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Updated: May 3, 2025
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. The world is greater than my house, it must be a greater some one who built the world.
Thus we see that Fechner's reproach is unjustified. Those concepts which are too general to apply to particular cases are not meant to do so. If a general concept expresses, as it should, the place of Beauty in the hierarchy of metaphysical values, it is for the psychologist of aesthetics to develop the means by which that end can be reached in the various realms in which works of art are found.
We may, therefore, say that, without regard to the fact that neither pantheism nor theism will ever harmonize with Fechner's solution of this contrast which gives to God exactly the same position in the world as the soul has in the body, natural science will certainly treat with great reserve a cosmo-metaphysical system which so fully upsets all results of exact investigations into the history of origin and development, and has no other proof for itself than the identity, or at least the similarity, of the abstract formula according to which the molecular motions of organisms and the cosmical motions are performed.
This time it was clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned the one in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him." "Ages ago the earth was called an animal," I ventured. "We all know that."
Fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our individual minds. When our eyes are open their sensations enter into our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of what they see.
He is left thin and abstract in his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom the divine order provides. I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have been required.
But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective experiences as to the absolute. So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my strategical objective.
It was brief but pregnant the block of another idea, Fechner's apparently, hurled at him by the little doctor.
I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us." WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe
But here, as in Fechner's case, I must confine myself only to the features that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in collateral details, however interesting otherwise. For our present purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery.
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