Shortly before his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks wrote about the mental life of plants. Charles Darwin contemplated a related set of questions before his own death in 1882, as he investigated the movement of climbing plants. Plant life, as shown in Darwin's books on the subject, is both active and intentional. Fascinated readers learned that climbing plants possessed volition and pursuied objectives: they move “when it is of some advantage to them,” and “in manifest relation to their wants.” More dramatically, perhaps, Darwin argued that plants gather information about the world around them through tendrils and other structures that act “like the brain of lower animals…receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.” The notion of volitional plants deconstructed any seemingly stable boundary between human and non-human, fauna and flora, and popular commentators looking both at the Darwinian plant world and at emerging theories of the mind and consciousness were driven to ask: “Are plants able to think?” and “Is there. . .a consciousness in vegetable organisms?” This paper investigates the startled reactions--from amused and bemused to downright panicked-- that readers of periodical literature in the U.S. had to Darwin’s observations on the movement of plants and on the significant yet understudied role that Darwin’s plant studies played on developing theories of consciousness, especially those of William James, in the late nineteenth century.
