ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 509 



to him that we are indebted for the term Psycho-physics, 

 which in the present chapter I have used in a more 

 general sense. Fechner worked independently of Lotze 

 and Helmholtz on the lines of E. H. Weber. He does 

 not seem to have been much influenced by either Kant 

 or Herbart. In 1 8 6 he published his ' Elemente der 

 Psychophysik,' which was to be an exact treatise on the 

 relations of " mind and body," founded upon a measure- 

 ment of psychical quantities. 



Herbart's attempt to submit psychical phenomena to 

 the exact methods of calculation had failed through the 

 want of a measure for psychical quantities. Lotze had 

 suggested the idea of a psycho-physical mechanism 

 i.e., a constant and definite connection between inner 

 and outer phenomena, between sensation and stimulus. 

 E. H. Weber in his important researches on " Touch and 

 Bodily Feeling" had made a variety of measurements of 

 sensations, and shown that in many cases stimuli must 

 be augmented in proportion to their own original inten- 

 sity in order to produce equal increments of sensation. 

 These observations lent themselves to an easy mathe- 

 matical generalisation. Fechner was the first to draw 



have been found out by Oken- 

 Schelling's method ? " This mix- 

 ture or alternation of exact science 

 and speculation, of faithfulness and 

 loyalty to facts as well as to theory, 

 runs through all Fechner's life, 

 work, and writings. Much of his 

 poetry, of his fanciful and para- 

 doxical effusions, is meant seriously, 

 and is really more coherent than it 

 appeared to his readers, some of 

 whom knew him only under his 

 pseudonym of Dr Mises. He lived, 

 thought, and worked truly on the 

 borderland of nature and mind, of 



this world and another, of science 

 and poetry, of reality and fiction. 

 Like Lotze, he wanted the genuinely 

 historical sense. Like Lotze, too, 

 he received from others only sug- 

 gestions which he elaborated in- 

 dependently in his own original 

 fashion. As little as Lotze does 

 he seem ever to have attempted 

 to realise and understand any other 

 philosophical system than his own. 

 To both, the ultimate problem was 

 capable only of a subjective solu- 

 tion. Cf. vol. i. p. 200. 



