I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner’s with which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms.  Not that they are the mere sum of the more limited forms.  As our mind is not the bare sum of our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of our separate minds is conscious.  It has schemes, forms, and objects proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too narrow to cognize.  By ourselves we are simply out of relation with each other, for it we are both of us there, and different from each other, which is a positive relation.  What we are without knowing, it knows that we are.  We are closed against its world, but that world is not closed against us.  It is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure, permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the wider.

Fechner’s great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our individual minds.  When our eyes are open their sensations enter into our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of what they see.  Close the eyes, however, and the visual additions stop, nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences remain—­in combination of course with the enormous stock of other thoughts and memories, and with the data coming in from the senses not yet closed.  Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this enormous life into which they fall.  Fechner thinks, as any common man would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur, and form part of it just as they are.  They don’t stay outside and get represented inside by their copies.  It is only the memories and concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as the eyes are open or shut.

Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth’s soul.  We add to its perceptive life so long as our own life lasts.  It absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the other data there.  When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular