44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 meas- 

 ureless distances. From this and many other chains of ingenious rea- 

 soning 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. Simi- 

 larly 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 Feclmer- 

 ian spirit was still alive, for in the succeeding year we find him en- 

 gaged 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 Biich- 

 lein 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 tlie " Concord and Merrimac Eivers " had been 

 turned over to him by the publishers as a waste product, Thoreau is re- 

 ported 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 Fech- 

 ner'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 " Zen- 

 davesta." 



