THE LITTLE BOOK
OF
LIFE AFTER DEATH
THE LITTLE BOOK
OF
LIFE AFTER DEATH
BY
GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
MARY C. WADSWORTH
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM JAMES
“_Indessen, freut es immer wenn man seine Wurzeln ausdehnt
und seine Existenz in Andere eingreifen sieht._”--Schiller im
Briefwechsel mit Goethe. III, S. 53.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY
1904
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published October, 1904
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
ISIDORE AND ELIZABETH
DAUGHTERS OF HIS FRIEND
CH. F. GRIMMER
THE AUTHOR
_INTRODUCTION_
_I gladly accept the translator’s invitation to furnish a few words
of introduction to Fechner’s “Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode,” the
more so as its somewhat oracularly uttered sentences require, for their
proper understanding, a certain acquaintance with their relations to
his general system._
_Fechner’s name lives in physics as that of one of the earliest
and best determiners of electrical constants, also as that of the
best systematic defender of the atomic theory. In psychology it
is a commonplace to glorify him as the first user of experimental
methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he
is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking
great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes
consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical
world. In literature he has made his mark by certain half-humoristic,
half-philosophic essays published under the name of Dr. Mises--indeed
the present booklet originally appeared under that name. In æsthetics
he may lay claim to be the earliest systematically empirical student.
In metaphysics he is not only the author of an independently reasoned
ethical system, but of a theological theory worked out in great detail.
His mind, in short, was 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. Patient observation and daring
imagination dwelt hand in hand in Fechner; and perception, reasoning,
and feeling all flourished on the largest scale without interfering
either with the other’s function._
_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 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. Leaders of thought, a Paulsen, a Wundt, a Preyer,
a Lasswitz, treat Fechner’s pan-psychism as plausible, and write
of its author with veneration. Younger men chime in, and Fechner’s
philosophy promises to become scientifically fashionable. Imagine a
Herbert Spencer who, to the unity of his system and its unceasing
touch with facts, should have added a positively religious philosophy
instead of Spencer’s dry agnosticism; who should have mingled humor and
lightness (even though it were germanic lightness) with his heavier
ratiocinations; who should have been no less encyclopedic and far
more subtle; who should have shown a personal life as simple and as
consecrated to the one pursuit of truth,--imagine this, I say, if you
can, and you may form some idea of what the name of Fechner is more
and more coming to stand for, and of the esteem in which it is more
and more held by the studious youth of his native Germany. 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 “Tagesansicht” in the “Zend-Avesta”
and in various other works of Fechner’s. Once grasp the idealistic
notion that inner experience is the reality, and that matter is but a
form in which inner experiences may 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
co-eternal aspects of one self-same 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 otherwise in the shape of a descriptive
“law.”_
_But movements can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the
greater, as wavelets upon waves. This is as true in the mental as
in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a
general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background,
and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch
the light. The whole process is conscious, but the emphatic wave-tips
of the consciousness are of such contracted span that they are
momentarily insulated from the rest. They realize themselves apart,
as a twig might realize itself, and forget the parent tree. Such an
insulated bit of experience leaves, however, when it passes away, a
memory of itself. The residual and subsequent consciousness becomes
different for its having occurred. On the physical side we say that the
brain-process that corresponded to it altered permanently the future
mode of action of the brain._
_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 earth-consciousness,--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 it sinks again
into that background it is not forgotten. On the contrary, it is
remembered and, as remembered, leads a freer life, for it now combines,
itself a conscious idea, with the innumerable, equally conscious
ideas of other remembered things. Even so is it, when we die, with
the whole system of our outlived experiences. During the life of our
body, although they were always elements in the more general enveloping
earth-consciousness, yet they themselves were unmindful of the fact.
Now, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, they lead the life
of ideas there, and realize themselves no longer in isolation, but
along with all the similar vestiges left by other human lives, entering
with these into new combinations, affected anew by experiences of the
living, and affecting the living in their turn, enjoying, in short,
that “third stage” of existence with the definition of which the text
of the present work begins._
_God, for Fechner, is the totalized consciousness of the whole
universe, of which the Earth’s consciousness forms 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 weaving into the total cosmic
life of God._
_The whole scheme, as the reader sees, is got from the fact that
the span of our own inner life alternately contracts and expands.
You cannot say where the exact outline of any present state of
consciousness lies. It shades into a more general background in which
even now other states lie ready to be known. This background is the
inner aspect of what physically appear, first, as our residual and only
partially excited neural elements, and then more remotely as the whole
organism which we call our own._
_This indetermination of the partition, this fact of a changing
threshold, is the analogy which Fechner generalizes, that is all._
_There are many difficulties attaching to his theory. The complexity
with which he himself realizes them, and the subtlety with which he
meets them are admirable. It is interesting to see how closely his
speculations, due to such different motives, and supported by such
different arguments, agree with those of some of our own philosophers.
Royce’s Gifford lectures, “The World and the Individual,” Bradley’s
Appearance and Reality, and A. E. Taylor’s Elements of “Metaphysics,”
present themselves immediately to one’s mind._
_WILLIAM JAMES._
_Chocorua, N. H., June 21, 1904._
_PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION_
_The first edition of this little book appeared in the year 1836 under
the pen-name of “Mises” and was published by my friend, long since
dead, the book-dealer and composer, Ch. F. Grimmer. It made its way
quietly, like the first edition of its author’s life, of which the
little book was a part, while cherishing the expectation of a second.
