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Updated: May 29, 2025
To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run thin.
Fechner towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made discoveries whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!" "To which the scholars and professors of today," I suggested, "would think reply not even called for?" "Ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps!
It is necessary to remember that experimental psychology was established in 1860 by Fechner, who was a physicist accustomed to experiment on things, not on living creatures, and who merely adapted the methods employed in physics to psychical measurements, thus founding psycho-physics.
"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is to understand that Fechner does not regard the Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from any other beings that we know.
The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen, and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.
Envelopment can't go on forever; it must have an abschluss, a total envelope must terminate the series, so God is the name that Fechner gives to this last all-enveloper. But if nothing escapes this all-enveloper, he is responsible for everything, including evil, and all the paradoxes and difficulties which I found in the absolute at the end of our third lecture recur undiminished.
Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with bodies of any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
Weber's results were definite enough and striking enough, yet they failed to attract any considerable measure of attention until they were revived and extended by Fechner and brought before the world in the famous work on psycho-physics. Then they precipitated a veritable melee. He pronounced Weber's discovery the fundamental law of psycho-physics.
In refutation of this theory, it may be pointed out that, if brain-changes are thus caused by, or are the outer expressions of, thought why not muscular changes, and in fact all physical phenomena throughout the world everywhere? For we cannot rationally draw the line of distinction here. Such is the logical outcome of the theory and has, in fact, been accepted in this form by Fechner and others.
And Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic University, he found time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this day. His philosophical work was more than considerable.
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