If it seems to us that the plant kills and eats a fly mechanically, may
it not seem to the plant that a man must kill and eat a sheep
mechanically?

"But it may be said that the plant is void of reason, because the growth
of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and due
temperature, the plant must grow: it is like a clock, which being once
wound up will go till it is stopped or run down: it is like the wind
blowing on the sails of a ship--the ship must go when the wind blows it.
But can a healthy boy help growing if he have good meat and drink and
clothing? can anything help going as long as it is wound up, or go on
after it is run down? Is there not a winding up process everywhere?

"Even a potato {5} in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him
which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he
wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar window
and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto: they will crawl along the
floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window; if there be a little
earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it for his own
ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of his roots when
he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but we can imagine
him saying, 'I will have a tuber here and a tuber there, and I will suck
whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbour I
will overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I can do shall be
the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed than
I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome.'

"The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of
languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find
it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with
those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being
boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything
else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then,
they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless;
and so _qua_ mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.

"If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical
only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light
and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every
sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operatio