which he wrote about one third.  He published physical treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in electricity.  Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of electrical science, and Fechner’s measurements in galvanism, performed with the simplest self-made apparatus, are classic to this day.  During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical, half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions, under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic essays, and other occasional articles.

But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation) produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from active life.  Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner’s malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine miracle.  This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner desperation, made a great crisis in his life.  ’Had I not then clung to the faith,’ he writes, ’that clinging to faith would somehow or other work its reward, so haette ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten.’  His religious and cosmological faiths saved him—­thenceforward one great aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the world.  He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other things too ere he died.

A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics—­many persons consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be included among these other performances.  Of the more religious and philosophical works, I shall immediately give a further account.

All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the vernacular sort.  The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen, and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.