GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER 41 



Accordingly, the first use he makes of his medical knowledge is to 

 satirize, in the main, with kindly humor, the medical disciplines, espe- 

 cially the materia medica, of his own day. For the medicine of that 

 time was still in the bonds of authority, it still harked back to Galen 

 and Hippocrates, though, as Fechner remarked, it had become what its 

 adherents called so "rational" in its methods, that had Hippocrates 

 himself come up for a medical degree, he would have " fallen through " 

 as not knowing Greek and as being unacquainted with the "Hippo- 

 cratic method." 



These first publications of Fechner appeared under the pseudonym 

 of Dr. Mises — a nom de plume which he used for many years in con- 

 nection with what he perhaps thought were the Fliegende Blatter of 

 his scientific and literary activity. But in whatever he published — 

 literary criticism, riddle books, psychological investigations or philo- 

 sophical treatises — Dr. Mises is always a co-worker. In his last con- 

 troversial writing, " On the Principles of Psychological Measurement 

 and Weber's Law," a subject with about as much affinity for the hu- 

 morous as a table of logarithms, it is Dr. Mises who begins the article 

 with a quotation from "Wieland : 



Noch einmal sattelt mil den Hippogryphen Ihr Musen 

 Zum Eitt ins alte romantische Land, 



and so he goes on to say, 



I once more saddle — and probably with my 86 years, it is for the last time 

 — my war-horse for a ride into the romance land of Psychophysics. 



It was indeed his last ride, for that volume of Wundfs "Philo- 

 sophic Studies," which contains this article, also contains the funeral 

 oration which "Wundt delivered over Fechner's bier on the twenty- 

 seventh of November, 1887. 



But it is in the philosophical writings especially that it is at times 

 not easy to distinguish between Dr. Mises and Fechner the philosopher, 

 and it is the infusion of something dangerously akin to humor in the 

 unconventional treatment of philosophic questions no less than a 

 curious tendency towards a practical mysticism which made the cut 

 and dried philosophers of Fechner's day shake their heads doubtfully 

 at this philosophy which moreover was attached to no school and 

 sprang from no accredited system. 



It is perhaps not to be gainsaid that the fanciful Naturphilosophie 

 of the early part of the nineteenth century for many years tinged 

 faintly Fechner's speculative views, but it was too arbitrary in its 

 methods and too vague in its conclusions to radically affect or infect a 

 mind so incredibly ready as was Fechner's to submit its problems to 

 the test of experiment. At any rate we find that in 1824 Fechner had 

 undertaken the first of those translations of French physical and chem- 

 ical text-books which busied him not a little in this period of his career. 



