"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! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music may bring them too, but above all—landscape and the beauty of Nature! 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. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"
"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid."
"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. He merely protests at the presumption of our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life—a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D'ye see, now?"
I gasped, I lit a big pipe—and listened. He went on. This time it was clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned—the one in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him."
"Ages ago the earth was called an animal," I ventured. "We all know that."
"But Fechner," he replied, "insists that a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal—'a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.'"
"An inhabitant of the ether—?"
"You've hit it," he replied eagerly. "Every element has its own living denizens. Ether, then, also has hers—the globes. 'The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens—higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. It is old as the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true."