Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/53

Rh has been born again with no less than Friedric Paulsen as accoucheur. Ebbinghaus lias dedicated to Fechner's memory his classical treatise on psycliology, and Möbius, the neurologist of Leipzig, has commemorated him in a volume of medical essays. Külpe, the philosopher and psychologist of Bonn, has been unwearied in critical appreciation of Fechner's achievements, and William James, who twenty-five years ago gave his official opinion that the "proper psychological outcome of Fechner's work was" just nothing," has made the amende honorable in a generously sympathetic essay in the "Pluralistic Universe." In glancing over the earlier pages of the present paper, the writer had the feeling that it resembled more a card catalogue of Fechner's publications than an appreciation of his work and works. If so, the fault lies somewhat in the faceted many-sidedness of Fechner's activities, as well as in the writer's deficiencies in power of interpretation. Perhaps the perspective of time now reaches far enough for us to view the outline of what he wrought in fairly true proportions. If so, one may say in brief that, able and ingenious physicist as he was it is doubtful if he could ever have risen to the stature of a Faraday; his philosophy will perhaps attract mainly those rare minds who, while working officially by the pale cold light of the intellect, are still prone to follow the promptings of the spirit into regions lying beyond the pale of syllogistic reasoning. His more solid and probably lasting achievements belong to the latter half of his life, to the period of the "Psychophysics" and the "Aesthetics."

As for the daily life itself, it was outwardly singularly uneventful even for a German "Gelehrter." He rarely left Leipzig, but, year in and year out, conscientiously fulfilled within its walls the duties of a public-spirited citizen. And the city responded by awarding him in his middle age an honorary citizenship, and at his death, with rare municipal good taste, erected a modest bust to his memory at the very turn of one of the winding walks in the Rosenthal where he had passed many a sunny afternoon of the long German summer days, discoursing with his friends on things that are little dreamed of by many a school philosopher. In accord with his scanty means was his dwelling in the Dresdener Strasse, fittingly called a nest; his study was furnished with a chair, a table, a stove and some bookshelves; a catalogue of the library resting on the shelves would usually indicate a stack of manuscript and a table of logarithms: sonst Nichts. Here there passed quietly away on the nineteenth day of November, 1887, almost exactly twenty-five years ago, the philosopher, the art critic, the humorist, the mathematician, the friend of children, the creative genius in science, Gustav Theodor Fechner. Verily, as Wundt said, in the funeral oration, "we shall not look upon his like again,"