320 The Unity of the Organism 



Without stopping to examine this language in detail, our 

 aim will be achieved by pointing out that the more closely the 

 various emotions are scrutinized, and the more effort there 

 is made to refer them to their causes, the more varied are they 

 found to be, and the more widely are we led to search in the 

 organization for causal factors. The mental attitude of per- 

 fect openness toward any and all facts, both of effect and 

 cause, which may occur in a given organic situation, is one 

 of the leading characterizations of the organismal conception. 

 The assertion that the organism as a whole is the causal ex- 

 planation of an emotion or an "emotion complex" is justified 

 by two considerations: (1) Except for the organism viewed 

 alive and whole and under both its ontogenic and phylogenic 

 aspects, the emotion would not exist; and (2) so wide-spread 

 and subtle does common observation recognize the parts of 

 the organism involved to be in many of its emotional activi- 

 ties that for practical purposes, it is better to work on the 

 hypothesis that all parts of the organism are implicated than 

 to adopt the alternative hypothesis that certain parts only 

 are involved ; that is, that some parts are not involved. 



As a matter of fact, I believe that in spirit James' hypo- 

 thesis is organismal even though, probably from his training 

 and career in formal anatomy, physiology, and psychology, 

 he never became entirely free from the Body-Soul antithesis 

 and the dogmatisms of "nerve physiology," which have so 

 dominated modern physiology and psychology. This opinion 

 I base on the general tenor of his discussions particularly 

 of the emotions, rather than on his direct formulation of his 

 theory of emotion. I will quote a few passages that seem 

 particularly to trend in this direction. "No reader of the 

 last two chapters [Tlie Production of Movement, and In- 

 stinct] will be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do 

 excite bodily changes by a preorganized mechanism, or the 

 farther fact that the changes are so indefinitely numerous 

 and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sound- 



