In a work titled
Nanna oder das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or the soul-life of plants; Leipzig, 1848) he defended the idea that even plants have a mental life. This book is indicative of the panpsychistic bent of Fechner's thought, which was the major cause of the direction taken by his further work.
Psychophysics
In 1848 Fechner returned to the University of Leipzig as professor of philosophy. His desire to substantiate empirically the metaphysical thesis that mind and matter are simply alternative ways of construing one and the same reality was the main motivation for his pioneering work in experimental psychology. His Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig, 1860) was intended to be an outline of an exact science of the functional relations between bodily and mental phenomena, with a view to showing that one and the same phenomenon could be characterized in two ways. Fechner divided his new science of psychophysics into two disciplines: inner psychophysics, which studies the relation between sensation and nerve excitation; and outer psychophysics, to which Fechner's own experimental work was devoted and which studies the relation between sensation and physical stimulus. Psychophysics became one of the dominant fields within experimental psychology.
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