That vital comprehension we have already seen.  It is that there is a sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary logic, since it denies this, must be overcome.  Ordinary logic denies this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts are their own bare selves and nothing else.  What Royce calls Hegel’s ‘system’ was Hegel’s attempt to make us believe that he was working by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all his results.

What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see in a later lecture.  It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent, and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.

There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods concretely can do.  If the ‘logical prius’ of our mind were really the ‘implicit presence’ of the whole ‘concrete universal,’ the whole of reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked (for example) by the dialectical method, doesn’t it seem odd that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in ‘science,’ namely, the dialectical method should never once have been tried?  Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs to my mind.  Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to be thanked for all of science’s results.

Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his metaphysical conclusions about reality—­but let me first rehearse a few of the facts about his life.

Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig, a typical gelehrter of the old-fashioned german stripe.  His means were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way of thought, but these were gorgeous ones.  He passed his medical examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical science.  It was ten years before he was made professor of physics, although he soon was authorized to lecture.  Meanwhile, he had to make both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors.  He translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot’s treatise on physics, and the six of Thenard’s work on chemistry, and took care of their enlarged editions later.  He edited repertories of chemistry and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight volumes, of