" The Intelligence of Flowers By Maurice Maeterlinck... translated... by Philip Mosley SUNY PRESS; 98 PAGES...
... Belgian playwright, essayist, amateur botanist and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)... argues for a kind of mystical science... Maeterlinck's 1907 essay "The Intelligence of Flowers"... melds religious intuition and scientific observation. He describes numerous examples of intelligence in flowers as they seek to reproduce, and by analogy insists that the "genius" observed in the behavior of flowers resembles the wisdom of people [really !!! ?]. "Ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us," Maeterlinck writes... he insists upon the brilliance of individual species - one orchid is even described as "truly Machiavellian"... Endorsing neither religion nor evolution, Maeterlinck puts forth a kind of spiritualism grounded in experience... Maeterlinck writes that everything alive is intelligent... If nature isn't perfect, then maybe there isn't a God, he implies. ... "The Intelligence of Flowers" would be worth reading if only for the phrases Maeterlinck parades:.. an orchid known as "stinking mud" has a lower petal "decorated at its source with bronzed caruncles, with Merovingian mustaches, and with ominous lilac buboes."... "The Intelligence of Flowers" is happily welcome... in this centenary reissue." URL : http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/14/RV66TCD6T.DTL ************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
