“The idea that plants have feelings and emotions goes back thousands of years. Evidence of this belief can be found in Hindu scriptures. In more recent years Darwin noticed the astonishing similarity between the radical — the root tip — of a plant and the brain of primitive animals. The radical seems to sense or feel its surroundings in order to make decisions necessary for the plant’s survival”¹.

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    This article is the latest in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins who, in collaboration with Christopher Bird, wrote The Secret Life of Plants² in 1973. (For a guide to the earlier articles, see under Science on the Blog Index page.) The purpose of the series is to seek to revive the ancient worldview of animism, and make it science. At the same time, it is another episode in the saga of the ongoing battle for truth in science, which to me means constantly struggling against the misguided philosophy of materialism. In the next few articles, I’m going to discuss some scientists whose work suggested that there is something very strange going on in the life of plants, at least from the perspective of conventional, materialist science.

   

    The first of these is Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858–1937)³. It’s worth pausing for a moment to ask yourself whether you have ever heard of him. I’m guessing that not many of you will have. I hope that I’m not exaggerating but, given that in his field he might be considered the equivalent of a Newton or an Einstein, one of the questions I shall be addressing here is why that might be. He should be a household name.

    I’ll begin by describing the reputation he gained during his lifetime, why he was, and why he should still be, taken seriously. He was a formidable figure, graduating in physics, botany and chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and then appointed Professor of Physics at the Presidency College, Calcutta. His career as an experimental scientist followed, which I’ll describe below. In 1917 he was given a knighthood, and in 1920 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in recognition of his scientific work. “The acclaim which came in the British Isles was repeated in Vienna where it was the consensus of eminent German and Austrian scientists that ‘Calcutta was far ahead of us in these new lines of investigation’ ”. In 1926 he was nominated a member of the League of Nations Committee on Intercultural Cooperation, other eminent members of which included Albert Einstein.

    It seems that his reputation was held back to some extent by racism, white European scientists being unwilling to contemplate that an Indian could be so far ahead of them. He was, however, revered in the USSR, even after his death:

• He was heralded “as introducing a new epoch in the development of world science by Kliment Arkadievich Timiryazev…”
• “The USSR’s plant men were so impressed by the achievements of this Indian scientist that they were going to mount a research campaign based directly upon his long-ignored conclusions”.
• At a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, “three leading academicians summed up for the huge crowd assembled the fantastic breakthroughs which the Indian had made not only in plant physiology but in physics and in the vital and until then unheard of links between them”.
• In 1964 “the Soviet Union honoured this neglected scientist by publishing in two handsomely illustrated volumes his selected works”

                                                                                                                                                                                                BOSE’S SCIENTIFIC CAREER

    His first significant achievement was that he demonstrated wireless transmission in 1895, before Lodge and Marconi. He then investigated metal fatigue, and “discovered that certain metals could recuperate, if given a rest. Graphs of fatigue and recovery, he pointed out, showed striking similarities between metal and animal tissues; in both ‘fatigue could be removed by gentle massage or by exposure to a bath of warm water’ ”. This sounds disconcerting to the rational mind, hard to believe, and poses the question, are metals really inanimate? However, “Bose was actually able to demonstrate that his ‘treatment’ worked”.

    He then turned his attention to plants, and showed “that plants react to ‘irritation’ or to ‘blows’ in much the same way as animals”. How could this be, given that plants “were held to have no nervous system, (and) were universally reckoned as unresponsive”? The evidence, however, suggested otherwise:

• He found that plants did actually have a nervous system. “He felt that some plants seem to be midway between higher and lower animals in the evolution of their ‘nervous system’ ”. Furthermore they had an array of emotional responses: “Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless other appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals”.
• “Experimenting first with horse-chestnut leaves and then with carrots and turnips, Bose found that they responded to various ‘blows’ in much the same way as had his metals and muscles, and that plants were clearly sensitive down to their roots”.
• He consistently pointed to a real continuity between various plant and animal tissues, and “was able to show the similarity in behaviour between skins of lizard, tortoises and frogs and those of grapes, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables”. “Even more heretically, he held that the isolated vegetal nerve is indistinguishable from an animal nerve”.
• He found that “trees have a circulatory system… similar to blood pressure in animals, and a tube which duplicates a heart. ‘The more deeply we perceive’, said Bose, ‘the more striking becomes the evidence that a uniform plan links every form in manifold nature’ ”.
• He discovered that plants could be as successfully anaesthetised as animals. He gave a plant chloroform, which stopped all growth. As soon as the plant was revived with an antidote, or when the narcotic vapour was blown away by fresh air, it once again began to move, just as an animal would. “Using chloroform to tranquillize a large pine tree, Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without the usually fatal shock of such operations”.
• “Like human beings, plants became intoxicated when given shots of whisky or gin, swayed like any bar-room drunkard, passed out, and eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover”.
• He found that too much carbon dioxide “could suffocate them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen”.
• A cabbage leaf went through “violent paroxysms as it was scalded to death”. Experimenting with heat and cold, “one day he found that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered in a way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. At death the plant threw off a huge electrical force”.
• “In his work with the sensitive plant Mimosa pudica, Bose showed that plants could be even more sensitive than men”.

