Bain defines genius as the power of seeing analogies.  The number that Fechner could perceive was prodigious; but he insisted on the differences as well.  Neglect to make allowance for these, he said, is the common fallacy in analogical reasoning.  Most of us, for example, reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with bodies, therefore God’s mind should be connected with a body, proceed to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again, and paint an altogether human picture of God.  But all that the analogy comports is a body—­the particular features of our body are adaptations to a habitat so different from God’s that if God have a physical body at all, it must be utterly different from ours in structure.  Throughout his writings Fechner makes difference and analogy walk abreast, and by his extraordinary power of noticing both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his conclusions into factors of their support.

The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body.  The entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own collective consciousness.  So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the consciousness of our earth plays one part.  So has the entire starry system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the sum of all that is, materially considered, then that whole system, along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of God.

Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there is room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order.  The earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as our special human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to their saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of the actual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limit of enclosure of the worlds above man.  He is left thin and abstract in his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom the divine order provides.

I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner’s speculations took was necessitated by logic.  I believe it not to have been required.  Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the detail of his thought.  Inevitably one does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him.  For altho the type of reasoning he employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions can be written on a single page, the power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination,