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.

 
The publication of Hayek’s principal work in “theoretical psychology” – The Sensory Order – was the end of a thirty-years-long endeavor, that begun in Monakow’s Zurich neurological laboratories, passed through Vienna, and London, and was concluded at the Committee of Social Thought of the University of Chicago. In my paper, I will compare the major versions of this work: the 1920 student paper, the London drafts, and the final Chicago publication. Thus we will be able to reveal the different constellations of disciplines that were summoned, each time, to answer the question: “What is mind?”.
 
We will be using Hayek as a common denominator that will enable us to see the differences between these intellectual worlds. While Hayek, in his travels in time and space, will be our informant, the concept of “Mind” will serve us as our magnifying glass. The mind has become an object to many different forms of knowledge: biology, psychology, philosophy, medicine, economics, and cybernetics. Therefore, studying the history of the “mind” is tantamount to the study of the fluctuating interfaces between the humanities, the life-, and the human sciences.
 
Finally, we will take into consideration the strange temporality of Hayek’s work. This book is read as either a fossil from the nineteenth century, or as prophecy about the world of AI – but never as a contemporary work. This curious temporality, I argue, hides the intellectual shift that took place in the time it took Hayek to bring his term paper to the shape of a published book.
 
 

By the 1920s, comparative psychology would
have hardly been recognizable to the naturalists who had filled its ranks a generation
prior. In fewer than thirty years, it had transitioned from an area dominated
by field observations, case studies, and at-home experiments to one consisting
of lab work, repeated trials, and specialized instrumentation. Where notions
like “reason,” “play,” and even “criminality” in animals had once been freely discussed,
they were now looked upon with the greatest skepticism. In fact, there was a
sense in which the object of study itself had changed. Whereas earlier texts
bore names like Mind in Animals and The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms, later
authors frequently opted for titles like Studies in
Animal Behavior or simply Behavior.
The reasons for this change are not especially well-understood. However, I argue
that much of the shift can be explained as a reaction to contemporary anxieties concerning the close relationship between psychology and psychical research (i.e., the
investigation of telepathy and other supernormal phenomena). Focusing on the experimental programme
advanced by figures like Edward Thorndike and J.B. Watson
between 1898 and 1920, I show how developments in psychical research and the concerns
these raised about the proper objects and methods of psychology were used to push for greater conservatism in the study of animals.
I consider how this approach was promoted by leading opponents of psychical
research and incorporated into the training of later psychologists, cementing its
position for generations to come.

In 1885, the eminent neurologist Jean Martin Charcot convened the experimental Société de Psychologie Physiologique to keep the circle of hypnotic research expanding around his clinic at Salpêtrière. Early papers showcased edgy-enough experiments involving hallucinations, hashish, handwriting analysis, delayed trance effects .  .  . but at the November assembly, research trends broke out in a gallop in altogether new directions.  Charcot had granted a broad research latitude in pursuing “how matter becomes mind,” but nothing in his directive would have encouraged the notion that mind might venture beyond matter.  Yet, in four plainly coordinated papers, evidence for “telepathic hypnotism” was set boldly before the gathered membership, all but forcing the Société to take up the gauntlet.  At the center of this overture was doctoral candidate, Pierre Janet, and his carefully observed investigation of “sommeil a distance,” but behind it all was Charles Richet, Charcot’s trusty subordinate who had, all the while, an agenda of his own.   While this paper’s reconstruction of the Société’s timeline and social networks clearly points to Richet as the impetus for this run on telepathy, the energy he stirred was already there, suggesting a less monolithic materialism than is often assumed regarding his psychiatric cohort.  Positivism, even for the French, might be as much a matter of professional conformity as personal ideological commitment.   Rather than read the demise of telepathy at Salpêtrière as due to a lack of interest (namely Charcot’s), it would be equally true to consider that such interest was in dangerous excess.