Sketch of an Orc/anismal 'J'/wor// of Conscioustwss 315 



ers of response. Instinct and oi .ranization arc, to me, two 

 aspects of one and the same tl)in«r, Ucnvv both have onto- 

 genetic and pliylogenetic development.*' 



Tiiese statements sliow, as do those given in our disc-iission 

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

 fledged elenientalism and toward organismalism. Hut 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 j)hil- 

 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 unform't table 

 visit which I liad 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 bv anv 

 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 Ix^ realities 

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

 giving definite directions to responses" of chemical sul)- 

 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, nuist l)e the consti- 

 tutional activities oi protoplasms (protoplasm in thi' plural 

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

 dividual nor even exactlv like anv other; and also that the 

 existence of protoplasms is de])endent upon the organisms 

 to w^hich they belong as well as upon the chemical substances 

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



