eyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen,
and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.

His mind was indeed 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. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest
discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest
scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a
philosopher in the 'great' sense, altho he cared so much less than
most philosophers care for abstractions of the 'thin' order. For him
the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he
did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into
ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole
universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious. It has taken fifty
years for his chief book, 'Zend-avesta,' to pass into a second edition
(1901). 'One swallow,' he cheerfully writes, 'does not make a summer.
But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming;
and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing.'

The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and
our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the
spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.
Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater
life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality,
which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence
than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies
outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we
believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless,
and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner
asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath,
the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit
and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature
turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is
treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns
between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a
thin nest of abstractions.

Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is
analogy; not a rationalistic a