All rights reserved
Published October, 1904
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
ISIDORE AND ELIZABETH
DAUGHTERS OF HIS FRIEND
CH. F. GRIMMER
The Author
INTRODUCTION
I GLADLY accept the translator’s invitation to furnish a few words of introduction to Fechner’s “Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode,” the more so as its somewhat oracularly uttered sentences require, for their proper understanding, a certain acquaintance with their relations to his general system.
Fechner’s name lives in physics as that of one of the earliest and best determiners of electrical constants, also as that of the best systematic defender of the atomic theory. In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical world. In literature he has made his mark by certain half-humoristic, half-philosophic essays published under the name of Dr. Mises—indeed the present booklet originally appeared under that name. In æsthetics he may lay claim to be the earliest systematically empirical student. In metaphysics he is not only the author of an independently reasoned ethical system, but of a theological theory worked out in great detail. His mind, in short, was one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth, which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. Patient observation and daring imagination dwelt hand in hand in Fechner; and perception, reasoning, and feeling all flourished on the largest scale without interfering either with the other’s function.
Fechner was, in fact, a philosopher in the “great” sense of the term, although he cared so much less than most philosophers do for purely logical abstractions. For him the abstract lived in the concrete; and although he worked as definitely and technically as the narrowest specialist works in each of the many lines of scientific inquiry which he successively followed, he followed each and all of them for the sake of his one overmastering general purpose, the purpose namely of elaborating what he called the “daylight-view” of the world into greater and greater system and completeness.
By the daylight-view, as contrasted with the night-view, Fechner meant the anti-materialistic view,—the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is inwardly alive and consciously animated. There is hardly a page of his writing that was not probably connected in his mind with this most general of his interests.
Little by little the materialistic generation that called his speculations fantastic has been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination. Leaders of thought, a Paulsen, a Wundt, a Preyer, a Lasswitz, treat Fechner’s pan-psychism as plausible, and write of its author with veneration. Younger men chime in, and Fechner’s philosophy promises to become scientifically fashionable. Imagine a Herbert Spencer who, to the unity of his system and its unceasing touch with facts, should have added a positively religious philosophy instead of Spencer’s dry agnosticism; who should have mingled humor and lightness (even though it were germanic lightness) with his heavier ratiocinations; who should have been no less encyclopedic and far more subtle; who should have shown a personal life as simple and as consecrated to the one pursuit of truth,—imagine this, I say, if you can, and you may form some idea of what the name of Fechner is more and more coming to stand for, and of the esteem in which it is more and more held by the studious youth of his native Germany. His belief that the whole material universe is conscious in divers spans and wavelengths, inclusions and envelopments, seems assuredly destined to found a school that will grow more systematic and solidified as time goes on.