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Updated: May 29, 2025
Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear life to their precious individualities." He drew breath and then went on: "'Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge.
Professor Fechner referred me to Professors Scheibner and Weber for information, saying that these two were present at most of the sittings.
So also did another phrase which Fechner introduced in the course of his book the phrase "physiological psychology." In making that happy collocation of words Fechner virtually christened a new science.
He believed in God in the pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly from what I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind could be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk about him pass unchallenged. I propose to you that we should discuss the question of God without entangling ourselves in advance in the monistic assumption.
Fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so fervently believes in as an hypothesis only, which he then recommends by all the resources of induction and persuasion. It is true that Fechner himself is an absolutist in his books, not actively but passively, if I may say so.
As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical and inductive grounds, the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing. Which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onward lies with Fechner and his method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, or Bradley.
Moreover, Fechner does not fail to connect his psycho-physics, the presuppositions and results of which have recently been questioned in several quarters, with his metaphysical conclusions. That which appears to us as the external world of matter, is nothing but a universal consciousness which overlaps and influences our individual consciousness. This is Spinozism idealistically interpreted.
I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on. It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail, which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this audience share.
Professor Zoellner's book, said Professor Scheibner, would create the impression that Weber and Fechner and he agreed with Zoellner throughout in his opinion of the phenomena "and their interpretation;" but this, he said, is not the case. HALLE a.S., July 5th, 1886. So much for the information given by Professor Scheibner.
To take a very inconspicuous case, it is found by Fechner that a given increase of force in the stimulus produces a less amount of difference in the resulting sensations when the original stimulus is a powerful one than when it is a feeble one. It follows from this, that differences in the degree of our sensations do not exactly correspond to objective differences.
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