Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/48

44 beings, angels have the most perfect shape, which is acknowledged to be the sphere with its perfect legless symmetry. Again passing along in ascending order the series of sense organs of human beings, we go from crude mechanical touch and pressure up through taste, smell and sight, to the refinement of vision which is capable of reaction at measureless distances. From this and many other chains of ingenious reasoning Dr. Mises concluded that the eye is the propotype of the angel in form and function, and by other reasoning, equally ingenious, he finds that the planets are conscious beings, to wit, angels. In the "Zend Avesta," published in Fechner's fiftieth year, the jest of Dr. Misses has become a matter of serious earnest. The earth is a higher being, possessed of higher consciousness, the vehicle itself of human consciousness and the connecting link between man and God. Similarly the remaining planets are conscious beings, while, at the other end of the scale of existence, the planets also have consciousness.

Now looking at such utterances, as they stand by themselves, one would naturally suppose physicist had disappeared in the mystic, and that the laboratory had given place to the oracle. But if this was the madness of mysticism, there still remained signs that the old Fechnerian spirit was still alive, for in the succeeding year we find him engaged in counting the steps of men and women passing by his house to serve as material for a statistical study on the ratio of the masculine to the feminine steps, published by the Saxon Academy of Sciences. As a matter of fact the coming of the "Zend Avesta" had been foreshadowed sometime before Fechner's illness in a little work entitled, "Das Büchlein des Lebens nach dem Tode," dedicated to the daughters of a dear friend who had passed away. The little book is rather a message of comfort than a didactic sermon, but in the doctrine that the soul after death becomes diffused into the general consciousness of nature we have the seed that later developed into the remarkable system of Fechner's metaphysics.

But if consciousness is a general attribute of nature it must be shared by plants, and so we find that the first work written by Fechner after his illness was the "Nana or The Conscious Life of Plants," necessary prolegomena to the "Zend Avesta." When the greater part of Thoreau's Week on the "Concord and Merrimac Rivers" had been turned over to him by the publishers as a waste product, Thoreau is reported to have said he had a library of about a thousand volumes, over 900 of which he had written himself. Almost a like fate awaited Fechner's publications of this period and for reasons that are obvious; the physicists could but shake their heads at a colleague who had given up his exact investigations in order to urge the phantastic tliesis of plant consciousness and the professional philosophers of that time were unable to reconcile the author of the psychophysics with the seer of the "Zendavesta."