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The Man who Introduced Soul to Science: Gustav Theodor Fechner Charles R Fox, O.D., Ph.D.

This article provides a fascinating insight into an important but relatively neglected figure.

In Carl Gustav Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961/1989), he talks about his medical education. Jung originally entered medical school intending to pursue internal medicine; as he progressed, he was invited to become an assistant to Fredrich von Müller and was on the path to specializing in this field. Throughout medical school, he was uninterested in psychiatry, a field generally held in contempt by the medicine of the time. What shifted his medical specialization to psychiatry was preparing for the state examination. As he was finishing up his exam preparations, he had a revelation upon read Krafft-Ebing’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (Textbook of Psychiatry, 1879).

“My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.”

My own career in psychology had a similar progression as my undergraduate interests in philosophy, theology, natural sciences, and biological sciences coalesced into the study of experimental psychology. It is only recently, since I have been studying and teaching the

history of psychology, that I started truly understanding how the very roots of psychology included the scientific study of the soul.

The concept of a human soul has a long history, yet modern science largely rejects this concept leaving it to the more traditional domains of theology and philosophy. The history of modern science, tracing from the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, etc., can be seen as a progressive movement away from the influence of theology and philosophy to a more mechanistic and material description of the universe; that is, a movement away from studying the soul. However, Gustav Fechner’s 19th century founding of Psychophysics, which served as the beginning of modern psychology, was an attempt to formally study the human soul; that is, create a mathematical description of the relationship between the world described by physics and the human soul represented by consciousness.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801 – 1887) came from a religious family. His father and grandfather were pastors and his mother came from a family of pastors. At the age of sixteen, he entered the University of Leipzig School of Medicine; this was the same year that Ernst Weber joined as a Dozent (a mid-level academic rank). During his medical education, his interest in religious faith decreased

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while his interest in the natural sciences increased. Even so, he soon became disillusioned with his medical studies though he did complete a degree allowing him to teach. His disillusionment with medicine lead him to seek out lectures on sensory physiology by Weber and mathematics by Karl Mollweide. Both of these men worked in perception, an area of increasing interest for Fechner.

In 1820, while still in medical school, he was introduced to ‘Natural Philosophy’ through reading Lorenz Oken’s Lehrbuch zur Naturphilosophie (1809). Natural Philosophy was the prescientific, philosophical study of the physical universe; it is considered the precursor of modern natural science. In 19th century Germany, Naturphilosophie was an attempt to unify nature as seen in the romantic worldview of e.g., Johann von Goethe and Georg Hegel versus the

more mechanical worldview of e.g., John Locke and Isaac Newton. Fechner was excited by Oken’s speculations about the unity of nature in contrast to medicine’s more mechanistic view. Fechner wrote “A new light seemed to me to illuminate the whole world and the sciences of the world; I was dazzled by it.” For the next four years, Fechner devoted himself to Naturphilosophie. However, he was critical of its methods and in fact wrote, under the pseudonym Dr. Mises, a satire on them (Stapelia mixta, 1824). He soon became frustrated by Naturphilosophie.

Fechner earned his medical degree in 1822 and the next year he started lecturing in physiology at his Alma Mater, the Leipzig Medical School. To help support himself, he also began translating Précis élémentaire de physique expérimentale (The element of experimental physics) by French physicist Jena Baptiste

Biot. He noted that Biot, by following careful methods of experimentation and observation, produced precise results of the type missing in both Natural Philosophy and medicine. By 1824, Fechner changed his field and began doing research in and lecturing on physics. Still needing additional income, Fechner continued translating science writings and by 1830 he had translated more than twelve volumes of physics and chemistry. By 1834, with over 40 publications in physics, he was appointed professor of physics at Leipzig and soon created the first Institute for Physics in Germany. A few years later, his interest in psychology began manifesting and, in 1838 and 1840, he published papers investigating the connection between the physical phenomenon of light and its subjective perception. At this same time, he wrote, again under the nom-de-plume of Dr. Mises, The Little Book on Life After Death maintaining that individual consciousness (i.e., soul) survived after death. This indicates Fechner’s lifelong dual interest in philosophical metaphysics and experimental science.

