Sketch of an Organismal Theory of Consciousness 315 



ers of response. Instinct and organization are, to me, two 

 aspects of one and the same thing, hence both have onto- 

 genetic and phylogenetic development." 



These statements show, as do those given in our discussion 

 of the cell-theory, how far Whitman went away from full- 

 fledged elementalism and toward organismalism. But his 

 treatment of instinct and animal behavior reveals what his 

 treatment of the cell-theory does not, at least so clearly ; 

 namely, how far he also went on the way to the natural his- 

 tory mode as contrasted with the mechanistic mode of phil- 

 osophizing on biological phenomena. And this gives me a 

 pleasant opportunity to testify to the genuinely naturalist 

 current that ran through his life and work. An unforgettable 

 visit which I had with him among his pigeons not long before 

 he died, permitted me to see something of the character and 

 depth of his interest in those animals. His whole attitude 

 toward them his wonderfully broad information about, and 

 understanding of their general ways of life and personal 

 idiosyncrasies, his solicitude for them, and his measured af- 

 fection for them was such as is never displayed by any 

 one who has not very much of the real naturalist about him, 

 in his personality as well as in his knowledge. The individual 

 pigeons, many of them at any rate, appeared to be realities 

 to him in a deep sense and not merely "mechanical means for 

 giving definite directions to responses" of chemical sub- 

 stances. But after all this is said, it must also be said that 

 there is no evidence that Whitman ever grasped fully the con- 

 ception that the "constitutional activities of protoplasm" in 

 which he believed instincts to be rooted, must be the consti- 

 tutional activities of protoplasms (protoplasm in the plural 

 number), because no individual pigeon is either any other in- 

 dividual nor even exactly like any other; and also that the 

 existence of protoplasms is dependent upon the organisms 

 to which they belong as well as upon the chemical substances 

 of which they are composed. Whitman went so far on the 



