all individual substances to the universality of God entails the
sacrifice of the individual personality of men. Our bodies
were reduced by Lotze to the general ruck of phenomenal appearances.
Our souls he tried his best to endow with a quasi-existence,
arguing that the unity of consciousness requires an
indivisible subject, which is distinct from the plurality of the
body but interacting with it, is in a way a centre of independent
activities, and is so far a substance, or rather able to produce
the appearance of a substance. But at the end of his Metaphysik,
from the conclusion that everything beyond phenomena is divine
interaction, he drew the consistent corollary that individual
souls are simply actions of the one genuine being. His final
view was that certain actions of the divine substance are during
consciousness gifted with knowledge of themselves as active
centres, but during unconsciousness are non-existent. If so,
we are not persons with a permanent being of our own distinct
from that of God. But in a philosophy which reduces everything
to phenomenal appearance except the self-interacting substance
of God, there is no room for either the bodies or the souls of
finite substances or human persons.
5. Fechner (1801–1887) affords a conspicuous instance of the idealistic tendency to mysterize nature in his Panpsychism, or that form of noumenal idealism which holds that the universe is a vast communion of spirits, souls of men, of animals, of plants, of earth and other planets, of the sun, all embraced as different members in the soul of the world, the highest Fechner. spirit—God, in whom we live and move and have our being; that the bodily and the spiritual, or the physical and the psychical, are everywhere parallel processes which never meet to interact; but that the difference between them is only a difference between the outer and inner aspects of one identical psychophysical process; and yet that both sides are not equally real, because while psychical and physical are identical, the psychical is what a thing really is as seen from within, the physical is what it appears to be to a spectator outside; or spirit is the self-appearance of matter, matter the appearance of one spirit to another. Fechner’s panpsychism has a certain affinity both to Stahl’s animism and to the hylozoism of materialists such as Haeckel. But, while it differs from both in denying the reality of body, it differs from the former in extending conscious soul not only to plants, as Stahl did, but to all Nature; and it differs from the latter in the different consequences drawn by materialism and idealism from this universal animism. According to Haeckel, matter is the universal substance, spirit its universal attribute. According to Fechner, spirit is the universal reality, matter the universal appearance of spirit to spirit; and they are identical because spirit is the reality which appears. Hence Fechner describes himself as a twig fallen from Schelling’s stem. Schelling’s adherent Oken by his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie conveyed to his mind the life-long impression that God is the universe and Nature God’s appearance. At the same time, while accepting the Schellingian parallelistic identity of all things in God, Fechner was restrained by his accurate knowledge of physics from the extravagant construction of Nature, which had failed in the hands of Schelling and Hegel. Besides, he was deeply impressed by the fact of man’s personality and by the problem of his personal immortality, which brought him back through Schelling to Leibnitz, whose Monadologie throughout maintains the plurality of monadic souls and the omnipresence of perception, sketches in a few sections (§§ 23, 78–81) a panpsychic parallelism, though without identity, between bodily motions and psychic perceptions, and, what is most remarkable, already uses the conservation of energy to argue that physical energy pursues its course in bodies without interacting with souls, and that motions produce motions, perceptions produce perceptions. Leibnitz thus influenced Fechner, as in other ways he influenced Lotze. Both, however, used this influence freely; and, whereas Lotze used the Leibnitzian argument from indivisibility to deduce indivisible elements and souls, Fechner used the Leibnitzian hypotheses of universal perception and parallelism of motions and perceptions, in the light of the Schellingian identification of physical and psychical, to evolve a world-view (Weltansicht) containing something which was neither Leibnitz nor Schelling.