    In order to make such observations, he had developed sophisticated monitoring devices to measure the growth and behaviour of plants down to their minutest detail, including the crescograph, which was capable of magnifying the life processes of plants ten million times (according to Whitman; Tompkins/ Bird say one hundred million times, which seems less likely, and which I therefore assume is a mistake).

                                                                                                                                                                                                      WHAT WAS THE RESPONSE?

    Here are two quotes from those who believed in him (there were obviously many others, as can be judged from the honours awarded to him):

• At the meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR mentioned above, one speaker said: “The green world of plants, seeming to us so immobile and insensitive, came miraculously to life and appeared no less, and often even more, sensitive than animals and man”.
• The philosopher Henri Bergson said, after hearing Bose lecture at the Sorbonne: “The dumb plants had by Bose’s marvellous inventions been rendered the most eloquent witnesses of their hitherto unexpressed life-story. Nature has at last been forced to yield her most jealously guarded secrets”.

    These are two responses from the orthodox scientific viewpoint of the time:

• The journal Nature said of his first book Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation: “The whole book abounds in interesting matter skillfully woven together and would be recommended as of great value if it did not continually arouse our incredulity”.
• Of his second book Comparative Electro-Physiology the reviewer in Nature said: “The student of plant physiology, who has some acquaintance with the main classical ideas of his subject, will feel at first extreme bewilderment as he peruses this book. It proceeds so smoothly and logically, and yet it does not start from any place in the existing ‘corpus’ of knowledge, and never attaches itself with any firm adherence. This effect of detachment is heightened by the complete absence of precise reference to the work of other investigators”.

    This is not, of course, how the scientific process is normally conducted — no peer-review, no other investigators. As Tompkins and Bird point out, that was because there weren’t any, and that the reviewer “had no way of knowing he was dealing with a genius half a century ahead of his time”. (Following on from my thought above, it’s worth noting that both Newton and Einstein, especially the former, worked in complete isolation, and felt no need to collaborate with others in order to develop their revolutionary ideas.) Given that nothing much has changed since their book, we may now say that he was actually 100 years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, this is how progress in science is often obstructed; firm experimental evidence is ignored for no good reason in favour of retaining an out-of-date worldview.

                                                                                                                                                                                                      IMPLICATIONS OF HIS WORK

    These are clear from the above, but just to summarise, Bose had demonstrated:

• that even metals seemed in some sense to be ‘alive’.
• that plants exhibited the same reactions and emotions as animals and humans, and could therefore be considered alive.

    This is close to the ancient worldview of animism, and the modern spiritual belief that the whole universe is a living organism:

• “All his life Bose had emphasized to a scientific community steeped in a mechanistic and materialistic outlook, the idea that all of nature pulsed with life and that each of the interrelated entities in the natural kingdom might reveal untold secrets could man but learn how to communicate with them”.
• In retirement, he said: “In my investigations on the action of forces on matter, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of contact emerging between the Living and the non-Living. Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant world? … This means that we should abandon all our preconceptions most of which are afterwards found to be absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears the plant’s own signature”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

    The scientist Bose unashamedly related his findings about plants and the world in general to the ‘mystical’ ideas of Hinduism. For example, at an address to the Royal Institution in 1901, having described his extensive experiments and results, he ended by saying:                                                                         “I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar indeed that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here the physical ends, and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist. …                                                                              “(I perceived) one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things — the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us — it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: ‘They who see but one, in the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth — unto none else, unto none else!’ ”.

    During his lifetime this did not always seem to have been a problem. This lecture was warmly received, notably by Sir Robert Austen, “one of the world’s authorities on metals, (who) praised Bose for his faultless arguments, saying: ‘I have all my life studied the properties of metals and am happy to think that they have life’ ”. Bose’s “views went unchallenged, despite the metaphysical note at the end”. It was obviously considered inappropriate at that time to include such a statement when publishing a scientific address, but Sir William Crookes “urged that the last quotation should not be omitted”.

    On another occasion the Times, sounding strangely more like the Hindu Times, wrote: “While we in England were still steeped in the rude empiricism of barbaric life, the subtle Easterner had swept the universe into a synthesis and had seen the one in all its changing manifestations”.

    Tompkins and Bird say in relation to this association with Hinduism: “Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose managed to accomplish the essential requirement of the twentieth century: an amalgamation of the wisdom of the ancient East with the precise scientific techniques and language of the modern West”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                THE LATER REACTION

    After his death, however, the groundless preconceptions contrary to facts started to kick back in, and there was a backlash from the ‘scientific’ community. They were still asking, “how could a plant, with no nervous system of the animal kind, react to irritation or blows in the same way as an animal?”, even though Bose had demonstrated that plants do have a nervous system, or its equivalent. Bose’s explanation had not been physical, but psychological, which materialists found unacceptable, and he had drawn comparisons with the ‘mystical’ Hindu concept of a pervading unity. “This was anathema to conventional botanists, physiologists and psychologists alike. They could not very well overturn Bose’s findings. Instead, “his work was treated as if it never existed”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     FURTHER QUESTION

    I don’t know whether Bose himself went so far as to consider this, but it is a reasonable question: if plants respond to the environment, react in the same way as animals and humans; if they show reactions and have the same emotions as animals and humans, do they have some sense of self-awareness like animals and humans?

