GUST AY THEODOR FECHNER 45 



But it was perhaps less the difference in value that he placed on the 

 subjects of metaphysical speculation, than the different way in which he 

 approached them that separates Fechner from the idealist of the early 

 nineteenth century. Believing no less absolutely than Hegel, that the 

 reality of the world must accord with what is reasonable, he saw clearly 

 that this reality could not be deduced by dialectics, but that it must be 

 worked out as one works out final questions in physics, namely, by gen- 

 eralization and by analogy. In other words the metaphysics of Fechner 

 was an inductive metaphysics or "Metaphysik von Unten," as he en- 

 joyed terming it, and as a philosophy of this kind must change with 

 progress in positive science, it becomes a scientific philosophy, so that in 

 this respect Fechner is the precursor of Lotze and Wundt. But it was 

 chiefly with the weapon of analogy that Fechner attacked the problem of 

 the ultimate nature of the cosmic world, and if in the history of philos- 

 ophy, this logical weapon had ever before been used with such subtlety, 

 such precision and with such bewildering variety of application the writer 

 is unaware of it. The profusion of arguments in behalf of the thesis that 

 plants have mental processes that differ in degree but not in kind from 

 that of animals is overpowering and in many points unassailable, save 

 by a fine old crusted prejudice against the doctrine in general, and 

 whoever takes up the "Zend Avesta" with the expectation of finding 

 there a mystic blend of " confusion, illusion and illation," will be speed- 

 ily undeceived by the opening chapters which bear a closer resemblance 

 to Newton's " Principia " than to the book of Eevelations. 



He asks, for example, that the scientific notion of force be extended 

 from inorganic to organic matter, from physics to biology. For force 

 in the scientific sense is not an immanent power residing in bodies by 

 means of which they pull or push one another, but it is a simple phe- 

 nomenon of motion, and is measured by rate of change of motion. In- 

 stead of saying " Here is a force at work " one should rather say " Here 

 is a law of nature." This applies no less to growth of the cell than to 

 atomic attraction and repulsion; to explain organic motion by an in- 

 nate power of adaptation is logically as wrong as to attribute to the 

 sun an innate gravitative force. In the case of combustion we have 

 only to consider the direct interaction of the particles of the bodies pres- 

 ent, but in organic bodies we have an extraordinary close and compli- 

 cated combination of parts into a unity, so that the necessary change of 

 the separate parts can only be determined with relation to the entire 

 system. 



The writer gives this not in any way as the beginning of an expla- 

 nation of Fechner's metaphysics which would lead one far beyond the 

 scope and limits on this paper, but merely as an illustration of the kind 

 of argument to be met with in the " Zend Avesta," and to indicate how 

 far removed in its methods was the " Philosophie von Unten " from the 



