326 The Unity of the Organism 



lation is most open to common observation. Compare, for 

 example, James' "Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; 

 and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, 

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

 personality that every one of us unfamiliarly carries with 

 him," with Hopkins' "On ultimate analysis we can scarcely 

 speak at all of living matter in the cell; at any rate, we 

 cannot, without gross misuse of terms, speak of the cell- 

 life as being associated with any one particular type of mole- 

 cule. Its life is the expression of a particular dynamic equil- 

 ibrium which obtains in a polyphasic system . . . 'life' as we 

 instinctively define it, is a property of the cell as a whole, 

 because it depends upon the organization of processes, upon 

 the equilibrium displayed by the totality of the coexisting 

 phases." 16 Also compare Hopkins' statement that among 

 the different "phases" of the cell in which its life inheres, 

 "are to be reckoned not only the differentiated parts of the 

 bio-plasm strictly defined (if we can define it strictly), the 

 macro-and-micro-nuclei, nerve fibers, muscle fibers, etc., but 

 the materials which support the cell structure, and which 

 have been termed metaplastic constituents of the cell," with 

 James' "each morsel" of our cubic capacity "contributes its 

 pulsations of feeling, etc." 



The congruity of these statements is apparent even when 

 taken as here exhibited; that is, each as standing by itself 

 at about the two extremes of the scale of life. When, how- 

 ever, they are viewed in connection with my general argument 

 that "cell" in Hopkins' statement ought to be replaced by 

 "organism"; and in connection with what we have learned 

 from Cannon and others about the mechanism by means of 

 which the organism operates in the phase of conscious emo- 

 tion, it seems as though our organismal hypothesis of con- 

 sciousness comes near to a demonstration. And so far as 

 ordinary descriptive natural history is concerned, I believe 

 this to be true. However, I recognize, keenly enough, that 



