GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER 43 



1840 after premonitory symptoms of an overstrained nervous system, 

 a three years' illness set in of so depressing, perhaps so desperate a 

 character, that few could have weathered it and retained their reason. 

 His illness was partly physical, a distaste for food, and partly men- 

 tal, a distaste for work — the more alarming symptom in a man of Fech- 

 ner's natural activity — together with an inability to control the course of 

 his ideas or even to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. 

 Added to these evils there developed such a supersensitiveness of the 

 eyes that for almost three years Fechner had to live in darkness. With- 

 out means and without earning power, tortured by physical pain, sit- 

 ting in darkness, anticipating total blindness and perhaps insanity, it is 

 small wonder that his thoughts turned again and again to suicide as the 

 only source of escape from his woes. That Fechner did not put an end 

 to his life is perhaps due to certain traits which were his, by right of 

 inheritance from his father — an almost ideal representative of the high- 

 minded, conscientious German village pastor — to wit, a keen sense of 

 duty and a tough energy of will which set themselves against the un- 

 bridled flight of illusionary ideas. He wrote: 



For almost a year I struggled the greater part of each day to banish these 

 ideas from my thoughts, and while this exercise served as a distraction, it was 

 of the most painful nature that it was possible to conceive. 



Few could have passed through an ordeal like this and have re- 

 tained reason, and no one unchanged in his views of what makes life 

 worth living ; and so, when Fechner took up academic work again it was 

 not with lectures on molar and molecular forces but with discourses on 

 subjects of ethics, of psychophysics and of esthetics ; " from the physicist 

 had come forth the philosopher." But while his lectures were compara- 

 tively few in number and given seemingly as a quid pro quo for the 850 

 Thalers of salary allowed him yearly by the government during his ill- 

 ness, there was no falling off in his pristine zeal in speculation or indus- 

 try in investigation. 



Among Fechner's earliest writings, for which he made Dr. Mises 

 sponsor, was a satire on the methods of reasoning of the natural phi- 

 losophy of his day, entitled "The Comparative Anatomy of the An- 

 gels." Applying, for example, the much-used doctrine of continuity, he 

 finds that the angels, as the highest and most perfect of created beings, 

 can have no legs, for, "beginning with the lowest animals, we see the 

 scolopenders have, God knows how many legs " ; next above them come 

 the butterflies and beetles with six ; mammals have four ; birds, which re- 

 semble angels in their free movement through space, together with hu- 

 man beings, who, by their own account are half animal, half angel, have 

 but two. At each step towards angelism two legs disappear, with the 

 step from man upwards all legs must have gone; ergo, angels have no 

 legs. But this also follows a priori: for as the most perfect of created 



