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He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis the basis of animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism.
The tropism concerned is the food tropism, but what is gained by calling the search for food common to all active animals a tropism, and how is the search for food before the food is perceptible to the senses, before it can act as a stimulus on a food-sensitive substance in the body, to be compared to a tropism at all?
A plant can continue to exist, and a sculptor can model a statue, only through being so organized as to be able to assimilate what the environment offers. Whether it be called tropism or technique, it is all one. Intelligence in this sense may be said to be the elementary virtue, conditioning success on every plane of activity.
And Leroy believes further that it isn't an intelligent arrangement not on the part of the barrels, at least but that it's been done for so many thousands of generations that it's become instinctive a tropism just like the actions of ants and bees. The creatures have been bred to it!" "Nuts!" observed Harrison. "Let's hear you explain the reason for that big empty city, then." "Sure.
It is impossible to understand in this case, firstly, how a mutation could cause the eyes to be divided and doubly adapted to two different optic conditions, and, secondly, how at the same time a convenient 'tropism' should occur which caused the animal to swim with its eyes half in and half out of water.
It's a sort of tropism, perhaps, such as bugs have, that enables them to keep between two planks or that turns plant-roots toward the sun. Anyway, I've brought some breakfast. These berries may be good, and these other things may be toadstools. I brought them along." "How does one tell?" she asked. "Oh, mushrooms are pink underneath and ribbed like a fan."
My certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men. In my experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.
We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.
"The Statisticalists deny all this; their opinion is that the discarnate individuality is in a more or less somnambulistic state, that it is drawn by a process akin to tropism to the nearest available reincarnation vehicle, and that it must reincarnate in and only in that vehicle.
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