The Little Book of Life After Death (1904)

The general background of the present dogmatically written little treatise is to be found in the " Tagesansieht," 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 selfsame 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 insidated 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 groiv 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 xvhich it could not have come. But as it sinks again into that background it is not forgotten.