life of plants except that of the life of nutrition. But, when men deny that plants have life, they do so because plants do not possess sensation; yet there are certain animals which lack foresight and intelligence.[1] For nature, which destroys the life of the animal in death, preserves it in the continuation of the race, and it is wrong for us to suppose any intermediate state between the animate and the inanimate. We know that sea-shells[2] are animals which lack foresight and intelligence and are at once plants and animals. The only reason, therefore, for their being called animals is that they have sensation; for genera give names and definitions to the species which fall under them, while the species give names to the individuals, and the genus ought to rest on a common cause present in the numerous individuals and not on the individuals themselves; but the meaning of the cause, on which the genus is based, is not obvious to every one. Now there are animals[3] which have no female sex, and some which do not procreate their kind, and some which lack the power of movement, and some in which the colour varies, and some which produce an offspring unlike themselves, and some which are produced from decaying vegetation.[4]
What, therefore, is the principle of life in animals? What is it that raises the noble animal, as surely as the heavens which encircle the sun and the planets, from the sphere of perplexity and doubt? For the heavenly bodies feel no outside influence, and sensation is an effect produced on a sentient being. Now a plant has no movement of itself, for it is fixed in the earth, which is itself immovable. Whence, then, shall we infer any similarity which may enable us to attribute life to the plant? For there is no
- ↑ The argument is that there are some animals which lack intelligence, but they do not therefore cease to be animals; so plants do not cease to be alive because they lack sensation.
- ↑ Cf. H. A. 588b 12 ff.
- ↑ Various classes of animals are now enumerated, which though they differ in many respects yet all possess one thing, sensation, which puts them into the genus of animals.
- ↑ The text has quae ex arboribus crescunt, which is absurd and due doubtless to mistranslation. The reference is almost certainly to the production of animal life from the putrefaction of vegetable matter, cf. H. A. 539a23.
