Gustav Theodor Fechner

“ Younger men chime in, and Fechner’s philosophy promises to become scientifically fashionable. Imagine a Herbert Spencer who, to the unity of his system and its unceasing touch with facts, should have added a positively religious philosophy instead of Spencer’s dry agnosticism ”

“ Once grasp the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality, and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may [xiii] appear to one another when they affect each other from the outside; and it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve. “Psychophysical movement,” as Fechner calls it, is the most pregnant name for all the reality that is. ”

“ Neither does any one think that the glory of the other world shall result otherwise to the foolish, the idle, and the bad, than to make them feel the discord of their lives, and to emphasize the necessity for reform. Already in the present life man brings with him an eye to behold the whole glory of heaven and earth, an ear to hear music and the speech of man, an understanding to grasp the meaning of all this ”

“ NE. of Havre; has a fine Gothic Benedictine church, a harbour and lighthouse, hardware and textile factories; fishing and sugar refineries also flourish; exports the celebrated Benedictine liqueurs.
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, physicist and psychophysicist, born at Gross-Särchen, in Lower Lusatia; became professor of Physics in Leipzig, but afterwards devoted himself to psychology; laid the foundations of the science of psychophysics in his "Elements of Pyschophysics"; wrote besides on the theory of colour and galvanism, as well as poems and essays (1801-1887) . ”

“ Every one who has set before him higher aims, and knows better ways thither, has chosen a new central point for his motive power; not as a blind tool, but as one who from his own impulse and understanding serves righteousness and wisdom. The brow-beaten slave does not render the best service. But in whatever way men begin to serve God here they will carry further there, as partakers of His divine glory.
[39] CHAPTER V IT is, indeed, possible for the spirits of the living and the dead to meet unconsciously in many ways, and also consciously only on one side. ”

“ How otherwise could these glorious realms, based upon such unalterable principles, be formed out of the tangled egotism of individuals, who, with their short-sighted eyes, from the centre could see no circumference, and at the circumference could discern no centre, if the higher spirits, seeing clearly through the whole, did not control the machinery, and, while they all press around the [36] common divine centre, and so in their godlike part meet together, also lead the men whom they influenced, united on to higher goals. ”

“ All spirits cannot be united indiscriminately in the same soul; therefore the good and bad, the true and false [29] spirits contend together for possession of it, and the one who conquers in the struggle holds the ground. ”

“ But as thoughts can be cleansed from all that is unworthy, and [67] in moments of insight be united to still higher thoughts, each becoming thereby perfected in that which was lacking, even so will souls in their mutual intercourse find the path of progress towards perfection. ”

“ Subsequently recovering, he turned to the study of mind and the relations between body and mind, giving public lectures on the subjects of which his books treat. He died at Leipzig on the 18th of November 1887. Among his works may be mentioned: Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode (1836, 5th ed., 1903) , which has been translated into English ”

“ On the physical side we say that the brain-process that corresponded to it altered permanently the future mode of action of the brain.
Now, according to Fechner, our bodies are just wavelets on the surface of the earth. We grow upon the earth as leaves grow upon a tree, and our consciousness arises out of the whole earth-consciousness,—which it forgets to thank,—just as within our consciousness an emphatic experience arises, and makes us forget the whole background of experience without which it could not have come. ”

“ By the daylight-view, as contrasted with the night-view, Fechner meant the anti-materialistic view,—the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is inwardly alive and consciously animated. ”

“ But in the moment of death, in which an eternal night darkens the eye of his body, light will begin to dawn in his soul. Then will the centre of the inner man kindle into a sun which illuminates his whole spiritual nature, and at the same time penetrates it as with an inner eye, with divine clearness. ”

“ But when man dies, with the destruction of his body that combination is loosened, and, released from its bondage to it, the soul will now return to nature with full freedom. He will no longer be conscious of the waves of light and sound only as they strike eye and ear, but, as the waves roll forth into the sea of ether and the sea of air, he will not merely feel the blowing of the wind and the wash of the waves against his body, but will himself murmur in the air and sea ”

“ The creation of both went on so hand in hand during a period of daily companionship, that they seem to echo and re-echo in my memory like intermingled melodies. Simple as their charm is, may they have a duration even beyond that of the music of the future; for sound drowns beauty, yet beauty outlives sound, and what begins loud cannot so end. ”

“ Suddenly a rift shows itself in the otherwise forever closed door between this life and the other, to close again quickly—the door, which will wholly open in death, and only then will open never more to be closed. ”

“ But death is only a second birth into a freer existence, in which the spirit breaks through its slender covering and abandons inaction and sloth, as the child does in its first birth.
Then all, which with our present senses only reaches us as exterior and, as it were, from afar, we become penetrated with and possessed of in all its depth of reality. The spirit will no longer wander over mountain and field, or be surrounded by the delights of spring, only to mourn that it all seems exterior to him; but, transcending earthly limitations, he will feel new strength and joy in growing. ”

