Sketch of an Organismal Theory of Consciousness 



mg-board, which every change of consciousness, however 

 slight, may make reverberate. The various premutations and 

 combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible 

 make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, how- 

 ever slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as 

 unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood it- 

 self. The immense number of parts modified in each emotion 

 is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood 

 the total and integral expression of any one of them. We 

 may catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with 

 the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera." 12 I ask the read- 

 er to make special note of the part of the quotation be- 

 ginning, "The various permutations" as we shall have more 

 to say about it a few pages farther on. 



Again we read: "Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly 

 alive ; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feel- 

 ing, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense 

 of personality that every one of us unfamiliarly carries with 

 him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these 

 complexes of sensibility." 1 I hope the reader will notice 

 how easy it would be for me to contend that these state- 

 ments come near to my statement about "inner" and "outer," 

 or subjective and objective; and also to my formal hypo- 

 thesis as to the nature of consciousness. However, I do not 

 wish to make too much of such a contention, though I shall 

 bring up the point again presently. All I want to do just 

 here is to make still clearer the meaning of my view that 

 James was organismal in spirit, though not wholly so in for- 

 mal statement. To me one of the strongest evidences of 

 this was his obvious effort, as indicated by these and many 

 other passages in many other writings than his Psychology, 

 to describe fully the phenomena with which he chanced to 

 deal. As I have remarked in substance so many times in this 

 book, one of the most unmistakable signs of the elementalist 

 attitude in biology is incomplete and more or less perverted 



