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 thefirst 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 organizedcross-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 successivelyfollowed, 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. Leadersof 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 youmay 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.
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 mayappear 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 “directionâ€; 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 orotherwise in the shape of a descriptive “law.â€
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 theliving 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 nowweaving 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.