    Can plants communicate with each other? Recent research suggests that they can. Do they know that they are doing this? Research in Russia, following on from Bose’s work, showed that plants do have an ‘awareness’ of being cut!

                                                                                                                                                                                                        CONCLUSIONS

• Bose had “carried scientific research into areas unexplored before, and used impeccably scientific methods to back his findings”.
• His results “were so well demonstrated and presented that, at the time, they convinced his fellow-scientists. Yet they were so disconcerting that they were not followed up, and are today rarely mentioned in academic journals”.
• He “found out more about plants than anyone before and perhaps since, but remains almost unmentioned in classical histories of subjects in which he specialized”.
• “Nearly a half century after his death, the Encyclopedia Britannica could only say of his work in the field of plant physiology that it was so much in advance of his time that it could not be precisely evaluated”.

    Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this was because those who followed were afraid of the implications if they were to evaluate it; the whole philosophy of (atheistic) materialism might be completely overturned.

    Are children now taught in biology lessons that plants are much more like humans that we might usually suppose, that they have emotions, react to pain, and suffer when they die? If so, I’m not aware of it. (Vegetarians and vegans seem blissfully unaware of this. What would they eat if they knew?) Fortunately others are now covering similar ground, and the torch which Bose lit, but which was sadly extinguished, is now being reignited by figures like the ecologist Peter Wohlleben and the scientist Monica Gagliano.

    Please don’t believe anyone if they tell you that science is always a search for, or is gradually finding, the truth about the universe. The highly influential enthusiast for ‘scientific’ progress Steven Pinker says: “The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures…are factually mistaken”⁴. Really? I don’t think so. If he chooses to live in a fantasy world, that’s up to him. It is closer to the truth that modern science is only slowly catching up with the wisdom of the ancients. But this is how science and the search for truth often operates. It is the preconceptions and psychological reactions of ‘scientists’ that determine what is allowed. And when they are afraid of what they might find, the work of a genius like Jagadis Chandra Bose is thrown upon the rubbish heap.

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Bose: “This vast abode of nature is built in many wings, each with its own portal. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist come in by different doors, each one his own department of knowledge, and each comes to think that this is his special domain unconnected with that of any other. Hence has arisen our present division of phenomena into the worlds of inorganic, vegetal and sentient. This philosophical attitude of mind may be denied. We must remember that all inquiries have as their goal the attainment of knowledge in its entirety”.

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Footnotes:

1. John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants, Star Books, 1975, p41

2. USA 1973, in Great Britain Allen Lane, 1974. My copy Penguin 1975.

3. My sources are:

• as footnote 2, p77–96
• as footnote 1, p41–45
• Brian Inglis, The Hidden Power, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p13–14.

Everything in quotation marks comes from one of these.

4. “Science is Not Your Enemy”, The New Republic, August 19th 2013, p33

    This article is the second in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins and others like him on the subject of plants. It follows on from an introduction, part 1, and an appendix to part 1. I’ve reached the point where the possibility of the existence of nature spirits, otherwise known as elemental beings, has to be contemplated, no matter what modern Enlightenment science tells us, in order to explain the behaviour of plants (and much else besides).

    Belief in nature spirits is an ancient tradition found all over the globe. It is the basis of animism, described as the “ancient philosophy that views everything in Nature as having an indwelling spirit/soul, including the plants, rocks, waters, winds, fires, animals, humans, and other life forms. Animism is the foundation of shamanism and has been considered the earliest form of human religion on planet Earth”¹. It will be interesting to see whether the earliest form of human religion has stood the test of time.

    Some examples are:

• the ancient Greeks, who believed in dryads, nymphs, satyrs,
• Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), where there are yakshas (male) and yakshini (female), described as “a broad class of nature-spirits… connected with water, fertility, trees, the forest, treasure and wilderness”². There are also nature spirits in the Japanese religion of Shinto, where they are called kami. Shinto is animistic; it is “shamanic and regards all things as alive, aware, sentient, and of spirit — just like us”³.
• the Hebrew apocryphal tradition, where the Book of the Secrets of Enoch “states that everything from blades of grass to herbs in the field have special spirits”⁴,
• so-called pagan traditions, including Druidism.

    Moving on to more modern times, esotericists believe that there are various elemental beings, existing in a different level of reality: these are called gnomes (earth spirits), undines (water spirits), sylphs (air spirits), and salamanders (fire spirits). (These terms refer to the ancient concept of the four elements, not what we understand by earth etc.) An outstanding example would be the 16th century Swiss healer Paracelsus, whom Manly P. Hall has described as “the Swiss Hermes, and the greatest physician of modern times”, and who says that he “has given us the most complete analysis of these strange creatures who live, move, and have their being unseen and unrealized by mortal man. Though we daily see their works, we have never learned to know the workers who, day and night, function through Nature’s finer forces”⁵ .

