Introduction to The Little Book of Life After Death

The general background of the present dogmatically written little treatise is to be found in the “Tagesansicht” in the “Zend-Avesta” and in various other works of Fechner’s. Once grasp the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality, and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may appear to one another when they affect each other from the outside; and it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve. “Psychophysical movement,” as Fechner calls it, is the most pregnant name for all the reality that is. As “movement” it has a “direction”; as “psychical” the direction can be felt as a “tendency” and as all that lies connected in the way of inner experience with tendencies,--desire, effort, success, for example; while as “physical” the direction can be defined in spatial terms and formulated mathematically or otherwise in the shape of a descriptive “law.”