6o2 NEW SYSTEMS. questions, and superior to their contemporaries in breadth of view as in the importance and range of their leading ideas — Fechner a dreamer and sober investigator by turns, Lotze with gentle hand reconcilingthe antitheses in life and science. Gustav Theodor Fechner * (1801-87 ; professor at Leip- sic) opposes the abstract separation of God and the world, which has found a place in natural inquiry and in the- ology alike, and brings the two into the same relation of correspondence and reciprocal reference as the soul and the body. The spirit gives cohesion to the manifold of material parts, and needs them as a basis and material for its unifying activity. As our ego connects the mani- fold of our activities and states in the unity of conscious- ness, so the divine spirit is the supreme unity of conscious- ness for all being and becoming. In the spirit of God everything is as in ours, only expanded and enhanced. Our sensations and feelings, our thoughts and resolutions are His also, only that He, whose body all nature is, and to whom not only that which takes place in spirits is open, but also that which goes on between them, perceives more, feels deeper, thinks higher, and wills better things than we. According to the analogy of the human organism, both the heavenly bodies and plants are to be conceived as beings endowed with souls, although they lack nerves, a brain, and voluntary motion. How could the earth bring forth living beings, if it were itself dead ? Shall not the flower itself rejoice in the color and fragrance which it pro- duces, and with which it refreshes us ? Though its psychical life may not exceed that of an infant, its sensations, at all events, since they do not form the basis of a higher activity, are superior in force and richness to those of the animal. Thus the human soul stands intermediate in the
- Nanna, or on the Psychical Life of Plants, 1848 ; Zend-Avesta, or on the
Things of Heaven and the World Beyond, 1851 ; Physical and Philosophical Atomism, 1855 ; The Three Motives and Grounds of Belief , 1863 ; The Day View, 1879 ; Elements of ALsthetics, 1876 ; Elements of Psycho-physics, i860; In the Cause of Psycho-physics, 1877 ; Revietv of the Chief Points in Psycho- physics, 1882 ; Book of the Life after Death, 1836; 3d ed., 1887 ; On the Hii^h- est Good, 1846 ; Eour Paradoxes, 1846 ; On the Question of the Soul, 1861 ; Minor Works by Dr. Mises (Fechner's pseudonym), 1875. On Fechner cf. J. E. Kuntze, Leipsic, 1892.
