“They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects, and persuade them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made of their leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves, as it were, into living rat-traps, which close with a spring on any insect that settles upon them; others make their flowers into the shape of a certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere.  Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against underground enemies.  If, on the other hand, they think that any insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they make themselves.

“What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one wants to do, and to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent?  Some say that the rose-seed does not want to grow into a rose-bush.  Why, then, in the name of all that is reasonable, does it grow?  Likely enough it is unaware of the want that is spurring it on to action.  We have no reason to suppose that a human embryo knows that it wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a man.  Nothing ever shows signs of knowing what it is either wanting or doing, when its convictions both as to what it wants, and how to get it, have been settled beyond further power of question.  The less signs living creatures give of knowing what they do, provided they do it, and do it repeatedly and well, the greater proof they give that in reality they know how to do it, and have done it already on an infinite number of past occasions.

“Some one may say,” he continued, “’What do you mean by talking about an infinite number of past occasions?  When did a rose-seed make itself into a rose-bush on any past occasion?’

“I answer this question with another.  ’Did the rose-seed ever form part of the identity of the rose-bush on which it grew?’ Who can say that it did not?  Again I ask:  ’Was this rose-bush ever linked by all those links that we commonly consider as constituting personal identity, with the seed from which it in its turn grew?’ Who can say that it was not?

“Then, if rose-seed number two is a continuation of the personality of its parent rose-bush, and if that rose-bush is a continuation of the personality of the rose-seed from which it sprang, rose-seed number two must also be a continuation of the personality of the earlier rose-seed.  And this rose-seed must be a continuation of the personality of the preceding rose-seed—­and so back and back ad infinitum.  Hence it is impossible to deny continued personality between any existing rose-seed and the earliest seed that can be called a rose-seed at all.

“The answer, then, to our objector is not far to seek.  The rose-seed did what it now does in the persons of its ancestors—­to whom it has been so linked as to be able to remember what those ancestors did when they were placed as the rose-seed now is.  Each stage of development brings back the recollection of the course taken in the preceding stage, and the development has been so often repeated, that all doubt—­and with all doubt, all consciousness of action—­is suspended.