His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective.  Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another.  He was in fact a philosopher in the ‘great’ sense, altho he cared so much less than most philosophers care for abstractions of the ‘thin’ order.  For him the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious.  It has taken fifty years for his chief book, ‘Zend-avesta,’ to pass into a second edition (1901).  ‘One swallow,’ he cheerfully writes, ’does not make a summer.  But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming; and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing.’

The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.  Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other.  What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine?  The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.  The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.

Fechner’s great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his many pages—­only reasonings like those which men continually use in practical life.  For example:  My house is built by some one, the world too is built by some one.  The world is greater than my house, it must be a greater some one who built the world.  My body moves by the influence of my feeling and will; the sun, moon, sea, and wind, being themselves more powerful, move by the influence of some more powerful feeling and will.  I live now, and change from one day to another; I shall live hereafter, and change still more, etc.