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The sort of belief that religious experience of this type naturally engenders in those who have it is fully in accord with Fechner's theories.
One is reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those poets who ape angelic modes of progression.
Fechner's primitive researches made it possible to produce instruments so exact that they can measure the sound made by a drop of water falling from the height of a meter, while Wundt's researches have resulted in chronometers which can measure the thousandth part of a second.
I owe to Fechner's shade an apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme I suggested at the end of our last hour.
The special thought of Fechner's with which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere sum of the more limited forms.
Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner's malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine miracle.
The numerous facts of divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were unknown in Fechner's time, and neither the phenomena of automatic writing and speech, nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally, had been recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner's stock of analogies is scant compared with our present one.
But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept any more than pantheistic idealists accept it. Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, 'nichts wirkliches kann unmöglich sein, the actual cannot be impossible, and what is actual at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now proceed to remind you of.
Fechner's term of the 'threshold, which has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in drops.
Perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little thought.... And from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger "projections" trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of Fechner's thundering conception of human beings as projections.
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