    Here I’m going to pose the question, considering that now most people find such ideas ridiculous, why did the ancients actually believe?

    We assume perhaps that people have always experienced the world in the same way that we do (saw through similar eyes, heard through similar ears), but formerly misinterpreted it, naïvely believing that hidden agencies were at work behind the weather, and so on. This is not necessarily true. It is reasonable to assume that through the centuries, consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious psyche, have themselves evolved. My assumption is that ego-consciousness has gradually become stronger, and that in the past the boundary between psyche and the material world was less pronounced. We might perhaps say that daily life once had more of a dreamlike quality. This would mean that, if nature spirits, or for that matter any spirits, do actually exist, then people in earlier times might have had a direct experience of them, and that is why they believed in them.

    It is not just me who thinks that. Jonathan Black is the author of The Secret History of the World⁶, which is a compendium of knowledge which “has been taught down the ages in certain secret societies” (p17), “common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world” (p25). His book “is the result of nearly twenty years’ research” into esoteric texts. More significantly, however, he was “helped to understand these sources by a member of more than one of the secret societies, someone who, in the case of one secret society at least, has been initiated to the highest level”. Black “had been working for years as an editor for one of London’s larger publishers”. One day this man walked into his office; he “was clearly of a different order of being” (p 23-24). They became friends, and this man became Black’s mentor, educated him in these secret teachings.

    That background information is my attempt to suggest that Black should perhaps be taken seriously. This is what he has to say about my idea: “In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us” (p58). They were not necessarily imagining these things; they were possibly literally aware of the reality of nature, and other, spirits.

    So, belief in spirits is alive and well even in modern times, among the self-appointed guardians of secret ancient knowledge. ‘Science’, of course, thinks that it knows better. However, it insists on only taking into account the material world, what can be appreciated by the five senses. As ego-consciousness has become stronger, we have become progressively cut off from the spirit world. That does not mean, however, that it has ceased to exist. Someone who thinks along the same lines is the prolific writer on spiritual and esoteric subjects V. Susan Ferguson. In an article inspired by the esotericist René Guénon, she talks about our ongoing “descent into matter and limited five-sense perception, which blocks our understanding of the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe”.

    Here she could easily be talking about modern science: “The people who have become prominent in all fields of modern life simply are no longer capable of understanding the real underlying metaphysical principles that are the substratum of the temporal illusory earth we stand upon. Thus the various and always changing theories that become the basis of our lives are profoundly flawed, unsound, and subject to collapse… The intelligence that is now held in high esteem is of the lowest order — regardless of how many corporate global policy institute think-tanks these modern era PhD priests are ensconced within”⁷.

    Someone who understood this very well was the poet William Wordsworth. (It seems that poets often know better than scientists.) These are some lines from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. He says that in early childhood we are still in touch with our origins in higher worlds: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” But then, as we grow up and become more accustomed to the material world, we lose touch with this: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”. He laments this: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more”.

    This may not be exactly what Wordsworth meant, but one interpretation of this could be the ego’s loss of connection with the psyche and its contents — it is often children who believe that they can see fairies. (Manly Hall says that “these little people are often seen by children, who remain clairvoyant up to about the seventh year”⁸.)

    It seems obvious that nature spirits cannot be physical, otherwise everyone would see them all the time. Why is it then that certain people can sometimes apparently see them? Is it something special about the observer? Or do the spirits have the ability to become sometimes slightly more physical, dense enough to be seen? We might perhaps then call them interdimensional beings.

    Modern educated Westerners may associate a belief in fairies etc. with primitive, simple-minded, poorly educated country folk. I would suggest, however, that the opposite is the case. In modern times there are two classes of believers (and there is a strong overlap between them).

    The first is that group of gifted adults who still seem able to see; we call them psychics, clairvoyants, or sensitives. They operate from a place higher than the rational mind, which is what I take Wordsworth to mean when he says prison-house. They are not trapped within the prison of scientific materialism. This may be a natural gift, or it is perhaps an ability that can be acquired through spiritual training. Here is an example of such a person⁹.

    The man in question was Geoffrey Hodson “with the gift of clairvoyance who claimed to be able to see fairies”. He was “a member of the Theosophical Society, a student of Buddhism, a practitioner of yoga, and a man who at first had regarded fairies as merely the products of the imagination, (but) had come to view them worthy of consideration thanks to an unexpected occult experience…”

    (I hope readers will be familiar with the case of the Cottingley fairies. If not please take a few minutes to do some internet research.) Hodson was invited by Edward Gardner who, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had been investigating the case, to visit Cottingley. Doyle considered him to be an “honorable gentleman with neither the will to deceive nor any conceivable object in doing so”. When he went to the glen with the two girls, he said that it “was swarming with many forms of elemental life, including wood elves, gnomes, and goblins, with even the rarer undines floating on the stream”. He said that the girls’ descriptions were essentially correct, but that “their powers of clairvoyance were more limited than his”.

    The second type of believers are great esoteric or spiritual teachers. An obvious example would be Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy.

