itting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might
always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the
wider.

Fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our
individual minds. When our eyes are open their sensations enter into
our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of
what they see. Close the eyes, however, and the visual additions stop,
nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences
remain--in combination of course with the enormous stock of other
thoughts and memories, and with the data coming in from the senses
not yet closed. Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this
enormous life into which they fall. Fechner thinks, as any common man
would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur,
and form part of it just as they are. They don't stay outside and
get represented inside by their copies. It is only the memories and
concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves
are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as
the eyes are open or shut.

Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many
sense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they
occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the
other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world
were closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have
spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow
and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our
own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new
relations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little
'Buechlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly
improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.'

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from obs