lf-made apparatus, are classic to this day.
During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical,
half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions,
under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic
essays, and other occasional articles.

But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations
on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation)
produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific
attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the
functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from
active life. Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner's
malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its
severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation
incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get
well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine
miracle. This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner
desperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung to
the faith,' he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other
work its reward, _so haette ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten_.' His
religious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one great
aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the
world. He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other things
too ere he died.

A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical
and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics--many persons
consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in
the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works
on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by
some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be
included among these other performances. Of the more religious and
philosophical works, I shall immediately give a further account.

All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and
sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one
with greater liberty of imagination, and a Pr