The capacity of the white Gaussian noise (WGN) channel is widely stated asS/N0nats/unit time. This conclusion is commonly derived either formally, or from the capacity,Wln(l +S/N0W), of the corresponding band-limited channel with bandwidthW, by takingW→8. In this paper, the WGN channel capacity is instead found directly by treating WGN as an arbitrary noise sequence that whitens in a general sense. In addition, the coding theorems proved make explicit the class of allowable receivers, either finite- or infinite-dimensional correlation receivers, or unconstrained. The capacities for these three receiver classes are found to be, respectively:S/N0forS> 0, and 0 forS= 0; and 8 for allS≥ 0. In those cases where the capacity is infinite, actual transmitter–receiver pairs are specified that achieve capacity.