 Despite his religious agenda, Fechner insists that he intends to base his faith upon the best science. This work follows a different course from most Naturphilosophie, he writes, because it does not begin from universal principles and descend to matter of fact; rather, it begins from an examination of the particulars of experience and ascends to the universal. “The whole tendency of this writing”, he says in the preface, “is that the universal rests on the particular rather than the particular on the universal.” (ZA: xiii) It will show that the realm of the soul is much wider than usually thought, and then proceed to demonstrate that it extends to the universe as a whole. 