n6 PSYCHO-PHYSICAL METHOD 



to us under two aspects, the physical or material and 

 the psychical or mental. Everything has these two 

 aspects, if we could but discern them. Hence everything, 

 not only the animals and plants, but all those objects 

 which we are accustomed to regard as inanimate and 

 purely material, have, like ourselves, their inner psychical 

 aspect as well as the physical aspect which alone we 

 apprehend through the senses. 



It was this doctrine of universal animation or pan-psych- 

 ism that Fechner accepted as an essential part of his specu- 

 lative system. He could not bring himself to believe that 

 the whole beautiful world was a soulless mechanism. 

 The commonly accepted view of science, which regards 

 the physical universe as merely a swarm of atoms in 

 never-ending motion, among which here and there little 

 points of light, the consciousness of men, appear for a 

 few brief moments, only to disappear once more, leaving 

 the meaningless swarming of the atoms to continue 

 through the ages this view he called the Night-view of 

 nature ; and over against it he set what he called the 

 Day-view of nature, the view that every part of the 

 whole universe not only exists as atoms swarming in 

 scattered groups, but has also the feeling of own its 

 existence and a joy in its own activity, and that this 

 consciousness of each part is but an element in the 

 universal world-consciousness. 



It is the peculiar distinction of Fechner that, having 

 accepted this Day-view of the world on purely speculative, 

 aesthetic and religious grounds, he was not content to 

 leave the matter there, like all his predecessors, but had 

 the immense courage to set out to prove it by the 

 application of the scientific method to the investigation 

 of the relation of the physical to the psychical. How 

 exactly he hoped to prove the truth of his view 



