and light,
relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to
the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering
or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has
the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive
part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the
mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither
run away nor cry out. But this only proves how different their modes
of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and
ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode
of feeling life at all.

How scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe, if the
feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence. Solitary would
consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or
other quadruped, or fly about the flowers in that of some insect, but
can we really suppose that the Nature through which God's breath blows
is such a barren wilderness as this?

I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who
have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more
general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like
reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner's with
which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his
belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere
sum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of
our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms
together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes
and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate
knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of
our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects
proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too
narrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with
each other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from each
other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world is
not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life
had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure,
perm