    He would agree that these entities can be seen or sensed by clairvoyants, but not by humans in their everyday state of consciousness. We are talking here about the gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders mentioned above. He mentioned and discussed them in “Right and Wrong Use of Esoteric Knowledge”, a lecture delivered at Dornach, 18, 19 and 25 November 1917¹⁰.

    These elemental beings, or nature spirits, also figure strongly in Theosophy, founded by Helena Blavatsky and others in 1875. Tim Wyatt is a modern Theosophist, and has written a summary of Theosophical teachings, more immediately accessible than some texts, called Cycles of Eternity¹¹. He says that the elementals are the builders of the material world: “Elementals and nature spirits belong to the three elemental kingdoms below the mineral. They build and preserve all the other four kingdoms of nature below the super-human” (p28). (This sounds very similar to the quote from V. Susan Ferguson above: “… the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe”.)

    None of the above, of course, proves the existence of nature spirits. However, the observations that I quoted in part 1 by Tompkins and Bird, and those by Inglis in the Appendix, suggest that there is some kind of psychological or mental life going on in plants. These invisible elemental beings are one possible explanation, especially in the context of this quote from Wyatt, that could resolve the questions that these authors are posing.

Footnotes:

1. Selena Fox, https://www.circlesanctuary.org/index.php/about-paganism/guide-to-nature-spirituality-terms
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaksha
3. https://positivearticles.com/shinto-and-the-spirits-of-nature/
4. I don’t have a copy of 2 Enoch to hand, but I’m quoting John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants, W. H. Allen & Co., 1975, p162, who is himself quoting Dorothy Retallack, The Sound of Music and Plants, DeVorss and Co, 1973, p57
5. Unseen Forces, Philosophical Research Society Press, 1936, available in the Kessinger Legacy Reprints series, p 3
6. Quercus, 2010
7. Click here for a link to her article.
8. as footnote 5, p8
9. The following account comes from The Secret Life of Nature, Peter Tompkins, Thorsons, 1997, p11f
10. see lecture 2, https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA178/English/RSP1966/WroRit_index.html
11. Firewheel Books, 2016

    I recently read an interesting article on Medium.com by Paul Austin Murphy on the concept of emergence in science, specifically on the ideas of the physicist Sean Carroll in relation to it. There are two types of emergence theorised, weak and strong. Here is how Carroll defines the latter: “In strong emergence, the behaviour of a system with many parts is not reducible to the aggregate behaviour of all those parts, even in principle”. In simpler language, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot be explained by them. It is debated whether such systems exist, but many scientists believe that they do.

    It is difficult, if not impossible, to account for the cause of the emergent property. This idea is therefore in direct conflict with the principle of reductionism, which has been a long held assumption in science, and by implication materialism, which assumes that complex systems have been built up gradually from simpler forms, and therefore in theory should be able to be explained in terms of them.

    I’m not going to go into a discussion of the validity of the concept here; there is plenty of material readily available on the internet. I’m more interested in how this concept of strong emergence is viewed by scientists. Wikipedia puts it quite mildly:

• “Strong emergence is a view not widely held in the physical sciences”.

• “The plausibility of strong emergence is questioned by some as contravening our usual understanding of physics”¹.

My purpose in writing this article is rather to bring to your attention this striking quote in Murphy’s piece from the American philosopher Mark Bedau, which puts it much more strongly:

    “Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing”.

    All this suggests to me that the concept of strong emergence may be at the cutting edge of a scientific revolution, a new paradigm breaking through, hopefully something that may eventually consign materialism to the dustbin of history. Scientists may be reluctant to accept it for precisely that reason; as Bedau put it, it is something uncomfortably like magic. We know, of course, that most scientists do not like feeling uncomfortable; they are much happier in their rational, logical, material world. It is, however, often uncomfortable anomalies that lead to great breakthroughs in science.

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Footnote;

1. https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/829759

    This article follows on from the first one in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins and others like him on the subject of plants. There I made reference to the extraordinary behaviour of carnivorous plants:

• “The sundew plant will grasp at a fly with infallible accuracy, moving in just the right direction towards where the prey is to be found. Some parasitical plants can recognize the slightest trace of the odour of their victim, and will overcome all obstacles to crawl in its direction”.
• “Insect-devouring sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal, or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick to sense the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat”¹.

    This brief Appendix contains some further material on that topic.

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    Carnivorous plants have also attracted the attention of Brian Inglis. In The Hidden Power² he discusses the work on plants of Joseph Sinel, who came to the conclusion that “things can be perceived without the use of any of the five senses”. Inglis thinks that there must be some kind of psi faculty at work (p17).

    He asks, how is it that “the common insectivorous bog-plant sun-dew, whose sticky hairs ordinarily are upright, ready to seize any fly alighting on them, turns upside-down when insects are unavailable, as if seeking nourishment in the bog below”? Details of experiments follow, the conclusion being that the sun-dew has “a sense of direction; it could tell what is, or is not, edible, the leaves ignoring inedible substances put on the needle. To Sinel this, too, looked like ‘an incipient faculty of “clairvoyance”…’ ”.

