Allan Kardec-THE Spirit's Book_ The Principles of Spiritist Doctrine (1989)

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ALLAN KARDEC
sensitiveness, and, in some cases, a sort of will, as in the case of the latter, whose lobes seize
the fly that lights on it, in order to suck its juices, and even seem to set a snare for it, in order
to kill it. Are these plants endowed with the faculty of thought? Have they a will, and do they
form 'in intermediate class between the vegetable and animal natures? Are they points of
transition from the one to the other?
"Everything in nature is transition, from the very fact that everything is different, and that
everything, nevertheless, is linked together. Plants do not think, and have consequently no
will. The oyster that opens its shell, and all the zoophytes, do not think; they have only a blind
natural instinct."
The human organism furnishes us with examples of similar movements that take place without any
participation of the will, as in the organs of digestion and circulation the pylorus closes itself at the
contact of certain substances, as though to refuse them passage. It must be the same with the sensitive
plant, the movements of which do not necessarily imply perception, and, still less, will.
590. Is there not, in plants, an instinct of self-preservation which leads them to seek what may
be useful to them, and to avoid what would do them harm?
"You may call it, if you will, a sort of instinct: that depends on the extension you give to the
word; but it is purely mechanical. When, in chemical operations, you see two bodies unite
together. it is because they suit one another, that ~s to say, there is an affinity between them;
but you do not call that instinct."
591. In worlds of higher degree, are the plants, like the other beings, of a more perfect
nature?
"Everything in those worlds is more perfect; but the plants are. always plants, as the animals
are always animals, and as the men are always men.
Animals and Men.
592. If we compare man with the animals in reference to intelligence, it seems difficult to
draw a line of demarcation between them; for some animals are, in this respect, notoriously
superior to some men. Is it possible to establish such a line of demarcation with any
precision?
"Your philosophers are far from being agreed upon this point. Some of them will have it that
man is an animal; others are equally sure that the animal is a man. They are all wrong. Man is
a being apart, who sometimes sinks himself very low, or who