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Updated: May 29, 2025
Fechner indeed was candid enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers, like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would permit me no such license.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his metaphysical conclusions about reality but let me first rehearse a few of the facts about his life. Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig, a typical gelehrter of the old-fashioned german stripe.
We miss the view defended in such grand outlines by Hegel, and so ingeniously by Fechner, that the good is not the flower of a quiet, unmolested development, but the fruit of energetic labor; that it has need of its opposite; that it not merely must approve itself in the battle against evil without and within the acting subject, but that it is only through this conflict that it is attainable at all.
The earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in mineralogical cabinets. Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorial philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh sense of reality. His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be like.
The same tendency was further evidenced by the appearance, in 1852, of Dr. Hermann Lotze's famous Medizinische Psychologie, oder Physiologie der Seele, with its challenge of the old myth of a "vital force." But the most definite expression of the new movement was signalized in 1860, when Gustav Fechner published his classical work called Psychophysik.
But the maternal influence was not of long duration, for domestic troubles soon caused the separation of Wieck and his wife, the latter marrying the father of Woldemar Bargiel, while the former also entered into a second union, with Clementine Fechner at Leipsic. A daughter of this second marriage, Marie Wieck, won some fame as a pianist, but was far surpassed by her elder half-sister.
Of all imaginative attempts to make the idea of immortality clear and possible, undoubtedly that of Fechner is the grandest and most effective. And it, too, is based entirely upon the idea of parallelism.
Latent in her did they still exist as moods or Powers true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature? Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?
In this shape, he represents the ideal element in things solely, and is our champion and our helper and we his helpers, against the bad parts of the universe. Fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfect formal consistency in these abstract regions.
This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner desperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung to the faith, he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other work its reward, so hätte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten. His religious and cosmological faiths saved him thenceforward one great aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the world.
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