16 FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



Marcus * in his little brochure on " Monism ? " 

 uses such an expression as :t that tendency to 

 persist/' which means the impossibility for any 

 given cell at any time to become any other kind of 

 cell. This same author speaks (p. 117) of "an 

 organism which showed such a capacity for re- 

 sistance : " that is not meant to convey affect- 

 ability. 



If it is objected that the assuming of the exist- 

 ence of functional inertia " explains too much/' 

 it must be remembered that the same objection 

 militates equally against the conception of affect- 

 ability. For certainly affectability explains, or 

 rather as a property underlies, a vast and quite 

 heterogeneous assemblage of functions or phenomena, 

 viz., movements of all kinds, evolution of heat, of 

 electricity, the doing of internal and external work, 

 secretions of the most diverse composition, ex- 

 cretions equally so, 'tropisms and 'taxes of every 

 description. If functional inertia explains many 

 and different things, so in truth, too, does affecta- 

 bility ; but the fact is, that, strictly speaking, 

 neither property explains anything in the sense of 

 giving the reason why when a stimulus is received 

 energy is or is not transformed by the living pro- 

 toplasm : whereas in another sense, these prop- 

 erties afford the only explanation we can have until 

 the day when we know in terms of the conceptions 

 of organic chemistry what biogenic instability and 



* Marcus, " Monism ? " translated by Dr. Felkin. (Rebman, 

 1907.) 