    Inglis continues: “The ability of the Venus fly-trap to snap shut when a fly is inside has attracted some attention from physiologists, puzzled by the plant’s ability to exert what resembles a powerful muscular reaction, such as closing one’s fist, with no muscles to account for it”.

    As you would expect, conventional scientists attempted to come up with a materialist, reductionist explanation: “The need to offer a ‘natural’ explanation led to what the New Scientist, in a note on the subject in 1981, described as ‘the classic textbook model of rapid changes in motor cell turgor’, based on the fact that plant cells maintain their shape through ‘turgor’ — water pressure. The trap, according to the model, was closed simply by rapid jettisoning of water from the appropriate cells”.

    This had sounded plausible, but a flaw in the argument was pointed out by Stephen Williams of Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania: “The major cells far from getting smaller as they jettisoned their load, actually increased in size”. He suggested electrical signalling as an alternative. This is possible, but Inglis asks the very reasonable question: “Even supposing this to be correct… on receipt of the signal, how is the trap closed?” (p18)

    Inglis then says: “A number of orthodox commentators, looking at what has been discovered about insectivorous plants, have admitted that they are ‘not satisfactorily accommodated in the omnibus of evolutionary doctrine’… They are not accounted for by invoking psi, either; but at least psi would make them easier to explain” (p18).

    If conventional science, and even psi cannot account for the behaviour of plants, do we have to turn to some kind of ‘supernatural’ explanation, a psychological level of plants, or even the existence of nature spirits?

    I’ll discuss that question in the next article.

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Footnotes:

1. The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Allen Lane 1974, my copy Penguin 1975, p10 and p11

2. Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1986

    This article is the first in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins and others like him on the subject of plants. It follows on from an introduction (which it will be helpful to have read before proceeding here), in which I mentioned his belief in nature spirits. In the preface to The Secret Life of Nature¹, he said: “Researching for The Secret Life of Plants in the 1970s, I accumulated some extraordinary material on nature spirits, but the book was already too long and — said my publisher — too ‘far out’. Better not strain credulity” (Pvii). This later book is the result of his subsequent explorations and research, so that here he is able to say: “Walking through the woods, I do not see the spirits, but I sense them all around me, and I no longer feel alone” (Pxi).

    In modern times, belief in fairies, nymphs, sylphs etc. would be considered almost a sign of madness. So let’s examine what led him to this belief. I’ll begin by going back all the way to the introduction to The Secret Life of Plants², where the conclusion is:

• “Evidence now supports the vision of the poet and the philosopher that plants are living, breathing, communicating creatures, endowed with personality and the attributes of soul. It is only we, in our blindness, who have insisted on considering them automata”.
• “plants may at last be the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and philosophy”.

Here are some of the statements which led the authors, Tompkins and Bird, to that conclusion:

• “A climbing plant which needs a prop will creep towards the nearest support. Should this be shifted, the vine, within a few hours, will change its course into the new direction. Can the plant see the pole? Does it sense it in some unfathomed way?” (p9)
• “Plants… are capable of intent (their italics); they can stretch towards, or seek out, what they want in (mysterious) ways”. (p10)
• “the inhabitants of the pasture… appear to be able to perceive and to react to what is happening in their environment at a level of sophistication far surpassing that of humans”. (p10)
• “The sundew plant will grasp at a fly with infallible accuracy, moving in just the right direction towards where the prey is to be found. Some parasitical plants can recognize the slightest trace of the odour of their victim, and will overcome all obstacles to crawl in its direction” (p10). “Insect-devouring sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal, or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick to sense the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat” (p11). (I’ll add some further material on carnivorous plants in the next article.)
• “Plants seem to know which ants will steal their nectar, closing when these ants are about, opening only when there is enough dew on their stems to keep the ants from climbing. The most sophisticated acacia actually enlists the protective services of certain ants which it rewards with nectar in return for the ants’ protection against other insects and herbivorous mammals”. (p10)
• “Is it chance that plants grow into special shapes to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of insects which will pollinate them, luring these insects with special colour and fragrance, rewarding them with their favourite nectar…?” (p10)
• “Is it really nothing but a reflex or coincidence that a plant such as the orchid Trichoceros parviflorus will grow its petals to imitate the female of a species of fly so exactly that the male attempts to mate with it and in so doing pollinates the orchid?” (p10)
• “The ingenuity of plants in devising forms of construction far exceeds that of human engineers” (p11). Examples are given.
• “Plants are even sentient to orientation and to the future… (There is) a sunflower plant, Siliphium laciniatum, whose leaves accurately indicate the points of the compass. Indian liquorice, or Arbrus precatorius, is so keenly sensitive to all forms of electrical and magnetic influences it is used as a weather plant. Botanists who first experimented with it in London’s Kew Gardens, found in it a means for predicting cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions” (p12).
• “So accurate are alpine flowers about the seasons, they know when spring is coming and bore their way up through lingering snowbanks, developing their own heat with which to melt the snow” (p12).
• Plants “have now been found to be able to distinguish between sounds inaudible to the human ear and colour wavelengths such as infra-red and ultra-violet invisible to the human eye; they are specially sensitive to X-rays and  the high frequency of television” (p12).

