Elements of Psychophysics, Vol. I

...sees nothing from the outside; and thus a dead clock—despite having a standpoint of coincidence with itself just as favorable as that of a brain—sees nothing from the inside; it exists only for external appearance.

Natural science consistently positions itself at the external standpoint of observing things, while the science of the mind original: Wissenschaft vom Geiste. In Fechner’s time, this referred to the humanities or the study of human consciousness and culture. positions itself at the internal one; views of life are based on the alternation of standpoints, and the philosophy of nature Naturphilosophie: A movement in German philosophy that sought to understand the organic unity between the natural world and the human spirit. on the identity of that which appears twice from two different standpoints; a doctrine concerning the relations between mind and body will have to track the relations between both modes of appearance of the One Fechner refers here to the single underlying reality that manifests as both matter and mind..

These are the fundamental points of a view through which I seek not so much to clarify the ultimate underlying essence of body and mind, as to link their most general factual relations under a unified point of view.

Yet, as stated, everyone remains free to choose through which other view they wish to attempt the same, or whether they wish to attempt it at all. What each person finds most suitable in this regard will depend on the connection to their other views; and indeed, this will retroactively establish the possibility or impossibility of finding a suitable general connection between them. Here, however, it will not matter from the outset whether one conceives of body and soul merely as two different modes of appearance of the same being, or as two beings brought together externally, or the soul as a point within a network original: Nexus of other points of essentially similar or dissimilar nature, or wishes to renounce a unified basic view altogether—provided only that everyone recognizes the empirical relations between body and soul and allows for an empirical investigation of them, however forced their representation of them may be. For in what follows, we shall base ourselves only on the empirical relations between body and soul; and in doing so, we shall moreover use the most common expressions to describe the facts—expressions which lean more toward a dualistic sense than our monistic Monism: The philosophical view that mind and matter are not two separate things, but two ways of perceiving the same underlying reality. view, even if they allow for an easy translation into it.