His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be like.  He called it ‘Nanna.’  In the development of animals the nervous system is the central fact.  Plants develop centrifugally, spread their organs abroad.  For that reason people suppose that they can have no consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous system provides.  But the plant’s consciousness may be of another type, being connected with other structures.  Violins and pianos give out sounds because they have strings.  Does it follow that nothing but strings can give out sound?  How then about flutes and organ-pipes?  Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with the kind of organization that | they possess.  Nutrition, respiration, propagation take place in them without nerves.  In us these functions are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is eclipsed by that which goes with the brain.  No such eclipse occurs in plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more lively.  With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves?  Does the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light, relish in no wise her own beauty?  When the plant in our room turns to the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive part?  Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers.  They can neither run away nor cry out.  But this only proves how different their modes of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode of feeling life at all.

How scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe, if the feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence.  Solitary would consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or other quadruped, or fly about the flowers in that of some insect, but can we really suppose that the Nature through which God’s breath blows is such a barren wilderness as this?