppose that a human embryo knows that it wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a man. Nothing ever shows signs of knowing what it is either wanting or doing, when its convictions both as to what it wants, and how to get it, have been settled beyond further power of question. The less signs living creatures give of knowing what they do, provided they do it, and do it repeatedly and well, the greater proof they give that in reality they know how to do it, and have done it already on an infinite number of past occasions.

“Someone may say,” he continued, “ ‘What do you mean by talking about an infinite number of past occasions? When did a rose-seed make itself into a rosebush on any past occasion?’

“I answer this question with another. ‘Did the rose-seed ever form part of the identity of the rosebush on which it grew?’ Who can say that it did not? Again I ask: ‘Was this rosebush ever linked by all those links that we commonly consider as constituting personal identity, with the seed from which it in its turn grew?’ Who can say that it was not?

“Then, if rose-seed number two is a continuation of the personality of its parent rosebush, and if that rosebush is a continuation of the personality of the rose-seed from which it sprang, rose-seed number two must also be a continuation of the personality of the earlier rose-seed. And this rose-seed must be a continuation of the personality of the preceding rose-seed⁠—and so back and back ad infinitum. Hence it is impossible to deny continued personality between any existing rose-seed and the earliest seed that can be called a rose-seed at all.

“The answer, then, to our objector is not far to seek. The rose-seed did what it now does in the persons of its ancestors⁠—to whom it has been so linked as to be able to remember what those ancestors did when they were placed as the rose-seed now is. Each stage of development brings back the recollection of the course taken in the preceding stage, and the development has been so often repeated, that all doubt⁠—and with all doubt, all consciousness of action⁠—is suspended.

“But an objector may still say, ‘Granted that the linking between all successive generations has been so close and unbroken, that each one of them may be conceived as able to remember what it did in the persons of its ancestors⁠—how do you show that it actually did remember?’

“The answer is: ‘By the action which each generation takes⁠—an action which repeats all the phenomena that we commonly associate with