s an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and
flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so
at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and
carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how
the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life
so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels
above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them
nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The
earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in
mineralogical cabinets.'[2]

Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorial
philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one
can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh
sense of reality.

His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be
like. He called it 'Nanna.' In the development of animals the nervous
system is the central fact. Plants develop centrifugally, spread their
organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no
consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous
system provides. But the plant's consciousness may be of another type,
being connected with other structures. Violins and pianos give out
sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound? How then about flutes and organ-pipes?
Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the
consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with
the kind of organization that | they possess. Nutrition, respiration,
propagation take place in them without nerves. In us these functions
are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is
eclipsed by that which goes with the brain. No such eclipse occurs in
plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more
lively. With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their
leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw
the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer
if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the
flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life
take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely
and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does
the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air,