The general background of the present dogmatically written little treatise is to be found in the “Tagesansicht” in the “Zend-Avesta” and in various other works of Fechner’s. Once grasp the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality, and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may appear to one another when they affect each other from the outside; and it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve. “Psychophysical movement,” as Fechner calls it, is the most pregnant name for all the reality that is. As “movement” it has a “direction”; as “psychical” the direction can be felt as a “tendency” and as all that lies connected in the way of inner experience with tendencies,—desire, effort, success, for example; while as “physical” the direction can be defined in spatial terms and formulated mathematically or otherwise in the shape of a descriptive “law.”
But movements can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves. This is as true in the mental as in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light. The whole process is conscious, but the emphatic wave-tips of the consciousness are of such contracted span that they are momentarily insulated from the rest. They realize themselves apart, as a twig might realize itself, and forget the parent tree. Such an insulated bit of experience leaves, however, when it passes away, a memory of itself. The residual and subsequent consciousness becomes different for its having occurred. On the physical side we say that the brain-process that corresponded to it altered permanently the future mode of action of the brain.
Now, according to Fechner, our bodies are just wavelets on the surface of the earth. We grow upon the earth as leaves grow upon a tree, and our consciousness arises out of the whole earth-consciousness,—which it forgets to thank,—just as within our consciousness an emphatic experience arises, and makes us forget the whole background of experience without which it could not have come. But as it sinks again into that background it is not forgotten. On the contrary, it is remembered and, as remembered, leads a freer life, for it now combines, itself a conscious idea, with the innumerable, equally conscious ideas of other remembered things. Even so is it, when we die, with the whole system of our outlived experiences. During the life of our body, although they were always elements in the more general enveloping earth-consciousness, yet they themselves were unmindful of the fact. Now, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, they lead the life of ideas there, and realize themselves no longer in isolation, but along with all the similar vestiges left by other human lives, entering with these into new combinations, affected anew by experiences of the living, and affecting the living in their turn, enjoying, in short, that “third stage” of existence with the definition of which the text of the present work begins.
God, for Fechner, is the totalized consciousness of the whole universe, of which the Earth’s consciousness forms an element, just as in turn my human consciousness and yours form elements of the whole earth’s consciousness. As I apprehend Fechner (though I am not sure), the whole Universe—God therefore also—evolves in time: that is, God has a genuine history. Through us as its human organs of experience the earth enriches its inner life, until it also “geht zu grunde” and becomes immortal in the form of those still wider elements of inner experience which its history is even now weaving into the total cosmic life of God.
The whole scheme, as the reader sees, is got from the fact that the span of our own inner life alternately contracts and expands. You cannot say where the exact outline of any present state of consciousness lies. It shades into a more general background in which even now other states lie ready to be known. This background is the inner aspect of what physically appear, first, as our residual and only partially excited neural elements, and then more remotely as the whole organism which we call our own.
This indetermination of the partition, this fact of a changing threshold, is the analogy which Fechner generalizes, that is all.
There are many difficulties attaching to his theory. The complexity with which he himself realizes them, and the subtlety with which he meets them are admirable. It is interesting to see how closely his speculations, due to such different motives, and supported by such different arguments, agree with those of some of our own philosophers. Royce’s Gifford lectures, “The World and the Individual,” Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, and A. E. Taylor’s Elements of “Metaphysics,” present themselves immediately to one’s mind.
WILLIAM JAMES.
Chocorua, N. H., June 21, 1904.