Thirteenth Lecture

It is something that any enlightened person would rightly call absurd. But that does not prevent this enlightened person from making a similar mistake every hour. Only he does not notice it when it concerns something he has included in the objects of his belief. The man who wrote this in 1821 — he called himself Dr. Mises at the time — is the same man you know from scientific literature as Professor Gustav Theodor Fechner, the same man who, in the 1850s, attempted to establish an aesthetic from the bottom up on the basis of sensory-visual experiments, rather than from the top down, that is, from the thoughts and feelings of the soul. This was a man who, one can truly say, went through all the torments of the struggle for knowledge in the 19th century. He was the same man who had the dispute with the botanist Schleiden about the influence of the moon on various processes on Earth. I have told you how Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner were then supposed to decide which of the two was right. This is also the same man who tried to gain a kind of idealistic-spiritual worldview from his struggle. You can see how he tried to do this from the description I gave of Gustav Theodor Fechner in my “Riddles of Philosophy.”