“ Fechner himself indeed was a German Gelehrter of the ideal type, at once simple and shrewd, a mystic and an experimentalist, homely and daring, and as loyal to facts as to his theories. But it would be terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our Science forever with his patient whimsies, and, in a world so full of more nutritious objects of attention, compel all future students to plough through the difficulties, not only of his own works, but of the still drier ones written in his refutation. ”

“ The human intellect or understanding, the special object of all philosophy, is a part, and in our case the most prominent part, of the human soul. Gustav Theodore Fechner, a forgotten star on the literary firmament, posed the question of the soul in his time and attempted to answer it. ”

“ Few could have passed through an ordeal like this and have retained reason, and no one unchanged in his views of what makes life worth living; and so, when Fechner took up academic work again it was not with lectures on molar and molecular forces but with discourses on subjects of ethics, of psychophysics and of esthetics; "from the physicist had come forth the philosopher." ”

“ The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.
Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his many pages—only reasonings like those which men continually use in practical life. For example: My house is built by some one, the world too is built by some one. ”

“ Precisely like Fechner, he holds that there is a physical causality and energy and there is a psychical causality and energy, parallels which never meet. He uses this psychical causality to carry out his voluntarism into detail, regarding it as an agency of will directed to ends, causing association and understanding, and further acting on a principle which he calls the heterogony of ends ”

“ Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this enormous life into which they fall. Fechner thinks, as any common man would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur, and form part of it just as they are. They don't stay outside and get represented inside by their copies. It is only the memories and concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as the eyes are open or shut.
Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth's soul. ”

“ Nevertheless he thinks only of the subordinate superhuman souls, and content with having made his obeisance once for all to the august total soul of the cosmos, he leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt to define its nature. Like the absolute, it is 'out of range,' and not an object for distincter vision. Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner's God is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system positively thought out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until—what? Envelopment can't go on forever ”

“ In such a philosophy all reality is “psychophysical.” At the same time Fechner would not have us suppose that the two sides are equal; according to him, the psychical, being the psychophysical as viewed from within, is real, the physical, being the psychophysical viewed from without, is apparent; so in oneself, though nervous process and psychical process are the same, it is the psychical which is the reality of which the nervous is mere appearance; and so everywhere, spirit is the reality, body the appearance of spirit to spirit. ”

“ It is thus that Fechner in his "day-view" of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us - that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the consciousness of higher and still higher relations." ”

“ The spirit will then communicate with others without language and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers. The earth will return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be degenerate souls. In his Zendavesta (Living Word) he gives us a philosophy that he deems Christian and that really sums up his final view of things. The childish view is nearest right and the philosopher only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18, 1887, at the age of eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than scientist. ”

“ Shall we resign our traditional belief that the greater part of the world is mere body, but that its general adaptability to conscious organisms proves its creation and government by God, and take to the new hypothesis, which, by a transfer of design from God to Nature, supposes that everything physical is alive, and conducts its life by psychical impulses of its own? Fechner himself went even further, and together with design transferred God Himself to Nature. ”

“ There are few divisions of the domain cultivated by natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century over which Fechner did not pass, and there are few on which he did not leave the imprint of his originality. In the second edition of the "Elements of Psychophysics," a work in which Fechner laid the foundations and built somewhat of the superstructure of the present science of psychology, the editor, Wundt of Leipzig, has appended a list of Fechner's published writings. ”

“ Soul and body being a single existence, it is practicable to investigate their mutual functioning and to state the results as laws of nature, which, in turn, are no more than assemblages of observations concerning phenomenal existence. Of course, a developed psychology would endeavor to extend this plan to the entire range of consciousness. Fechner, however, confines himself to a single fundamental point—the relation between stimulus and sensation as generalized in Weber's law ”

“ Natural laws are just the modes of the unfolding of God’s perfection. In his last work Fechner, aged but full of hope, contrasts this joyous “daylight view” of the world with the dead, dreary “night view” of materialism. Fechner’s work in aesthetics is also important. He conducted experiments to show that certain abstract forms and proportions are naturally pleasing to our senses, and gave some new illustrations of the working of aesthetic association. Fechner’s position in reference to predecessors and contemporaries is not very sharply defined. ”

“ The psychological laboratory sprang first from no single mind; not wholly from science nor yet from philosophy, but from an age. In 1860 Gustave Theodore Fechner, the godfather of experimental psychology, published his famous Law. Fechner was as much a mystic as a scientist. His Law was, perhaps, the first great impetus to active psycho-physical experimentation. The prospects now are, however, that this Law will stand, a halfway truth, beside Newton’s erroneous theory of 409 light, rather than, as was at first claimed for it, beside the Law of Gravity, a great primary law of nature. ”