58 The Mechanistic Conception of Life 



phases undergo a shifting by means of which a change in the 

 rate of reaction is brought about according to one of the ways 

 described above. Since then I have looked through the litera- 

 ture on the function of the otoliths or statoliths, and have 

 reached the conclusion that all writers who assert that the 

 removal of the otoliths disturbs the geotropic orientation of 

 animals have been victims of the same fallacy as myself. They 

 have injured or removed the nerve endings. In the only case 

 in which a removal of the otoliths without tearing or other 

 injury of the nerve endings can be justifiably assumed, no dis- 

 turbance of the orientation occurred. 



While in my own work I have aimed to trace the complex 

 reactions of animals back to simpler reactions like those of 

 plants and finally to physico-chemical laws, the opposite 

 tendency has lately been gaining influence. Some botanists, 

 namely, Haberlandt, Nemec, and F. Darwin, endeavor to show 

 that the relatively simpler reactions of plants may be traced 

 back to the more complex relations found in animals. Instead 

 of deriving the tropic reactions of plants as directly as possible 

 from the law of mass action or the law of Bunsen and Roscoe, 

 they try to show that "sense-organs" exist in the cells of 

 plants and Franc6 even attributes to the latter a "soul" and 

 "intelligence." I believe that in order to be consistent, these 

 writers ought to base the law of mass action upon the assump- 

 tion of the existence of sense-organs, souls, and intelligence in 

 the molecules and ions. It is probably unnecessary to empha- 

 size the fact that it is better for the progress of science to derive 

 the more complex phenomena from simpler components than to 

 do the contrary. For all "explanation" consists solely in the 

 presentation of a phenomenon as an unequivocal function of 

 the variables by which it is determined, and if in nature we find 

 a function of two variables, it does not, in my opinion, tend 

 toward progress to assert that this is a case of functions of 

 more than two variables, without furnishing sufficient proof for 

 this assertion. 



