Page:The Works of Aristotle - Vol. 6 - Opuscula (1913).djvu/84

815$a$ plants possess these characteristics, they believed them also to be affected by desire.

Let us first examine their obvious characteristics, and afterwards those which are less evident. Plato says that whatsoever takes food desires food, and feels pleasure in satiety and pain when it is hungry, and that these dispositions do not occur without the accompaniment of sensation. The view of Plato in thus holding that plants have sensation and desire was marvellous enough; but Anaxagoras and Democritus and Empedocles declared that they possessed intellect and intelligence. These views we must repudiate as unsound and pursue a sane statement of the case. I assert, then, that plants have neither sensation nor desire; for desire can only proceed from sensation, and the end proposed by our volition changes in accordance with sensation. In plants we do not find sensation nor any organ of sensation, nor any semblance of it, nor any definite form or capacity to pursue objects, nor movement or means of approach to any object perceived, nor any token whereby we may judge that they possess sense-perception corresponding to the tokens by which we know that they receive nutriment and grow. Of this we can only be certain because nutrition and growth are parts of the soul, and when we find a plant to be possessed of such a nature, ve perceive of necessity that some part of a soul is present in it; but we ought not to contend that a plant which lacks sensation is a thing possessed of sense, because while sensation is the cause of the glorification of life, nutrition is merely the cause of growth in the living thing.

These differences of opinion come into consideration in their own proper place. It is certainly difficult to find a state intermediate between life and the absence of life. Some, too, will urge that a plant, if it be alive, is therefore an animal; for it is difficult to assign any principle to the