2. Questions following Carl Unger's Lecture on “Anthroposophy and the Epistemological Foundations of the Natural Sciences”

The fact that today one does not even have an inkling of how to arrive at an understanding of the will proves to you that now even a strange idea has found its way into the newer scientific way of thinking: the strange idea that plants also have something like ensouled will, because there are those among them which, when insects or something like that come near them, fold up their leaves and consume these insects. That means, to summarize a mere external fact, a mere external 'complex of acts, an external complex of phenomena, under the concept of will - but which in this case is only an illusion. I have often said in lectures that I know of another creature that, when small animals come near, also takes the opportunity to get them into its burrow and kill them there, just like the [carnivorous] plant does the insect: namely, a mousetrap. And with exactly the same right with which one thinks of the Venus flytrap as ensouled, one can think of a mousetrap as ensouled.