thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.

There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between
the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the
'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of
reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it
may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked
(for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that
in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in
'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been
tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs
to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by
sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to
be thanked for all of science's results.

Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.

Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived
from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig,
a typical _gelehrter_ of the old-fashioned german stripe. His means
were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical
examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but
decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical
science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make
both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors. He
translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot's treatise on
physics, and the six of Thenard's work on chemistry, and took care of
their enlarged editions later. He edited repertories of chemistry
and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third. He published physical
treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of
electrical science, and Fechner's measurements in galvanism, performed
with the simplest se