Fechner’s first point was his panpsychism. Emphasizing the many real analogies between physical and mental agency, but underrating the much stronger evidences that all the mental operations of men and animals require a nervous system, he flew to the paradox that soul is not limited to men and animals, but extends to plants, to the earth and other planets, to the Panpsychism. sun, to the world itself, of which, according to him, God is the world-soul. In this doctrine of universal animation he was like Leibnitz, yet very different. Whereas Leibnitz confined a large area of the world to wholly unconscious perceptions, and therefore preferred to call the souls of inorganic beings “Entelechies,” Fechner extended consciousness to the whole world; and accordingly, whereas Leibnitz believed in a supramundane Creator, “au dessus du Monde” and “dans le Monde,” Fechner, in the spirit of Schelling, identified God with the soul of the world. Fechner’s second point was that, throughout the animated universe, physical processes accompany psychical processes without interaction. In this panpsychistic parallelism he was again like Leibnitz, and he developed his predecessor’s view, that the conservation of energy prevents interaction, into the supposition that alongside the physical there is a parallel psychical conservation of energy. Here, again, he went much further than Leibnitz, but along with Schelling, in identifying the physical and the psychical as outer and inner sides of the same process, in which the inner is the real and the outer the apparent. Fechner’s third point carried him beyond all his predecessors, containing as it does the true originality of his “world-view.” He advanced the ingenious suggestion that, as body is in body and all ultimately in the world-body, so soul is in soul and all ultimately in the world-soul. By this means he explained immortality and vindicated personality. His fourth point was connected with this inclusion of personal spirits in higher spirits and in the highest. It is his so-called “synechological view” of the soul. Herbart and Lotze, both deeply affected by the Leibnitzian hypothesis of indivisible monads, supposed that man’s soul is seated at a central point in the brain; and Lotze supposed that this supposition is necessary to explain the unity of consciousness. Fechner’s supposition was that the unity of consciousness belongs to the unity of the whole body; that the seat of the soul is the living body; that the soul changes its place as in different parts a process rises above the “threshold of consciousness”; and that soul is not substance but the single psychical life which has its physical manifestation in the single bodily life. Applying this “synechological view” to the supposed inclusion of soul in soul, he deduced the conclusion that, as here the nature of one’s soul is to unite one’s little body, so hereafter its essence will be to unite a greater body, while God’s spirit unites the whole world by His omnipresence; and he pertinently asked, in opposition to the “punctual” view, whether God’s soul is centred in a point. Lastly, the whole of this “world-view” was developed by Fechner in early life, under the influence of his religious training, and out of a pious desire to understand those main truths of Christianity which teach us that we are children of God, that this natural body will become a spiritual body, and that, though we are different individual members, we live and move and are in God: “in Deo vivimus, movemus, et sumus.” It is important to notice that Fechner maintained this “world-view” in a little book, Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, which he originally published in 1836 under the pseudonym of Dr Mises, but which he afterwards republished in his own name in 1866, and again in 1887, as a sketch of his Weltansicht. Afterwards in Nanna (1848) he discussed the supposed souls of plants, and in Zendavesta (1851) the supposed souls of the earth and the rest of the world. Then in 1855 he published his Atomenlehre, partly founded on his physics, but mainly on his metaphysics. Under the influence of Leibnitz, Boscovich, Kant and Herbart, he supposed that bodies are divisible into punctual atoms, which are not bodies, but centres of forces of attraction and repulsion; that impenetrability is a result of repulsive force; and that force itself is only law—taking as an instance that Newtonian force of attraction whose process we do not understand, and neglecting that Newtonian force of pressure and impact whose process we do understand from the collision of bodies already extended and resisting. But, in thus adapting to his own purposes the Leibnitzian analysis of material into immaterial, he drew his own conclusions according to his own metaphysics, which required that the supposed centres of force are not Leibnitzian “monads,” nor Herbartian “reals,” nor divine modifications such as Lotze afterwards supposed, but are elements of a system which in outer aspect is bodily and in inner aspect is spiritual, and obeying laws of spirit. At the same time his synechological view prevented him from saying that every atom has a soul, because according to him a soul always corresponds to a unity of a physical manifold. Thus his metaphysics is Leibnitzian, like that of Lotze, and yet is opposed to the most characteristic feature of monadology—the percipient indivisible monad.
In 1860 appeared Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik, a work which deeply affected subsequent psychology, and almost revolutionized metaphysics of body and soul, and of physical and psychical
relations generally. It becomes necessary, therefore, to determine