    Much of the above was inspired by the research of an Austrian biologist Raoul Francé. (The authors say that he could have written their book 50 years earlier.) He says that “plants which react so certainly, so variously, and so promptly to the outer world, must have some means of communicating with the outer world, something comparable or superior to our senses. Francé insists that plants are constantly observing and recording events and phenomena of which man — trapped in his anthropocentric view of the world, subjectively revealed to him through his five senses — knows nothing” (p13)³.

    Conventional scientists, of course, have dismissed such ideas, and will continue to do so, attempting to come up with reductionistic explanations. For the sake of the discussion, however, I’m going to suppose that Francé, Tompkins and Bird have got it right. The question then arises, are the plants aware of what they are doing, therefore aware of themselves existing as individual entities? Or are they acting unconsciously, being controlled from a deeper level of their being, either by some kind of psychological factor, or something akin to a nature spirit? Or, taking it to a further level, are they being controlled by the brain of a much greater superorganism, the planet Gaia?

    In an Appendix (click here) I add some more material on carnivorous plants, and I’ll discuss the possibility of the existence of nature spirits in the article after that.

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Footnotes:

1. Thorsons, 1997

2. written with Christopher Bird, Allen Lane 1974, my copy Penguin 1975

3. This is a quote from Tompkins/Bird, p12, not Francé.

    This is the title of a book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published nearly 50 years ago.           I’m going to start a new series of articles exploring their theme.

    Various investigators have made the following claims:

• plants communicate with each other
• plants communicate with humans
• plants have psychic powers
• plants have healing powers
• plants respond and react to music
• plants are ‘inhabited’ by nature spirits

    I won’t be going into great detail, my purpose being mainly to make readers aware of this highly interesting material, so that they can do more reading if they so wish. This is not an exhaustive list, but some relevant books are:

• Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants¹
• John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants²
• Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden — and Beyond³
• Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent⁴ and Intelligence in Nature⁵
• Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees⁶
• Dorothy Retallack, The Sound of Music and Plants⁷
• Maurice Mességué, Of Men and Plants⁸
• Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant, A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants⁹
• Peter Tompkins, The Secret Life of Nature¹⁰

    The order is not significant, but I’ve finished with the most recent, and another by one of the authors of the original. This has the highly provocative subtitle Living in Harmony with the Hidden World of Nature Spirits, from Fairies to Quarks. People in modern times who say that they believe in fairies are likely to be given a funny look by their friends, and find people avoiding them when they walk the streets. In his preface, however, Tompkins says: “Researching for The Secret Life of Plants in the 1970s, I accumulated some extraordinary material on nature spirits, but the book was already too long and — said my publisher — too ‘far out’. Better not strain credulity”.

    The original book was, of course, full of ‘pseudoscience’ according to its critics, even without reference to nature spirits. So they must have been delighted when he brought out this one, since it would have confirmed their suspicion that he might actually be mad. However, we may note that one generation’s pseudoscience, if we follow the argument of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, may become the next generation’s truth.

    Why is all this important?

    If what Tompkins says is true, it suggests that we need, philosophically speaking, to return to the ancient belief in animism, an idea that modern science has poured scorn on. It would offer evidence that the ancients were much more knowledgeable and sophisticated than we give them credit for.

    We are engaged in a battle between the search for truth and so-called Enlightenment ‘science’. It’s interesting that The Secret Life of Plants was a best seller, and was very popular with the general public; it must have resonated strongly with their experience. We are, of course, supposed to prefer and respect the rigours of scientific investigation, rather than trust the public’s intuitions. I’m not so sure.

    Far from consigning ancient so-called ‘primitive’ beliefs to the dustbin of history, science is gradually rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients. We are hopefully on the way to a reunification of science and religion (some may prefer the term spirituality). It seems, on the basis of what has just been said, that this would be a renaissance of paganism. I wouldn’t go that far, but some pagan ideas would need to be reintegrated into the new synthesis.

    As many people have noted, quantum physics is leading the way towards this reunification. I refer you again to Tompkins’ subtitle Living in Harmony with the Hidden World of Nature Spirits, from Fairies to Quarks. Dorothy Retallack said something on the same theme: “Many of us know that all matter is simply a form of energy, of certain types of waves and pulsing vibration”. “Louis de Broglie felt that there is a pattern of waves in every atom. Therefore, according to this theory underlying all seen and unseen electromagnetic waves, heard and unheard sound waves, felt and unfelt gravity waves there is yet another vast and mysterious ocean of atomic particle waves. It is in and through the constantly shifting patterns of this atomic surf that the fundamental chemistry and physics of our living — and indeed all life is expressed”¹¹. She quotes in her epigram Donald Hatch Andrews, a former Professor of Chemistry, from his Symphony of Life: “We are finding that the universe is composed not of matter but of music”, which has echoes of the ancient belief in the Harmony of the Spheres. On that theme it is also worth noting the title of a book by the biologist Denis Noble, The Music of Life¹².

