Maeterlinck has knowledge of nature, not only such knowledge as Wordsworth had, but a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous science. He has learned lessons from Fabre, whom he admires. He has studied his own garden in the light of what botanists have told him and in the other light, which is not hostile to botany, but is different, the light of poetry. He loves to speculate about unsettled questions. And his speculations have a very great intellectual merit. He is, on the whole, content to be uncertain about uncertain things and to express his inclinations toward one or another conclusion in a persuasive, wistful manner. Like many other poets, he leans toward the belief that nature, which includes us, knows more than we do, and that to ascribe intelligence, in a restricting way, to man alone is probably to leave out a good deal of the magic of growing things, and to omit some potential explanations of their mystery, their mystery in the poet's sense and in the stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot question about what knowledge is, what instinct is. It's a very fine question, and it becomes hottest when the men of imagination and the men of science (happily they are not mutually exclusive) argue about whether a dog knows that he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a dog: The curate says you have no soul-- I know that he has none. That is good; but it is spiteful. Let us admit the curate. For the dog would. A dog does not care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is our superior. Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan doubt of our times, is a true believer in other kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that "nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to please, to delight and to prove herself happy, does almost what we should do had we her treasures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs the whole question and ascribes to "nature" wishes, desires, intentions. He does the trick that poets always do; he answers the question that he asks and that he pretends to be discussing. "All that we observe within ourselves," he says, "is rightly open to suspicion; we are at once litigant and judge, and we have too great an interest in peopling our world with magnificent illusions and hopes. But let the least external indication be dear and precious to us."