PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY 139 



history. Commonly, they begin as special inquiries, somewhat off the 

 traditional lines, in the science which bears close or closest affinity to 

 the future discipline. Such movements continue lonely for a time, 

 systematization being difficult or unattainable till many facts have been 

 collected. To the point reached now we see this stage predominating 

 in physiological psychology. Physics and anatomy, physiology and 

 philosophy present special departures toward psychology, but a unifica- 

 tion of the last still lacks. The final step must be associated always 

 with the names of Gustav Theodor Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt (the 

 latter more emphatically), who, building on the accumulations of their 

 predecessors, at length brought the new science into formal shape. 



Fechner (1801-87), like Lotze, studied medicine at Leipzig, where 

 he became professor of physics in 1834. Like Lotze, too, he was an 

 expert in philosophy. Both were " masters in the use of exact meth- 

 ods, yet at the same time with their whole souls devoted to the highest 

 questions, and superior to their contemporaries in breadth of view as 

 in the importance and range of their leading ideas — Fechner a dreamer 

 and sober investigator by turns, Lotze with a gentle hand reconciling 

 the antitheses in life and science." 10 In a fashion Fechner's psy- 

 chology is more intimately connected with his philosophy than Lotze's, 

 and his philosophico-psychological perspective offers points of strong 

 contrast to Wundt's. Indeed, his definition of psychophysics — a term 

 original with him — hints as much. " I understand by psychophysics 

 an exact theory of the relations of soul and body, and, in a general way, 

 of the physical world and the psychical world." Undoubtedly, the 

 psychology may be disengaged from metaphysical entanglements, as 

 Wundt said in his address on the occasion of the Fechner centenary. 11 

 But, after all, Fechner's panpsychism forms a motive force of his 

 psychophysics, because, intellectually, he was a double personality. 12 

 His philosophical theory teaches a universal parallelism between the 

 physical and the psychical. Or, as Nageli, the botanist, has it : 



Sensation is clearly connected with the reflex actions of higher animals. 

 We are obliged to concede it to the other animals also, and we have no grounds 

 for denying it to plants and inorganic bodies. The sensation arouses in us a con- 

 dition of comfort and discomfort. In general, the feeling of pleasure arises when 

 the natural impulses are satisfied, the feeling of pain, when they are not satis- 

 fied. Since all material processes are composed of movements of molecules and 

 elementary atoms, pleasure and pain must have its seat in these particles. 

 Sensation is a property of the albuminous molecules; and if it belongs to these, 

 we are obliged to concede it to the other substances also. If the molecules pos- 

 sess anything even remotely akin to sensation, they must have a feeling of 

 comfort when they can obey the law of attraction or repulsion, the law of their 

 own inclination or aversion; a feeling of discomfort, however, when they are 



10 "History of Modern Philosophy," Falckenberg, pp. 601-2 (Eng. trans.). 



11 Cf. "Gustav Theodor Fechner," K. Lasswitz, p. 91. 



12 Cf. ibid., p. 154. 



