Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
Fechner, with his distinct earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use it.
Professor Fechner, who no longer lectures, being old and feeble, and suffering from cataract of the eyes, made the following statements, each of which I translated to him for his approval, after I had set it down: 1. That he himself was present at but two sittings, and that these were not very decisive.
Fechner tries sincerely to grapple with the problem of evil, but he always solves it in the leibnitzian fashion by making his God non-absolute, placing him under conditions of 'metaphysical necessity' which even his omnipotence cannot violate. His will has to struggle with conditions not imposed on that will by itself.
From all eternity life has only been produced from life. As Preyer accepts the Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of our earth from the sun, he reaches ideas which have points of contact with the “cosmo-organic” ideas of Fechner. Life was present even when the earth was a fiery fluid sphere, and was possibly more general and more abundant then than it is now.
This standpoint is most impressively set forth in Paulsen’s widely read “Introduction to Philosophy.” The same ideas form the central feature in the work of Fechner, which is having such a marked renaissance to-day. It seems as though all higher estimates of spirit, even the religious estimate, could quite well rest upon this basis.
He declares himself specially authorized to mention by name as present at some of his investigations his colleagues, Professors Fechner and Scheibner, of the University of Leipsic, and Professor Weber of Goettingen. These three, he states, were perfectly convinced of the reality of the observed facts, and that they were not to be attributed to imposture or prestidigitation.
Few men are as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that seem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, will leave the thinner for the thicker path. Compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralistic philosophy.
And there are doubtless hundreds of other such associations, too minute or remote or long- forgotten to recover, which add their mite of feeling to swell and make vast the musical emotion. As Fechner pointed out, these associations may work quite unconsciously, giving evidence of their functioning only through the feeling tones which they release.
Perhaps old Stahl was right, perhaps old crazy Fechner; and it actually was the consciousness of the Earth. I can only tell you that the whole experience left no room in me for other memories; all I had previously known was gone, wiped clean away. Yet much of what came in its place is beyond me to describe; and for a curious reason.
In Germany, the hegelian impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship, nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as Büchner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at all.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking