ave only to collect
them and there is little need of imagination to see their general bearing.
Since we have discovered the fact that Man is a time-binder (no matter
what time is) and have introduced the sense of dimensionality into the
study of life phenomena in general, a great many facts which were not
clear before become very clear now.

I wrote this book on a farm without any books at hand and I had been out
of touch with the progress of science for the five years spent in the war
service and war duties. My friend Dr. Grove-Korski, formerly at Berkeley
University, drew my attention particularly to the books of Dr. Jacques
Loeb. I found there a treasury of laboratory facts which illustrate as
nothing better could, the correctness of my theory. I found with deep
satisfaction that the new "scientific biology" is scientific because it
has used mathematical methods with notable regard to dimensionality--they
do not "milk an automobile."

For the mathematician and the engineer, the "tropism theory of animal
conduct," founded by Dr. J. Loeb, is of the greatest interest, because
this is a theory which analyses the functions and reactions of an organism
_as a whole_ and therefore there is no chance for confusion of ideas or
the intermixing of dimensions.

"Physiologists have long been in the habit of studying not the
reactions of the whole organism but the reactions of isolated
segments; the so-called reflexes. While it may seem justifiable to
construct the reactions of the organism as a whole from the
individual reflexes, such an attempt is in reality doomed to
failure, since the reactions produced in an isolated element
cannot be counted upon to occur when the same element is part of
the whole, on account of the mutual inhibitions which the
different parts of the organism produce upon each other when in
organic connection; and it is, therefore, impossible to express
the conduct of a whole animal as the algebraic sum of the reflexes
of its isolated segments.... It would, therefore, be a
misconception to speak of tropism as of reflexes, since tropisms
are reactions of the organism as a whole, while reflexes are
reactions of isolated segments. Reflexes and tropisms agree,
however, in one respect, inasmuch as both are obviously of a
purely physico-chemical character." _Forced Movements--Tropism and
Animal Conduct._ By Jacques Loeb.

I will quote