With the years of the one first edition, the copies of the other,
without being yet quite exhausted, are diminishing._
_While I dedicate this second edition, issued from another friendly
publishing house, and under my own name, to the beloved daughters of
my departed friend, in whom is continued for us that knew him all that
we loved in him, I believe, in the sense of the very view which is set
forth in this book, that I am giving it back to my friend in the way
he would best like. He has, indeed, a perpetual spiritual claim upon
the earlier material; for it originated mainly as the result of talks
with him about an idea of our mutual friend Billroth, which, though
cursorily expressed and held by the latter, yet took deep root in the
heart of the author. It was a little seed, a tree has grown from it; he
has helped to loosen the earth for it._
_Let me here add a wish: that there might be a revival of my
friend’s songs, so beautiful and so forgotten, as well as of this
half-forgotten little book. The creation of both went on so hand in
hand during a period of daily companionship, that they seem to echo
and re-echo in my memory like intermingled melodies. Simple as their
charm is, may they have a duration even beyond that of the music of
the future; for sound drowns beauty, yet beauty outlives sound, and
what begins loud cannot so end. But if I did not believe that the same
is true of truth as of beauty, how should I hope for a future for the
opinions of this book?_
_The reason for exchanging the former pen-name now for the author’s
own, was personal. The little paper at its first appearance was a
divergence from the chief characteristics of the author’s other works;
but it became the firstling of a series of later writings, appearing
under his own name, which, in their contents, conform to it more or
less, and to which it may therefore be added by the ascription of a
common origin. Finally, their grouping results from the consideration
that they combine with the work before us to form a connected theory of
life which partly supports, partly is supported by the contents of this
book. A further carrying out of this view, only briefly developed here,
may be found in the third part of the Zend-Avesta._
_This edition has only been altered in unimportant respects, extended
in several, from the former._
_PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION_
_It is sufficient to remark that, except by the addition of a note
upon page 57, and the omission of an easily controverted appendix (on
the principle of divine vision) at the close of the last edition, the
present one only differs from the former in unimportant changes of a
few words._
* * * * *
_The fourth edition, the first after the author’s death, is a
faithfully rendered reprint of the third, changed only in form._
_THE PUBLISHERS._
_March, 1900._
_APPENDIX TO THE FIRST EDITION_
_The first suggestion of the idea worked out in this paper, that the
spirits of the dead continue to exist in the living as individuals,
came to me through a conversation with my friend Professor Billroth,
then living in Leipzig, now in Halle. While this idea, in a series
of related images, both appealed to me and awakened kindred ones,
it took prominent shape, and through a sort of enforced progression
extended to the idea of a higher life of spirits in God. Meanwhile the
originator, as in the philosophy of religion in general, so especially
in the doctrine of immortality, took a quite different line from this,
conforming more directly to the church dogma, which led him away, for
the most part, if not wholly, from this fundamental idea, so that,
while I had thought it necessary to point to him as its author, I no
longer venture to call him its advocate. The views of this philosopher
upon the subject in question will be developed in a work by him shortly
to appear._
_Written in Gastein in
August, 1835._
LIFE AFTER DEATH
CHAPTER I
Man lives upon the earth not once, but three times. His first stage
of life is a continuous sleep; the second is an alternation between
sleeping and waking; the third is an eternal waking.
In the first stage man lives alone in darkness; in the second he lives
with companions, near and among others, but detached and in a light
which pictures for him the exterior; in the third his life is merged
with that of other souls into the higher life of the Supreme Spirit,
and he discerns the reality of ultimate things.
In the first stage the body is developed from the germ and evolves
its equipment for the second; in the second the spirit unfolds from
its seed-bud and realizes its powers for the third; in the third is
developed the divine spark which lies in every human soul, and which,
already here through perception, faith, feeling, the intuition of
Genius, demonstrates the world beyond man--to the soul in the third
stage as clear as day, though to us obscure.
The passing from the first to the second stage is called birth; the
transition from the second to the third is called death.
The way upon which we pass from the second to the third stage is not
darker than that by which we reach the second from the first. The one
leads to the outer, the other to the inner aspect of the world.
But as the child in the first stage is still blind and deaf to all
the glory and joy of the life of the second, and his birth from the
warm body of his mother is hard and painful, with a moment when the
dissolution of his earlier existence feels like death, before the
awakening to the new environment without has occurred,--so we in our
present existence, in which our whole consciousness lies bound in our
contracted body, as yet know nothing of the splendor and harmony, the
radiance and freedom of the third stage, and easily hold the dark
and narrow way which leads us into it as a blind pitfall which has
no outlet. But death is only a second birth into a freer existence,
in which the spirit breaks through its slender covering and abandons
inaction and sloth, as the child does in its first birth.
Then all, which with our present senses only reaches us as exterior
and, as it were, from afar, we become penetrated with and possessed
of in all its depth of reality. The spirit will no longer wander over
mountain and field, or be surrounded by the delights of spring, only
to mourn that it all seems exterior to him; but, transcending earthly
limitations, he will feel new strength and joy in growing. He will no
longer struggle by persuasive words to produce a thought in others,
but in the immediate influence of souls upon each other, no longer
separated by the body, but united spiritually, he will experience the
joy of creative thought; he will not outwardly appear to the loved ones
left behind, but will dwell in their inmost souls, and think and act in
and through them.