340 The Unity of the Organism 



every part of the organism. In oxygen the organism finds 

 one of its most fundamental food materials for which it does 

 not normally have to go in search or to compete with other 

 organisms. The familiar fact and its significance appear not 

 to have attracted the attention of biologists much. Even 

 L. J. Henderson 30 who has written so illuminatingly on 

 many aspects of organic adaptiveness says nothing definite 

 on this point. These two facts are weighty reasons for my 

 proposal to look upon oxygen as one chemically elementary 

 substance and the organism as another, the reaction be- 

 tween which is basal in the production of consciousness and 

 all life phenomena. Consequently the problem of how, ex- 

 actly, the organism endowed with full-fledged consciousness 

 reacts toward oxygen is certainly one of the most important 

 of all problems on the purely physico-chemical side of life. 

 And, as said early in this sketch, it is just here that my the- 

 ory is most avowedly hypothetical. It would be quite out of 

 the question to present in the remaining pages of this book, 

 even had I the requisite knowledge for doing so, all that 

 might profitably be said on the subject. Consequently only 

 two or three of what seem to me the most crucial matters will 

 be mentioned. 



In the first place I ask the reader to recall what has been 

 said in various of the preceding chapters which have brought 

 out the indubitable trend of the interpretation of life phe- 

 nomena according to the principles of physical chemistry, 

 away from the elementalistic conception of the organism. 

 The interpretation of the organic cell as a system of phases 

 in dynamic equilibrium, so strongly set forth by Hopkins 

 and Bayless will be remembered. And this will call to mind 

 the sharp way in which the new conception, with its appeal 

 to the role of surface-layers, membranes, and areas of con- 

 tact between all sorts of constituent substances, sets itself 

 over against such pseudo-objective conceptions as that of 

 biogens, not to mention the horde of out and out subjectivis- 



