to the multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he gives of a man who doesn’t live at second-hand, but who sees, who in fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.

Abstractly set down, his most important conclusion for my purpose in these lectures is that the constitution of the world is identical throughout.  In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes, tactile consciousness with our skin.  But altho neither skin nor eye knows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together and figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive consciousness which each of us names his self.  Quite similarly, then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myself and yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separate and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they enter as constituent parts.  Similarly, the whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope.  This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of experience to that of the whole solar system, and so on from synthesis to synthesis and height to height, till an absolutely universal consciousness is reached.

A vast analogical series, in which the basis of the analogy consists of facts directly observable in ourselves.

The supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive prejudice which Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome.  Man’s mind is the highest consciousness upon the earth, we think—­the earth itself being in all ways man’s inferior.  How should its consciousness, if it have one, be superior to his?

What are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here?  If we look more carefully into them, Fechner points out that the earth possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we.  He considers in detail the points of difference between us, and shows them all to make for the earth’s higher rank.  I will touch on only a few of these points.

One of them of course is independence of other external beings.  External to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies.  All the things on which we externally depend for life—­air, water, plant and animal food, fellow men, etc.—­are included in her as her constituent parts.  She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not so.  We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a small portion of her history.  She swings us in her orbit from winter to summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day.