Fechner Quotes

[ Gustav Fechner ] was troubled by materialism... His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lat in his affirmation of the identity of the mind and matter and in his assurance that the entire universe can be regarded as readily from the point of view of its consciousness... as it can be viewed as inert matter. (Edwin Boring)
Leibniz foreshadowed the entire doctrine of the unconscious, but Herbart actually began it. Wundt was to appeal first to unconscious inference in order to explain perception, and then to apperception. Fechner was to take from Herbart the notion of the measurement of the magnitude... View quote
Edwin Boring
Fechner laid down the general outlines of his program [psychophysics] in ZendAvesta, the book about heaven and the future life. Imagine sending a graduate student of psychology nowadays to the Divinity School for a course in immortality as preparation for advanced experimental work in psychophysics! How narrow we have become! View quote
Edwin Boring
Zend-Avesta, a truly life giving word creating new life in knowledge as in faith! ...As Fechner in his Nanna sought to show that plants have souls, so the point of departure of his contemplations in the Zend-Avesta is the doctrine that the stars have souls. The method he employs is not that of the abstraction of general laws by induction and the application and testing of these in the explanation of nature, it is analogy. He compares the earth with our own organism, which we know to be endowed with a soul. He searches out not merely in a one-sided way the similarities, but does equal justice to the dissimilarities, too, and so arrives at the conclusion that all the former show the earth to be a being with a soul, and that all the latter indicate that it is a being with a soul far higher than our own. View quote
Bernhard Riemann