40 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNEE 



By Peofessoe FRANK ANGELL 



LELAND STANFORD UNIVEESITY 



SOMEWHERE Huxley says that certain men are counted great be- 

 cause they represent the actuality of their own age and mirror it 

 as it is. 



Such a one was Voltaire, of whom it was said that he expressed everybody's 

 thoughts better than anybody. But there are other men who are great because 

 they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. 



In both of these respects Gustav Theodor Fechner was one of the 

 greatest men of his age and perhaps, as not a few psychologists feel, 

 one of the greatest in the history of science. 



But in reflecting the tendencies of his age Fechner's influence was 

 less like that of a mirror than of a many-sided prism which bends and 

 reflects light in all directions, sending it out tinged by the action of 

 the medium through which it has passed. There are few divisions of 

 the domain cultivated by natural science in the first half of the nine- 

 teenth century over which Fechner did not pass, and there are few on 

 which he did not leave the imprint of his originality. In the second 

 edition of the " Elements of Psj'chophysics," a work in which Fechner 

 laid the foundations and built somewhat of the superstructure of the 

 present science of psychology, the editor, Wundt of Leipzig, has ap- 

 pended a list of Fechner's published writings. Excluding editions other 

 than the first, and including translations of physical and chemical 

 works which with Feclmer usually meant critical revisions, the list com- 

 prises 124 titles, and a classification of these under the headings of 

 nonsensical, humorous, literary, chemical, physical, psychological, 

 esthetic, statistical, physiological, encyclopa?dic, logical and philosoph- 

 ical, would perhaps more than anj-thing else give a representative idea 

 of Fechner's almost unparalleled many-sidedness. 



His first published works were an inverted reflection of his univer- 

 sity career as a student of medicine. The condition of medical study 

 in the first quarter of the nineteenth century may be inferred from 

 Fechner's objections to entering a profession in which he had taken his 

 degree; although qualified by the examination to practise medicine, he 

 remarks : 



I could neither open a blood vessel, apply a bandage nor perform the 

 simplest obstetrical operation. 



