Edward F. Kravitt, Mahler's
Dirges for His Death: February 24, 1901 , The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3
(Jul., 1978), pp. 329-353
Now, according to Fechner, our bodies are just wavelets on
the surface of the earth. We grow upon the earth as leaves grow upon a tree,
and our consciousness arises out of the whole earthconsciousness, which it forgets
to thank, just as within our consciousness an emphatic experience arises, and
makes us forget the whole background of experience without which it could not have
come. But as
His belief that the whole material universe is conscious in
divers spans and wavelengths, inclusions and envelopments, seems assuredly
destined to found a school that will grow more systematic and solidified as
time goes on.
The general background of the present dogmatically written
little treatise is to be found in the "Tagesansieht," in the
"Zend-Avesta," and in various other works of Fechner s. Once grasp[ed]
the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality, and that matter is
but a form in which inner experiences may
[xii] 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 coeternal aspects of one selfsame 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
[xiii
]
Fechner was, in fact, a philosopher in
the "great" sense of the term, although
he cared so much less than most philosophers
do for purely logical abstractions.
For him the abstract lived in the concrete
; and although he worked as definitely
and technically as the narrowest
specialist works in each of the many lines
of scientific inquiry which he successively
[ix] followed, he followed each and all of them for the sake of
his one overmastering general purpose, the purpose namely of elaborating what
he called the "daylight-view" of the world into greater and greater
system and completeness.
By the
daylight-view, as contrasted with the night-view, Fechner meant the anti-materialistic
view, the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is
inwardly alive and consciously animated. There is hardly a page of his writing
that was not probably connected in his mind with this most general of his
interests.
Little by little the materialistic generation that called
his speculations fantastic has been replaced by one with greater liberty of
imagination. Lead
x
it sinks again into that
background it is not forgotten.
xv
God, for Fechner, is the totalized consciousness of the
whole universe, of which the Earth's consciousnessforms an element, just as in
turn my human consciousness and yours form elements of the whole earth's
consciousness. As I apprehend Fechner {though I am not sure), the whole
Universe God therefore also evolves in time : that is, God has a genuine
history. Through us as its human organs of experience the earth enriches its
inner life, until it also "geht
zu grunde" and becomes immortal in the form of those
still wider elements of inner experience which its history is even now
b xvii
“In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that mind or soul (Greek: ψυχή) is a universal feature of all things, and the primordial feature from
which all others are derived. A panpsychist sees themselves as a mind in a
world of minds.”
WIKI
Fechner's world concept was
highly animistic. He felt the thrill of life everywhere, in plants, earth,
stars, the total universe. Man stands midway between the souls of plants and
the souls of stars, who are angels. God, the soul of the universe, must be
conceived as having an existence analogous to men. Natural laws are just the
modes of the unfolding of God's perfection. In his last work Fechner, aged but
full of hope, contrasts this joyous "daylight view" of the world with
the dead, dreary "night view" of materialism. Fechner's work in
aesthetics is also important. He conducted experiments to show that certain
abstract forms and proportions are naturally pleasing to our senses, and gave
some new illustrations of the working of aesthetic association.
Gustav Theodor Fechner April 19, 1801 –
November 18, 1887)
Gustav
Theodor Fechner, The Little Book of Life After Death, Translated
from the German by Mary C. Wadsworth, With an Introduction by William James, Boston,
Little, Brown, & Co., 1904
"We
are now sufficiently advanced to consider resources other than materialistic,
but they are tenuous, intangible, and vulnerable to misapplication. They are,
in fact, the symbols of spiritual life -- a vast impersonal pantheism --
transcending the confused myths and prescriptions that are presumed to clarify
ethical and moral conduct. The clear realities of nature seen with the inner
eye of the spirit reveal the ultimate echo of God. ..."
Adams,
Ansel (1950). My Camera in the National Parks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 97.
Ansel Adams,
Tree Reflection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pantheists