    Scientists who are following this path sometimes express a strongly spiritual worldview. For example, Monica Gagliano opens her book with an address to Humanity: “The Void sings everything into Being. You are the Singing Void. Then Sing!” This sounds like an idea that could be found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or ancient Greek philosophy.

    To conclude, when The Secret Life of Plants first came out, it “was gleefully disparaged by the academic establishment. The editor of Science, Philip Abelson, suggested it should be put on the equivalent of the Vatican’s Index, as unsuitable reading”¹³. This sounds remarkably similar to a later remark made by John Maddox, editor of Nature, upon the publication of Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life¹⁴. He entitled his review “A book for burning?”, and went on to say: “ Sheldrake’s argument is in no sense a scientific argument but is an exercise in pseudo-science… Many readers will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion — and this, indeed, may have been a part of the objective of writing such a book”¹⁵.

    All of this suggests to me that Tompkins and Sheldrake were probably on the right track.

Footnotes:

1. USA 1973, my copy Penguin 1975

2. Star Books, W. H. Allen & Co, 1975

3. Oneworld, 2012

4. Phoenix, 1999

5. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006

6. Greystone Books, 2016

7. DeVorss & Co, 1973

8. Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1972.

9. North Atlantic Books, 2018

10. Thorsons, 1997

11. as footnote 7, p 9–10

12. OUP 2006, my copy 2008

13. Brian Inglis, The Hidden Power, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p19

14. Blond and Briggs, 1981

15. Nature, September 24th 1981

    Richard Feynman was one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists. Even though the following five quotes¹ are brief, they reveal that he was also interested in, and a profound thinker about, the philosophy of science and the nature of the scientific quest.

• “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. It would be interesting to know exactly what he meant by this one. It sounds as though he is talking about some scientists’ unwarranted faith in the truth of what those from other disciplines believe. This is something that I’ve noticed in my readings, the problem being that the tendency towards specialisation means that individual scientists cannot keep up with all the latest developments in fields other than their own. They therefore accept the findings and statements of others on trust. However, the quote could also be about the public’s attitude to science, their blind faith in it. In the current pandemic, for example, we are told repeatedly that the government is “acting upon the best scientific advice”, and we are therefore supposed to accept this unquestioningly. Another example would be slogans like “In Science We Trust” as ‘proof’ that God does not exist.

• However, Feynman cautions doubt: “If you thought that science was certain — well, that is just an error on your part”. How many scientists, however, insist that current beliefs are the truth? I am reminded especially of the assured self-confidence of people like Steven Pinker², and the dogmatic statements made by (neo-)Darwinian biologists in recent times: Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Julian Huxley etc. In their world even the phrase ‘central dogma’, reminiscent of Church language, has been used.                                                                                                                                                                                              
• Rather than be satisfied with current ‘truth’, however, Feynman is constantly looking for that something which will break the established rules, that will move scientific thinking forward: “The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting”. According to the scientific method, an established ‘law’ is assumed to be correct until anomalies are found which cannot be accommodated within its framework. Then a new theory or paradigm is needed. I am reminded of something the great American psychologist William James said, that it only takes one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black.                                                                                                                                                
• Feynman clearly thinks that science is an ongoing process of discovery, but that there may actually be limits to what can be discovered: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”. Science is the, often passionate, quest for truth about the nature of things, and it is a good thing, on the whole, that scientists have an unquenchable thirst for this. There are, however, some things which we will perhaps never know, and Feynman accepts this, rather than pretend dogmatically that we currently have all the answers.

    This is especially relevant to one of the themes of my writing, the battle against scientific materialism. Because science and the scientific method can really only deal with the physical universe — that which can be seen, controlled, and experimented upon — it is therefore possibly extremely limited. Instead of accepting this, however, which is what Feynman is advocating, materialistic science claims that the physical universe with its apparent laws is all that there is, and that any attempt to suggest otherwise is non-scientific, pseudoscientific, or even worse ‘mystical’. In recent times this has been especially true of neuroscience (which focuses on the brain, claiming that it is the source of consciousness, and which frequently denies the existence of the self), and biology (which forces the evolution of life to be seen through aggressively materialist, neo-Darwinian eyes). Fortunately physics is leading the way out of this prison. Here the physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben are adopting the attitude of which Feynman approves: “We only know that there is something other than space-time but we don’t know what it is, because beyond space-time is nonphysical, unmeasurable”³.

• Perhaps my favourite Feynman quote is: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”. How many scientists know this, or have even considered it? Should the first part of any scientific training be a course in psychology, self-awareness, psychoanalysis, and the human tendency towards self-deception? I’m sure the scientific world would be a better place if it were.

                                                                                         Richard Feynman

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Footnotes:

1. They can all be found on this webpage: https://www.azquotes.com/author/4774-Richard_P_Feynman

2. A recent book of his is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin, 2018), in which he claims that the latest ‘Enlightenment’ science, which is materialist and atheistic, is the truth. He says (p29): “Who could be against reason, science, humanism, or progress?”, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with him must be stupid.

3. Space-Time and Beyond, Bantam, 1983, p56