Anent the same question Edward Step says, “Modern thought denies consciousness to plants, though Huxley was bold enough to say that every plant is an animal enclosed in a wooden box; and science has demonstrated that there is no distinction between the protoplasm of animals and plants, and that if we get down to the very simplest forms in which life manifests itself we can call them animals or plants indifferently.” When one considers the rooted, plant-like life of Mollusks and Hermit Crabs, and then the active, animal-like life of the free-swimming Moss spores and the wind-borne Fungi, he is tempted to wonder if, after all, this talk of plants and animals, is not just another of man’s arbitrary classifications, which may be superceded in time by some other system of nomenclature. Of only one thing are we sure, and that is that all life is one--an expression of the intelligence and power which pervades the universe. Many readers may vaguely feel and believe these facts and yet not be certain that plants are individually and personally intelligent; long training makes them still feel that the many admittedly clever and ingenious acts recorded every day in plantdom are but the indications of some external mind or force working through Nature. The plants act in certain ways because they have no choice in the matter; they are passive tools in the hands of such craftsmen as “instinct,” “heredity,” and “environment.” The answer to this is that you can ascribe an exactly similar fatalistic interpretation to every human thought, word or deed. What you consider the freest decision of will you made today can be shown conclusively to be the result of a long train of acts and influences which stretches back to Adam. It would have been impossible for you to have acted differently. Such blanket reasoning leads nowhere. If you believe that you are a free, independent, decision-making soul (and who does not?) logically you must grant the same rights to the humble Squash. Even in the terms of man’s own science, the plants can be shown to be intelligent. The psychologist Titchner classifies the three stages of mental processes as (1) Sensations (2) Images and (3) Affections. The term “affection” is here used in the special sense of a capacity for entering into intellectual states of pleasure or pain. In view of what has already been said, it hardly seems necessary to prove the existence of sensation in plants. The very fact that all life is a constant response to stimuli and the adjustment to environment presupposes the existence of plant sensation. Only a few hours passed in the investigation of plant habits will show our vegetable friends giving definite responses to heat, cold, moisture, light, and touch, while laboratory experiments show their sensitive powers of taste and hearing.