348 The Unity of the Organism 



the warrantableness for considering the individual organism 

 as a chemical element, is the fact that it maintains its identity 

 as regards all its elementary constituents except one, oxygen, 

 be wrenching these, so to speak, from other organic com- 

 pounds (by digesting these) and then by synthesizing the 

 elements into its own particular substance. Another way of 

 expressing the same conception is to say that the organism 

 is an element, chemically speaking, because it reacts directly 

 in a chemical sense with another element. 



Did this chapter pretend to be anything more than a 

 sketch of a theory of consciousness a considerable discus- 

 sion of the "activation" of oxygen would naturally come in 

 somewhere, perhaps at this point. The essense of activation 

 is the fact that when oxygen passes into the organism by the 

 respiratory process it is somehow changed into a condition 

 which enables it to oxidize living tissue-substances as it 

 can not to any degree, seemingly, when brought into con- 

 tact with the same substances outside the organism. This 

 discussion would involve the various theories which have 

 been put forward to account for this phenomenon, as those 

 which make use of the principle of enzymes, of peroxides or 

 of some other. All that our aims here require us to notice 

 is that nothing conclusive as touching the nature of activa- 

 tion would come from the discussion. How unsatisfactory 

 a state this whole subject is in may be seen from the follow- 

 ing words of a foremost American biochemist : "It has been 

 a popular practice to appeal to hypothetical enzymes to 

 explain some of the obscure chemical transformations in the 

 organism. Thus we have been wandering through the mazes 

 of the oxidases, oxygenases, peroxidases, reductases, cata- 

 lases and other products of perplexing nomenclature in the 

 hope of escaping the uncertainties of intermediary meta- 

 bolism." 36 