Fechner’s professorship and heavy translating load resulted in a great deal of stress and, in the autumn of 1839, Fechner was emotionally exhausted and suffering from headaches, insomnia, lethargy, and symptoms of neurosis; modern authors suggest he was suffering from serious neurotic depression with hypochondriacal preoccupation. In addition to these physical and mental issues, Fechner was nearly blind. In doing his experimental work studying sensory after-images, he spent extended amounts of time looking directly at the sun. This resulted in a painful and debilitating eye disorder, most likely solar retinopathy. This disorder is damage to the nerves in the back of the eye (the retina) from prolonged exposure to solar radiation; these retinal nerves transmit information to primary visual cortex of the brain (and elsewhere) and allows us to see.

Light was very painful for Fechner to the point where he had to live in a completely darkened room and to wear a blindfold; he was unable to read or write. In December 1839, he resigned his professorship and went into a lengthy period of seclusion. His mental health continued to decline, most likely due to ‘black patch psychosis.’ This is a condition seen in some patients who have both eyes patched closed and, in severe cases, can result in auditory and visual hallucinations as well as delusions. At the

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time, little was known of these disorders and no medical treatment helped him; desperate, his doctors attempted a remedy from traditional Chinese medicine. This treatment resulted in no improvement and in fact created GI problems that quickly emaciated him.

Fechner wrote that only two things prevented him from sinking into complete oblivion: the care of his wife and his religious faith (remember he came from a line of pastors). Slowly, a process of recovery began and by Christmas of 1843, Fechner believed “…God himself…” called him to do extraordinary things. Three years later he returned to a professorship at Leipzig. During his period of seclusion, his interests increasingly focused on metaphysics and, returning to Leipzig, he requested returning as a professor of philosophy. He had no formal lecturing responsibilities but voluntarily gave lectures, frequently on the soul. His 1848 manuscript, Nanna, oder Über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or About the Soul Life of Plants), contains his first explicit, philosophical treatment of the problem of the relationship of soul to body.

In his 1851 book, Zend-Avesta oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits (Zend-Avesta, or Concerning Matters of Heaven and the World to Come), Fechner set forth a more detailed theory of human soul-body relations. He postulated that human, indeed all things, had a soul and that the human soul has an effect on the body.1

Fechner thought that this philosophical framework required a solid scientific foundation. He reported that on the morning of 22 October 1850, the general outline of the solution came to him and Fechner laid out the basic framework for psychophysics. It has been suggested that this general outline was highly influenced by earlier work of Weber but we have Fechner’s statement that it didn’t and, even though the two men were colleagues at the same university, Weber did not do much to emphasize this aspect of his work. Still, as Fechner developed his framework, he acknowledged Weber’s work and clearly differentiated his (Fechner’s) work from Weber’s. Between 1851 and 1860, Fechner worked out the rationale for measuring human sensory experience in terms of thresholds and just noticeable differences. That is, how much does a sensation have to change before we are consciously

aware of it existing or being ‘noticeably different’.

Most relevant here is his concept of the threshold. Fechner reasoned that we are constantly receiving stimulation from the world but we are not conscious of most of this information. The mind/soul somehow becomes consciously aware of some of it, that which is above threshold, while most of it remains unconscious, that is, remains below threshold. The key question is what are the conditions that allow unconscious things to raise to the conscious state and for conscious things to sink to the unconscious state. Fechner developed a formal procedure for measuring this process. Similarly, he formalized the concept of a differential threshold; that is, how much does a sensation have to change before we are consciously aware of the new stimuli being ‘noticeably different’ from the original stimuli. With this work, Fechner developed a mathematic of the mind/soul.

His 1860 book, Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics), further developed this mathematical thesis stating that Elemente is “… a text of the exact science of the functional relations or relations of dependency between the body and the soul ….” With this, Fechner sought to use the techniques of science and mathematics to study the human soul. Fechner showed that non-physical events such as those of mind or soul, not only could be measured, but measured in terms of their relationship to physical events2. In achieving this milestone, Fechner established psychophysics as one of the core methods of the newly emerging scientific psychology. As Boring (1950) noted, before Fechner, there was only the early ‘philosophical psychology’ such as that of Gottfried Leibniz and John Locke and the more modern ‘physiological psychology’ such as that of Johannes Müller and Ernst Weber. Fechner’s experimental method began an entirely new wave in psychology, which became the basis for experimental psychology. His techniques and methods inspired Wilhelm Wundt, who created the first laboratory for the scientific study of conscious experience, opening the door to the scientific study of mind.

