286 The Unity of the Organism 



with life need not be raised by the naturalist, the indubitable 

 fact that at least a large sector of life is conscious ; in other 

 words, the fact that consciousness is a part of life, he can 

 not ignore if he is to deal with consciousness at all. For the 

 naturalist, then, no hypothesis or theory of consciousness 

 can be satisfactory which is not clearly and expressly em- 

 bedded in and an essential part of an hypothesis or theory 

 of life generally. Our central hypothesis, drafted in ac- 

 cordance with these principles, may now be given. 



Formulation of the Central Hypothesis 



All the manifestations which in the aggregate we call 

 Life, from those presented by the simplest plants to those 

 of a consciously psychical nature presented by man and 

 numerous other animals, result from the chemical reaction 

 between the organism and the respiratory gases they take, 

 oxygen being almost certainly the effective gas for nearly 

 all animals. An essential implication of this proposition 

 is that every living individual organism has the value, 

 chemically speaking, of an elementary chemical substance. 



Let us be promptly explicit in recognizing the character 

 of the two propositions contained in this hypothesis. They 

 are manifestly chemical in large part, and a complete demon- 

 stration of their truth is impossible without the aid of chem- 

 ical research focussed directly upon them. But though 

 clearly chemical, equally clearly they go beyond far beyond 

 present chemical knowledge. To speak of a whole organ- 

 ism as equivalent to a chemical element seems at first sight 

 not only unwarranted by positive chemical knowledge, but 

 opposed by such knowledge. Furthermore, the term "re- 

 action" as used in the first proposition undoubtedly seems 

 quite foreign to the technical meaning which chemistry has 

 attached to the word. Indeed so remote to say the least, 

 are these fundamental propositions of the hypothesis from 



