Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/47

Rh 1840 after premonitory symptoms of an overstrained nervous system, a three years' illness set in of so depressing, perhaps so desperate a character, that few could have weathered it and retained their reason. His illness was partly physical, a distaste for food, and partly mental, a distaste for work—the more alarming symptom in a man of Fechner's natural activity—together with an inability to control the course of his ideas or even to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Added to these evils there developed such a supersensitiveness of the eyes that for almost three years Fechner had to live in darkness. Without means and without earning power, tortured by physical pain, sitting in darkness, anticipating total blindness and perhaps insanity, it is small wonder that his thoughts turned again and again to suicide as the only source of escape from his woes. That Fechner did not put an end to his life is perhaps due to certain traits which were his, by right of inheritance from his father—an almost ideal representative of the highminded, conscientious German village pastor—to wit, a keen sense of duty and a tough energy of will which set themselves against the unbridled flight of illusionary ideas. He wrote:

Few could have passed through an ordeal like this and have retained reason, and no one unchanged in his views of what makes life worth living; and so, when Fechner took up academic work again it was not with lectures on molar and molecular forces but with discourses on subjects of ethics, of psychophysics and of esthetics; "from the physicist had come forth the philosopher." But while his lectures were comparatively few in number and given seemingly as a quid pro quo for the 850 Thalers of salary allowed him yearly by the government during his illness, there was no falling off in his pristine zeal in speculation or industry in investigation.

Among Fechner's earliest writings, for which he made Dr. Mises sponsor, was a satire on the methods of reasoning of the natural philosophy of his day, entitled "The Comparative Anatomy of the Angels." Applying, for example, the much-used doctrine of continuity, he finds that the angels, as the highest and most perfect of created beings, can have no legs, for, "beginning with the lowest animals, we see the scolopenders have, God knows how many legs "; next above them come the butterflies and beetles with six; mammals have four; birds, which resemble angels in their free movement through space, together with human beings, who, by their own account are half animal, half angel, have but two. At each step towards angelism two legs disappear, with the step from man upwards all legs must have gone; ergo, angels have no legs. But this also follows a priori: for as the most perfect of created