As Fechner was putting the finishing touches on the Elemente, a young physician and neurophysiologist, Wilhelm Wundt, became a Dozent in physiology at Heidelberg. He began the study of sense

perception that led to his 1862 Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception). The Beiträge is notable for its introduction on methods that marked the emergence of Wundt’s plan for an experimental psychology. Rejecting a metaphysical foundation for psychology, Wundt argued that the study of consciousness was best done through newly emerging sciences including Fechner’s psychophysics. He stated that only this scientific approach would allow understanding of the “complex products of the unconscious mind.” Right before moving to Leipzig to accept a chair in philosophy in 1875, Wundt collected his physiology lectures into Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology), the first comprehensive handbook of modern experimental psychology. In the Winter of 1879, he created the first laboratory devoted to original psychological research; its opening is usually thought of as the beginning of modern psychology.3

When Wundt arrived at Leipzig, Fechner was a rather old man at 74 years old and had not been very actively involved in the life of the university for decades. Yet he was still an active and sought-after scholar. He received visits from such noted scholars as philosopher Franz Brentano, physicist Ernst Mach, psychologist Carl Stumpf, and American psychologist and Clark University President G. Stanley Hall. Sigmund Freud attended Fechner’s lectures in Leipzig and gave him the title “The great G. T. Fechner.” It is clear that Wundt was very close to Fechner. He delivered Fechner’s eulogy and inherited his papers. After Fechner’s death, Wundt and his associates edited and published Fechner’s largest posthumous publication, Theory of Measuring Collectives (1897), as well as an edited edition of Elements of Psychophysics (1889). Marking the centennial of Fechner’s birth, Wundt remembered him not only as the father of psychophysics, but also as a model, to his final days, of scientific and scholarly dedication.

However, even though Wundt adopted Fechner’s psychophysical methods, he never adopted his metaphysics. In defining experimental psychology, Wundt established a modern psychology that existed between philosophy and physiology. In place of the metaphysical definition of psychology as a science of the soul, Wundt defined experimental

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psychology as a psychology of consciousness that precisely analyzes the processes of consciousness, to assess the complex psychological connections, and to find the laws governing such relationships. He specifically excluded the individual soul from his new psychology. Wundt also rejected any subconscious mental processes as a topic of scientific psychology. In Grundzuge, he specifically stated that the actively organizing processes that results in consciousness will no longer be explained by means of an immortal soul. In perhaps the only extant letter from Fechner to Wundt, Fechner stated:

“I don’t see why we should argue about this anymore; I would rather not argue with you on this subject at all, since we are both convinced that we cannot change one another’s opinion on the issues at hand. You will continue to recognize spiritism as something that cannot be investigated, that is not factual, and I will continue to say that it is factual and will try to investigate it.”

Fechner was not as popular among the younger generation of scientists who were warry of his metaphysical position in Nanna and Zend-Avesta. Wundt and others were part of a younger, more mechanistic generation of scientists who were trained after the Naturphilosophisch influence. For example, the physicists Hermann von Helmholtz (20 years Fechner’s junior) and Ernst Mach (37 years Fechner’s junior) both adopted Fechner’s methods as they explored sensory physiology and perception but ignored his metaphysics. Wundt (31 years Fechner’s junior), in papers published in 1862 and 1863, drew attention to Fechner’s psychophysical methods while

ignoring his metaphysics. However, to Fechner, psychophysics was not simply a useful methodology for approaching some problems in sensory physiology and experimental psychology; it was the way to discover the true connection between matter and soul.

Even though psychology began as the formal scientific investigation of the soul, such work was soon abandoned in favor of studying the mind. Further, contemporary psychology frequently ignores the mind in favor of behavior with Behaviorism stating that mind is not a part of psychology. Still, modern areas such as cognitive science, cognitive and systems neuroscience, and artificial intelligence are reviving the scientific interest in mind, and perhaps we will soon see Fechner’s insight revived by a reintroduction of soul into modern scientific theory.