Germs of Mind in Plants

R.H. France

This eccentric and beautiful book, kept in print all these years by the noble Charles Kerr Publishers, makes the case for sentience in the plant world. France’s writing is expertly rendered into careful and poetic English. The book was a part of the Workingman’s Library, a counterweight to that tedious propaganda called ‘education’ which merely serves to further the pathological idea that capitalism is true progress.
In the West, we ignorantly assign perceptive life only to blooded creatures. This book extends perceptive life to the green world and demands a humane socialism from the intricate analogy of the stamens, flowers, and roots of a republic we have denigrated and forgotten.
The book is also a fine rebuff to the social-Darwinist racists and mechanists who see the universe as one great adding machine. Indeed, the universe of William Blake is not far from ‘The Germs of Mind in Plants’. France’s book achieves an earthy magic, where the working day, riddled with exploitation and class war, can be pierced by a dialectic of flower and fly.
I strongly recommend this passionate, civilized, and highly original work. All ecological work should proceed along these lines. If it did, it would avoid the sentimentality and suburban misanthropy that so often plagues it.
This book is both a treatise and a work of poetry by a true scientist.

status	Copy #1 (5852): in
genre	Philosophy » General Philosophy
publisher	Charles H. Kerr & Company
publish date	1905
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)