Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/45

Rh Accordingly, the first use he makes of his medical knowledge is to satirize, in the main, with kindly humor, the medical disciplines, especially the materia medica, of his own day. For the medicine of that time was still in the bonds of authority, it still harked back to Galen and Hippocrates, though, as Fechner remarked, it had become what its adherents called so "rational" in its methods, that had Hippocrates himself come up for a medical degree, he would have "fallen through" as not knowing Greek and as being unacquainted with the "Hippocratic method."

These first publications of Fechner appeared under the pseudonym of Dr. Mises—a nom de plume which he used for many years in connection with what he perhaps thought were the Fliegende Blätter of his scientific and literary activity. But in whatever he published—literary criticism, riddle books, psychological investigations or philosophical treatises—Dr. Mises is always a co-worker. In his last controversial writing, "On the Principles of Psychological Measurement and Weber's Law," a subject with about as much affinity for the humorous as a table of logarithms, it is Dr. Mises who begins the article with a quotation from Wieland:

 Noch einmal sattelt mir den Hippogryphen Ihr Musen Zum Ritt ins alte romantische Land,

and so he goes on to say,

 I once more saddle—and probably with my 86 years, it is for the last time —my war-horse for a ride into the romance land of Psychophysics.

It was indeed his last ride, for that volume of Wundt's "Philosophic Studies," which contains this article, also contains the funeral oration which Wundt delivered over Fechner's bier on the twentyseventh of November, 1887.

But it is in the philosophical writings especially that it is at times not easy to distinguish between Dr. Mises and Fechner the philosopher, and it is the infusion of something dangerously akin to humor in the unconventional treatment of philosophic questions no less than a curious tendency towards a practical mysticism which made the cut and dried philosophers of Fechner's day shake their heads doubtfully at this philosophy which moreover was attached to no school and sprang from no accredited system.

It is perhaps not to be gainsaid that the fanciful Naturphilosophie of the early part of the nineteenth century for many years tinged faintly Fechner's speculative views, but it was too arbitrary in its methods and too vague in its conclusions to radically affect or infect a mind so incredibly ready as was Fechner's to submit its problems to the test of experiment. At any rate we find that in 1824 Fechner had undertaken the first of those translations of French physical and chemical text-books which busied him not a little in this period of his career.