a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain-tops.  Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her at once—­all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh.  That landscape is her face—­a peopled landscape, too, for men’s eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops.  Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—­a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.

Every element has its own living denizens.  Can the celestial ocean of ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one another, following the slightest pull of one another’s attraction, and harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?

Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and God.  Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying his commands.  So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none.  Yes! the earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.

In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision of this truth.

’On a certain spring morning I went out to walk.  The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things.  It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,—­only to find them nowhere....  But such an experience as this passes for fantastic.  The earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in mineralogical cabinets.’[2]

Where there is no vision the people perish.  Few professorial philosophers have any vision.  Fechner had vision, and that is why one can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh sense of reality.