Introduction to The Little Book of Life After Death

Fechner’s name lives in physics as that of one of the earliest and best determiners of electrical constants, also as that of the best systematic defender of the atomic theory. In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical world. In literature he has made his mark by certain half-humoristic, half-philosophic essays published under the name of Dr. Mises--indeed the present booklet originally appeared under that name. In æsthetics he may lay claim to be the earliest systematically empirical student. In metaphysics he is not only the author of an independently reasoned ethical system, but of a theological theory worked out in great detail. His mind, in short, was one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth, which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. Patient observation and daring imagination dwelt hand in hand in Fechner; and perception, reasoning, and feeling all flourished on the largest scale without interfering either with the other’s function.

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.”