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278 But this lies in the distant future. For the present therefore pessimism can feel quite at ease and at home in the world!

Besides his masterpiece, Hartmann has written a number of important works in the departments of ethics, the philosophy of religion and æsthetics, as he was, generally speaking, a rather voluminous author. Arthur Drews has published a detailed and quite sympathetic exposition of his whole activity (Hartmann's Philosophical System in Outlines, 2d ed., 1906).

3. Gustav Theodore Fechner (1801-1887) was originally a physicist. But along with his scientific investigations his mind dwelt on a world of speculation and poetic imagination in which the ideas of romanticism are peculiarly prominent,—this was especially the case after the objective world was closed to him through failure of eyesight. By the method of the most daring analogies, he construed the universe (in the highly fanciful book Zendavesta, 1851, and later in the Seelenfrage, 1861) as an animated whole within which every possible degree of psychic life is manifest,—in the form of plant and animal souls, human souls, the souls of the heavenly bodies, etc. When Fechner began to reflect on the problem of the relation of the psychical side of the universe to its physical side he came upon the fundamental idea of his masterpiece, Elemente der Psychophysik (1860). Like Kepler, with whom he shows a striking mental sympathy, he took fantastic speculations for his starting-point, but by diligent reflection he finally discovered principles which could be verified in experience. He was convinced from the beginning that the relation of spirit and matter could not be objective, as if they were different entities. Later on he defends this view (in the fifth chapter of the